Goat Song by
Chantal Pelletier
pbk out July 04
(Bitter Lemon Press)
at £8.99
This zany crime novel begins in melodramatic fashion with a double murder at the
Moulin Rouge and continues in the same vein throughout, taking in drug dealing
scams, hard core porn videos and the savage murder of a junkie as well as a double
suicide and much else. Chantal Pelletier packs a great deal into a short space, but what
is memorable about the book is not the crazily careering plot, nor even the sharp and
sometimes surreal humour, but the character of the detective, Inspector Maurice
Laice, known to his lesbian boss as 'More is Less'. Maurice is a shambling loser in
love ('the only girl who had ever consoled him had died in his arms, killed by a
defective water heater') but he has all the doggedness of the best fictional cops - even
though he lacks the patience to stakeout suspects effectively. When he tracks a villain,
we are told: 'Maurice would have preferred him to be less repulsive. He always lost
his motivation when the guilty party was this ugly.' This book is patchy, and is
certainly no masterpiece, but nevertheless Maurice's humanity will stick in my mind
for a long time.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
Goat Song by
Chantal Pelletier
