You Who Know

Henri Castang finds police investigation dangerous when an old friend and Irish bureaucrat is shotgunned, but his wife gets the answers by pursuing questions his police-cohorts would never think to ask.

Freeling, an acknowledged master, packs even more provocation and punch than usual into his 32nd novel, in which former French cop Henri Castang delves into the power of sex and the nature of love, generously lacing his account with literary and political allusions. Now working for the European Commmunity, Castang sets out to solve the shotgun murder in Brussels of his Irish friend, Eamonn Hickey, an EC bureaucrat. An unproductive interview in Dublin with Hickey's father leads to Hampshire where Hickey's estranged wife reveals that her mate had a hidden life in which he lusted after typists and kitchen maids. Next, Castang is in the Italian Alps, where a female British agent suggests that Hickey was IRA. She, too, is killed with a high-powered rifle and soon, in Lake Como, Castang must take extreme action to save himself from an attacking scuba diver. Drawing a bead on a smuggling ring that deals in antiques, sex and drugs, Castang, aided by his insightful wife, Vera, closes in on a mafia capo. An unusual last scene aboard a Lake Lugano touring boat finds Castang confronting the crime kingpin with his essential weakness: like Hickey, the man is incapable of love. As ever, Freeling writes with heart and unfailing intelligence.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Through 32 crime novels, but especially in his Henri Castang series, Nicholas Freeling has ignored the conventions of the genre. The crime novel's focus, he contends, must be metaphysics not clues or even atmosphere. And so it is with Castang and his wife, Vera, both of whom bring a degree of introspection to crime solving that goes well beyond the intellectual ponderings of, say, P. D. James' Adam Dalgleish. Here Castang is engaged with finding the killer of a friend of his, an Irish diplomat with possible IRA connections. The trail leads Castang and Vera from their Brussels home across Europe, ending in a confrontation with a sophisticated mobster who matches wits with Castang but proves no contest for Vera. The metaphysical element here concerns the relationship of love and power, and it is Vera's condemnation of the mobster as a man who can never know love that drives the story's climax. A killer undone by a woman's words? And not a woman imitating a hard-boiled tough guy. As usual, Castang finds the cutting edge while the rest of us are still sharpening the wrong knives. Bill Ott