The Ravaged will have been my last completed book before the end of 2018.
I don’t know why, but in winter I want to be thrillers. We did more cozy as a reading and yet, I have no better idea of a sweet moment than those hours spent huddled on my couch with a plaid and a cup of decaf to follow an investigator in his pursuit of a criminal.
In this novel, we follow Alex Dueso who, as his first name does not indicate, is a woman. Cop and single mother, she is employed by a fictitious brigade: the brigade of sexual crimes and crimes, a hundred hits since several men were raped and left seriously battered in vacant lots at night. This situation undermines Alex’s very realistic statistics, which insists that we have never seen so many sexual assaults affecting men in such a short period of time. And the situation is made all the more complicated by the fact that the victims, therefore male, refuse to file a complaint and even to recognize the character of these attacks.
The principle of the story is clear and particularly interesting: what happens when the vapor reverses and those who commonly occupy a position of strength find themselves in a position of weakness? We discover a Paris deserted by men at night and in which women no longer have any fear of walking alone in the dark alleys, in short skirts.
And the situation is particularly difficult to manage for Alex who struggles to clearly see these men as victims: she begins to question their probity, their relationships, asks to have their criminal record checked… which she never did when a woman came to file a rape complaint.
More than the intriguing yet intriguing, it is this question that remains, once the reading is over: can we avenge crime with crime? To turn things around, do we necessarily have to resort to violence?
Louise Mey is the author of two other novels that I have not read: The spray and The invisible Hordes.
Louise Mey, The Ravaged
ed. Pocket, 445 pages
€ 7.90