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Summary: Pulp Fiction en Alger
Comment: Khadra's first Inspector Llob mystery (Morituri) was a wonderfully unexpected pulp fiction take on a large Arab city. This second in the trilogy is also set in Algiers in the mid-90s at the height of the Civil War. Like that book, it owes more than a little in style to Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett, as the intrepid Inspector delves into a dark a corrupt world of powerful men and their vices. Inspector Llob is a classic seeker of justice, armed with battery of wisecracks and caustic insults -- backed up by a pair of distinctive policemen, pony-tailed Lino and hulking Seddig. The story concerns the beheading of a longtime intellectual who wrote a popular book critiquing the FLN regime, but just recently returned to Algeria. The obvious culprits would be a known cell of Islamic guerillas, but Llob isn't so sure. Just a few days before the murder, the victim had met with Llob and told him that he had explosive information that he was going to turn into a book that would rock the country.As Llob mobilizes his resources and races around the underworld trying to piece together what happened, the bodies start to pile up. Soon he's looking in high places, barging in on the rich and famous in order to find answers. True to Algeria's tragic Civil War, it's a bloody, messy affair, with severed necks, booby-trapped corpses, and dark dark humor (one notorious beheader's nickname is "The Hairdresser"). The writing is so pulpy and staccato that it's hard for the reader to really engage with the material, it's simply too stylized. Moreover, the entire subject matter is so steeped in such corruption and brutality that many Western readers will likely have a hard time getting a handle on it. One kind of wishes Khadra had slowed the pace down a little and toned down some of the stylistic tics to make it a little more realistic, which would have made it that much more powerful.
