A Paris detective with a past and a hostage with a history will shape each other in this sinister crime thriller.ÅPolice commandant Camille Verhoeven is a skilled detective struggling to cope with the brutal kidnapping and murder of his wife and unborn son. Alex Prevost is a beautiful young woman snatched off the street mere blocks from her apartment. She is next seen in a series of gruesome photographs-naked, filthy, and trapped in a wooden cage hung six feet above the ground in an abandoned warehouse. As Camille and his team race against the clock to rescue Alex, events occur that lead them to question whether she is truly a damsel in distress. This kicks off a series of plot twists that propel the reader toward an unsettling conclusion. Brutal, dark, and gory, this crime thriller, a best seller in Europe, will keep readers turning the pages until well past bedtime-with all the lights on, of course. VERDICT Celebrated French mystery author Lemaitre makes his U.S. debut with this tense work of detective fiction that is intended to be the first volume in a trilogy but functions equally well as a stand-alone novel. Fans of John Connolly, John Lutz, and Kevin O'Brien are apt to enjoy Lemaitre's graphic prose and contemporary noir style. The diminutive and complex Camille, standing at just under five feet, is a memorable sleuth, but for readers searching for a strong female protagonist, Alex Prevost remains a puzzle at novel's end. [Previewed in "A World of New Titles: Editors' Picks, LJ 7/13.-Ed.]-Liv Hanson, Chicago (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

During the reign of Louis XVI, a cage was designed to inflict maximum torture. It was built so that the person in it could barely move his or her limbs. Muscles would atrophy, totally crippling the inhabitant. In this horror-film-like French suspense story, this type of cage has been updated and suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse filled with rats. After a young woman is forced into a van off a Paris street, police know their time is very limited to find the victim before she's murdered. Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven, whose own wife was kidnapped and killed, is forced into taking on the case, which moves, quickly, from kidnap to hostage drama. The details concerning the woman in the cage are reminiscent of Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum in their mounting despair. What the police uncover about the young woman sets them off in another, equally disturbing direction. Verhoeven's knowledge of kidnapping how it's a special crime, marked by a great deal of planning and with a demanding time line is fascinating. Filled with many twists and turns of plot, along with a huge surprise.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2010 Booklist

In this unpredictable, oddly delectable French thriller, an attractive young Parisian woman is abducted, chained in a crate and brutalized by an avenger--a crime that doesn't begin to hint at the gruesome killings to follow. The spoiler alert applies big-time to this book, the fourth of Lemaitre's novels featuring Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven and the first to be translated into English. The surprises, early and late, reboot the unusual narrative and redefine the case at hand. The quick-tempered, Danny DeVitoshort Camille is already feeling a bit shaky, having just returned to the force after four years. He suffered a breakdown following his wife Irene's murder--a crime for which his smooth, elegantly dressed sidekick, Louis, feels responsible. Though solving this new case ultimately helps Camille deal with his personal loss, he is dogged by his decision to return to work after Irene's death. But his guilt fades with each burst of intuition he has about the killings; the stranger the case becomes, the more he is drawn into it. A serial killer, deviant sexual behavior and hungry rats figure in the story. An eloquent thriller with a denouement that raises eyebrows as it speeds the pulse.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

At the outset of French author Lemaitre's impressive American debut, the first in a trilogy, attractive 30-year-old Alex Prevost is shopping for wigs in a Paris shop when she spots a man waiting on the street who's clearly been following her. Perhaps he's just an admirer who wants to meet her, she thinks. That night, after dining alone at a restaurant, Alex is accosted on the sidewalk by a man who, after discarding the wig he initially grabbed and seizing her by her real hair, throws her into a white van. Soon Alex finds herself trapped inside a wooden crate suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse. Meanwhile, Commandant Camille Verhoeven throws himself into the kidnapping investigation as a way to deal with his grief over his wife's death, but he and his detectives have few clues to aid them in identifying Alex's abductor. An irritant to his superiors but respected by his subordinates, Verhoeven uses his diminutive stature to unsettle witnesses and suspects while surprising them with his intelligence and wit. Some unexpected plot twists will keep readers turning the pages. 150,000-copy first printing. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

I CAN TELL you in just two words Why ALEX (MacLehose, $24.95), a thriller by the fashionable French author Pierre Lemaitre, was such a sensation in Europe. Partisan politics. Just kidding! The two words are - sadistic sex. Lemaitre's plot is laid out with mathematical precision: a beautiful woman is kidnapped, stripped naked, thrown into a cage and subjected to the systematic torture of a brutal captor. But just as ravenous rats are about to overrun her cage, she manages to escape and assume a fresh identity - as the emblematic female avenger who seems to be all the rage these days. If this sounds a bit like "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," it's because Stieg Larsson did much to validate sadomasochism as a plot device, and thriller writers jumped all over it. That novel and its two sequels are certainly fueled by the dynamic character of Lisbeth Salander, but her narrative also has a graphic sexual context, and it goes like this: A helpless child who is abused by her father and raped by her courtappointed guardian grows up and takes revenge on her father by sinking an ax in his head - but not before being beaten, shot in the head and buried alive. The punishment she dishes out to her guardian makes that ax in the head feel like a kiss. Revenge narratives go all the way back to the Greeks, but it's the vagina dentata component that sets a specimen like "Alex" apart, as Lemaitre adapts Larsson's blueprint with moves of his own. The rats are a particularly effective touch. Like the original atrocity that scarred her in mind and body as a girl, the femme fatale's method of payback is excruciating. The ending is also dark and ironic the way the French like their noir fiction. In Frank Wynne's assured translation, there's even a raffish quality to the prose. (A hotel receptionist is described as "a young man with his hair gelled into a side flip as though he'd just been slapped.") But in the end, it's still a formula, one that manipulates women as if they were the avatars in "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" - and it has already worn thin. SOME SOLDIERS come back from war, put down their weapons and walk straight into their old lives. Some don't. Those are the ones George Pelecanos is writing about - is writing for - in THE DOUBLE (Little, Brown, $26). Spero Lucas, the young Marine veteran we memorably met in "The Cut," returned from Fallujah thinking he could appease his inner warrior by working as a private investigator back home in Washington, D.C. That belief is shaken when he finds himself inclining toward extreme violence to resolve his cases. A slow and painful death actually seems too good for Billy King, "a goatish figure, more Minotaur than man," who preys on lonely women, and Percy Malone, a "spidery" villain who pimps high school girls. But Lucas is an honorable man, and he frightens himself. It's astonishing all the good stuff Pelecanos can pack into one unpretentious book: meaty substance, multiple story lines, vital characters, choice dialogue and all those descriptive details (about what people are wearing, driving and listening to on their car radios) that make the story so rich. What really stays with you, though, are those visits Lucas makes to veterans' hospitals ("No one would ever film a Budweiser commercial here") and those quiet talks he has with the forgotten soldiers he calls brothers. FIRST-TIME AUTHORS HAVE a tendency to throw everything into the pot. Barry Lancet does that very thing in japantown (Simon & Schuster, $25) when he gives the personal life of his private eye too much prominence in an otherwise sophisticated international thriller. Jim Brodie is already stretched thin, running an antiques business in San Francisco and managing a detective agency in Tokyo. But with his expat history and familiarity with Japanese language and culture, it's only natural that the San Francisco cops would consult him about the blood-soaked kanji ideograph found at the scene of a multiple murder. And we're with him all the way when he flies to Tokyo on the trail of a sinister gang of assassins. Having lived and worked in Japan for more than 25 years, Lancet brings an impressive breadth of knowledge to the historical aspects of the mystery and a sharp sense of immediacy to its action. WHAT WONDERS THERE are in America's own backyard, if we only think to look. That's what the Norwegian writer Vidar Sundstol does in the land of DREAMS (University of Minnesota, $24.95), a murder mystery translated by Tiina Nunnally and set against the harsh landscape of the Lake Superior shore. This region was settled by hardy Scandinavian pioneers, and Lance Hansen, a police officer who works for the United States Forest Service, is proud to be descended from such stout stock. ("What dreams those people must have had.") But the murder of a Norwegian tourist shocks him into thinking about other victims and other acts of violence that might have been lost to history. There's a wintry bleakness to Hansen's brooding about the past, which is more interesting than the case he's working and more compatible with the austere setting. Hansen is a good cop and a decent man, but the extraordinary choice he opts for at the novel's end makes it certain that he'll not be having pleasant dreams for a very long time.