The adventures of Chief Inspector Pel of the many names continue.
Pel goes missing between home and office. Madame Pel, used to his erratic hours, patiently waits, while at the office the ever loyal Darcy is so preoccupied with his love life, for this Lothario is madly in love with a woman who is out of reach geographically and perhaps socially, that he cannot think of anything else, so he does not notice Pel’s absence for several hours.
Then Madame Pel telephones Darcy and the alarm bells rings. Pel has a long list of enemies, krims he has banged up, and the worst is feared. Meanwhile all leave is cancelled, Sergeant Misset whinges on cue, and no stone is left unturned. Until….
In a strange phone call Pel tells Madame Pel to instruct Darcy to stop the search.
Odder still.
Two days later Pel reappears none the worse for wear with a strange story to tell. The gist of it is that an old nemesis wants Pel to find his missing granddaughter and in return the nemesis will go quietly.
It takes Pel far too long to find the girl whom he keeps tripping over without recognition but there are compensations in the old, garlic eating baron who is much quicker on the uptake than his dithering manner suggests, in de Troq’s capacity nearly to read Pel’s mind in a crisis, and in the balanced portrayal of the gung-ho special team brought from Paris. Nice for once to find a fictional police officer who is a person not a stereotype.
While the situations in these books are stereotypical, the handling of them is not. The baron has ability that belies his appearance. The head of the SWAT from Paris listens to reason and has no desire to go in shooting if it can possibly be avoided. In a TV cop show these two would be reduced to cardboard.
Much to Pel’s surprise it all works out, for he the eternal pessimist expected the worst, and his nemesis even keeps his word, which Pel did not expect. But not quite in the way he was supposed to do. Yes, he surrendered but he did not give up.
Cannot figure it out? Read the book.
Juliet Hebden
This was my reading on QF3 Sydney to Honolulu in March 2017.
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