Book review: Autumn All The Cats Return, by Philippe Georget

Philippe Georget is a TV news anchorman for France-3, but he is an equally successful crime writer. His debut novel, Summertime All the Cats are Bored (2013), won the SNCF Crime Fiction Prize and the City of Lens First Crime Novel Prize.

His detective, Gilles Sebag, a Lieutenant of Police in Perpignan, is disillusioned with "his work ... the routine, the violence, the lack of internal recognition, the citizens' scorn". He believes his wife Claire has been unfaithful, without any proof, and his jealousy leads to "dark thought" and bouts of depression. Sebag is a paradox, with all the attributes of a classic crime noir hero except that, despite himself, he has a loving wife and family.

In Autumn All the Cats Return an old man, Bernard Martinez is discovered murdered in his apartment, executed by a single bullet to the back of the neck. On his door in black paint are the letters "OAS". The Organisation Armee Secrete was a dissident paramilitary group during the Algerian war whose aim was to prevent Algeria from gaining independence. "In less than two years [they] set off a good ten thousand bombs, not only in Algeria but also in France. They are said to have killed more than 1600 people."

Martinez was born in Algeria but after Algerian independence returned to France, bought a vineyard near Perpignan and became "a-run-of-the-mill retiree". However, Sebag and his team are aware of the tension between the Pied-Noir community (Frenchmen born in Algeria before independence) and locals opposing monuments to the OAS in Perpignan. When one of the monuments is vandalised, Sebag suspects "an old desire to take revenge on the OAS" and that "this murder is the first in a series".

Dogged police work reveals that Martinez was an active member of an OAS commando group led by the notorious Lieutenant Degueldre, who "set bombs and machine gunned people ... defenceless Arabs ... a French police officer". When a second member of the commando group is murdered, Sebag knows they have to find the others before the killer strikes again.

Georget interweaves into his main narrative both the thoughts of the murderer, as he hunts down his victims, and the events of fifty years earlier in Algeria. As a result, despite the plodding nature of the translation at times, Autumn All the Cats Return is a powerful exploration of the potent force of revenge and of the horrors of the Algerian conflict.

* Anna Creer is a Canberra reviewer.