There is nothing more to read Fred Vargas and Pierre Lemaitre to aim at French noir as one of the most original in the world. Jérôme Lubry seems to be pointing towards that same horizon, inviting us to his particular sample of crime and the police as a whole tinged with a darker tone if possible thanks to his powerful set design.
Because everything has a sort of Gothic point made in Loubry that becomes strangely close. As if you were going to find the world transformed when you go out. Impressions that deconstruct what is real, breaking down the events into a lurid and gloomy puzzle. Nothing ominous ever seems true. Everything cruel appears as a deviation from human nature. But the truth is that the shadows always lurk and from there Loubry brings us his plots as inherited from that Poe always on the threshold between reason and madness.
It could be a hybrid. Or rather it is a matter of importing a background of terror collected in the excuse of the current case. Crime always goes further in Loubry's novels to reach a dimension of shocking psychological tension.
Top recommended novels Jérôme Loubry
The Montmorts Sisters
A novel that at times reminded me of that jewel of Stephen King called Despair. The most reasonable thing to do is to cross a town called that with your car without stopping at all. But misfortunes happen when you least need them. And sometimes it is even written in destiny that you have to end up getting there to dive into the deepest and darkest of being. Worst of all, the people of Stephen King at least it already warned of its nature on the entrance sign.
Julien Perrault has been appointed police chief of Montmorts, a small isolated town with virtually impossible access, connected to the world by a single highway. Montmorts is not at all what Julien had imagined. Far from being the last inhabited place before reaching the end of the world, it is an opulent place, with impeccable streets and equipped with a state-of-the-art surveillance system.
However, there is something in all this, in the strange tranquility of the place, that does not quite fit, perhaps it is the always omnipresent silhouette of the mountain or the voices and superstitions that persecute the inhabitants of the place, or the deaths that marked, long ago, his story. A psychological horror novel that raises an ancient mystery around the witch hunt, and that leads to an unprecedented escalation of murders and violence in a town where nothing has ever happened.
Sandrine's refuge
There is no worse labyrinth than that of memory. Because at the cost of erasing some memories, the mind is capable of describing the strangest and most unhinged dead ends. Perhaps Sandrine expected to run into a suggestive inheritance. Perhaps it was just curiosity. The point is that the search for your own roots that are most attached to the earth can sometimes mean starting to dig your own grave.
Sandrine, a journalist for a local Normandy newspaper, receives the news of the death of her grandmother, Suzanne, whom she never met in life. Sandrine will travel to the island where her grandmother lived to collect all her belongings. The place is inhabited by people who came to the island towards the end of World War II to work in a summer camp for children whose families had been especially affected by the war.
Hours after her arrival on the island, Sandrine notices that the locals are hiding something, and a few days later they find Sandrine wandering along one of the beaches, her clothes stained by someone else's blood, and muttering nonsense. To understand the truth, Inspector Damien Bouchard will have to delve into the past and Sandrine's memory, putting Sandrine's sanity and his own at stake.
