Paris at the start of the second millennium is dark with fog, riots over police killings, and Far Right demagogues frightening the confused.
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Such is the millieu surrounding dogged state criminal investigator Stanislas Cassel at the Palace of Justice. However, this grandson of a French propagandist for the Nazis during their World War II Occupation, ashamed of his family's infamy, avoids anything political. Instead he buries himself tracking down perpetrators of small crimes, which he calls his Little Miseries.
One current dossier involves the bizarre murder of a pensioner, found glassy-eyed dead on the stairs of his run-down apartment building. The major suspect: a Far Right extremist, convicted, after Paris's 1945 Liberation, of Nazi collaboration. Among his victims, Cassel believes, were the deceased pensioner's relatives, making a link therefore between suspect and victim.
Cassel finds the suspect odious because the man resembles his collaborator grandfather. This resemblance works subconsciously to make Cassel's investigation slipshod.
During his work, Cassel meets a Jewish woman, whose family died in a 1942 death camp. Haunted by this traumatic experience, she tries to warn him about the Far Right's reemergence, but to no avail. Anything political doesn't interest him the least bit, except when a dramatic turn one foggy night forces him to rethink his investigation and consider other Far Right suspects as well.
The review of this Book prepared by Steve Haberman
