The black tower

Review by New York Times Review

Having piloted a grown-up Tiny Tim through Dickensian London in "Mr. Timothy" and enlisted Edgar Allan Poe in the hunt for a killer in upstate New York in "The Pale Blue Eye," Louis Bayard repairs to Paris in THE BLACK TOWER (Morrow, $24.95) for another daring historical adventure - this time in the company of the greatest of French detectives, Eugène François Vidocq. The real-life Vidocq was unmatched as a figure of romantic legend. On the run as a thief, he offered his services to the law, becoming so adept at catching criminals that in 1811 he was named the first chief of the Sûreté, whose detective ranks he filled with former miscreants like himself. A scientific criminologist, he instituted modern procedures in all areas of police work, from ballistics to record-keeping. But it was his swaggering ego and mastery of disguise, as much as his forensic methods, that won him iconic status among authors like Balzac, Hugo, Melville and Poe. Bayard makes brilliant application of Vidocq in this fanciful adventure, which takes place in the unsettled era of Restoration France and rekindles the rumor that Louis-Charles, the 10-year-old son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, did not die in the black tower of his fortress prison in 1795. Who better than Vidocq to navigate these treacherous political shoals, teeming with embittered royalists, seditious republicans and die-hard Bonapartites? Presenting himself in the filthy rags of a beggar (the first of many vivid disguises), the detective orchestrates the hectic action with operatic flamboyance. The narrative chores he leaves to Hector Carpentier, son of the physician, now deceased, who ministered to the dauphin in prison and might have been party to a plot to free the boy. If so, then the artless young man Hector and Vidocq discover in the country town of Saint-Cloud (and must repeatedly rescue from armed assassins) might very well be the true king of France. No snatch-and-run researcher, Bayard takes care to capture Vidocq's roguish voice and grandiose affectations, as well as the melodramatic substance of his published memoirs. While there are glimpses of the elegant Bourbon court, Bayard's primary settings are the foul back alleys of Vidocq's Paris. "I've seen more English tourists in the morgue than in the Louvre," Hector says, putting his finger on the perverse appeal of viewing a beautiful city naked, soaking in the bath of its own bloody history. Marina Marks, the haunted heroine of Debra Ginsberg's clever thriller, THE GRIFT (Shaye Areheart, $23.95), considers herself to be an honest psychic. Unlike those "Gypsies, santeros and voodooiennes" who ply their trade in her South Florida community by sacrificing live chickens and sticking pins into dolls, Marina makes her own shady living by her wits. Applying sharp observation and intuition, she wins the confidence of needy clients like Mrs. Golden, who entrusts her with a valuable ruby ring in the belief that the gift will protect the elderly woman's beloved son from harm. But that ring proves a curse when Marina skips to San Diego and develops a new client base. Ginsberg has a nice way with offbeat characters like Madeline, the pampered wife of a very rich, very angry man; Cooper, whose "boundary issues" hinder his pursuit of a closeted gay psychiatrist; and Eddie, a womanizer who won't take "Get lost, you creep" for an answer. Once Marina's true psychic gifts kick in, making it impossible for her to lie, her clients turn nasty. Given her own storytelling gift, Ginsberg easily counters the suggestion that her plot is schematic. As Marina would testify, "The very concept of randomness was something created to stave off the crush of inevitability." Bill Loehfelm is one of those first-time novelists who don't want to tell a story so much as get it all out of their system. The bottled-up emotions he uncorks in FRESH KILLS (Putnam, $24.95) belong to Junior Sanders, a Staten Island bartender who becomes almost incoherent with rage when he learns that his father has been shot to death, gangland style, outside a deli. That's not grief Junior is choking on, but hatred for the old man, a mean drunk who abused him and his mother and made a nervous wreck of his sister. Junior's attempt to beat the cops to the killer may be a weak plot device, but it's a good excuse to roam this often ignored borough, picking over its garbage and brooding on its wounds. In genre fiction, making your city look bad is a sign of deep affection - which is precisely the message conveyed in new books by two Chicago writers. In Michael Harvey's latest novel, THE FIFTH FLOOR (Knopf, $23.95), Michael Kelly, the cocky P.I. hero of Harvey's nifty retro-noir series, wants to pin a domestic abuse charge on one of the mayor's "fixers," the polite term for a problem solver who "makes things go away." But when Kelly comes across the murdered body of a historian-with an interest in the Great Chicago Fire, he uncovers a conspiracy so deeply entrenched that no fixer can make it go away. Marcus Sakey sees Chicago as a constant source of sin and temptation for weak souls who can't catch a break. In GOOD PEOPLE (Dutton, $24.95), he saddles Tom and Anna Reed with an ethical challenge when they find $375,000 hidden in the apartment of a tenant who died in their building. Once they give in to temptation, these foolish but tenderly drawn innocents find themselves in a classic bind, unable to outrun the criminals, outwit the cops or find their way home again. 'I've seen more English tourists in the morgue than in the Louvre,' Louis Bayard's Parisian narrator says.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Occasionally, a brilliant audio can improve upon the print original. Simon Vance's skillful enactment of a cast the size of Balzac's The Human Comedy is a joy. The characters include the credibly naive and incredibly good bourgeois narrator, Dr. Hector Carpentier; several members of the royal family; and, of course, the servants, soldiers and government hacks that form the majority of the populace. Most amazing is Vance's portrayal of Vidocq, a criminal turned police inspector. A master of masquerade, Vidocq takes on many disguises, complemented here by unique voices. When uncloaked, Vance returns Vidocq to his natural speech, a sort of East Ender drawl. Vance smartly avoids pasting French accents onto the characters. The pace is perfect, as Vance skillfully swirls the reader through a complex Restoration plot that is sure to please. A Morrow hardcover (Reviews, July 21). (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Where is Marie Antoinette's son? Trust Vidocq to find out; real-life founder of the Serete in early 1800s France, he's considered the first modern detective. With a reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

Having previously channeled Dickens and Poe, historical novelist Bayard (The Pale Blue Eye, 2006, etc.) throws down the gauntlet to Dumas in another high-energy melodrama. Set in early-19th-century Paris and environs, the book recounts the life-changing experience of medical student Hector Carpentier, who's enlisted by celebrated police detective Eug'ne Vidocq (a real historical figure) to follow clues suggesting that members of the recently restored Bourbon monarchy known to have been executed by the Jacobins who overthrew them did not include the Dauphin Louis-Charles, younger son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. A scrap of paper bearing Hector's name, a meeting with a down-at-heels baroness and an astonishing accretion of details concerning the late M. Carpentier p're, who had himself pursued a medical career, enable Vidocq to persuade the initially disbelieving Hector that his humble father, an artisan of no particular accomplishment, "might have rubbed shoulders with a Bourbon or two." Dastardly plots, thrilling last-minute rescues and escapes, the destruction by fire of the boardinghouse run by Hector's stoical mother and the mystery surrounding the docile man-child, who may be the one who might be king, are cast together in a whirligig narrative whose impertinent momentum never flags (despite the appearances of enough red herrings to overpopulate a sizable sea). Young Carpentier is a perfectly suitable unwilling (and quite sensibly unheroic) hero, and the ego-driven, Rabelaisian Vidocq drags the story along by his flaring coattails, never fearing any challenges to his wit and resourcefulness (his eccentric jocosity, however, often feels forced). The novel's witty succession of trapdoor endings, culminating (we think) in "the quietest of abdications," keeps surprising us long after it seems Bayard's plot has nowhere else to go. Who says they don't write 'em like this anymore? Long may Bayard reign. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

The Black Tower Chapter One The Beggar at the Corner I'm a man of a certain age--old enough to have been every kind of fool--and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers. Name, yes. Mine is Hector Carpentier. These days, Professor Carpentier, of the École de Médecine. My specialty is venereology, which is a reliable source of amusement for my students. "Come with us," they say. "Carpentier's going to tell all about the second stage of syphilis. You'll never screw again." I live on the Rue du Helder, with an orange tabby named Baptiste. My parents are dead, I have no brother or sister and haven't yet been blessed with children. In short, I'm the only family I've got, and at certain intervals of calm, my mind drifts toward those people, not strictly related, who took on all the trappings, all the meaning of family--for a time, anyway. If you were to pin me down, for instance, I'd have to say I recall the lads I went to medical school with better than I recall my own father. And Mother . . . well, she's present enough after all these years, but from some angles, she's not quite as real as Charles. Who was perhaps not real at all but who was, for a time, like family. I think about him every time I see a penta. One glance is all it takes, and I'm standing once more in the Luxembourg Gardens, somewhere in May. I'm watching a pretty girl pass (the angle of her parasol, yes, the butter brightness of her gloves), and Charles is brooding over flowers. He is always brooding over flowers. This time, though, he actually plucks one and holds it up to me: an Egyptian star cluster. Five arms, hence its name. Smaller than a whisper. Imagine a starfish dragged from the ocean bottom and . . . never mind, I can't do it justice. And, really, it's not so remarkable, but sitting there in the cup of his hand, it lays some claim on me, and so does everything else: the Scottish terrier snoring on a bench; the swan cleaning its rump feathers in the fountain; the moss-blackened statue of Leonidas. I am the measure of those things and they of me, and we are all--sufficient, I suppose. Of course, nothing about our situation has shifted. We are still marked men, he and I. But at this moment, I can imagine a sliver of grace--the possibility, I mean, that we might be marked for other things. And all because of this silly flower, which on any other day, I would have stepped on like so much carpet. He's been on my mind of late, because just last week, I received a letter from the Duchesse d'Angoulême. (She is staying at Count Coronini's estate in Slovenia.) The envelope was girt round with stamps, and the letter, written in her usual shy hand, was mostly an essay on rain, sealed off by prayers. I found it comforting. Word has it that the Duchess is penning her memoirs, but I don't believe it. No woman has clutched her own life more closely to her bosom. She'll hold it there, I expect, until the coroner assures her she's dead. Which may be a long time coming. God's funny that way. The more his servants pine for his presence--and make no mistake, the Duchess does--the longer he keeps them shackled to the old mortal coil. No, it's the blasphemers he's aching to get his hands on. Take Monsieur Robespierre. At the very height of the Terror, Robespierre decided that the name "God" had too much of an ancien régime color to it. In his capacity as head of the Committee of Public Safety, he declared that God would henceforward be known as the Supreme Being. There was some kind of festival, I believe, to celebrate God's promotion. A parade, maybe. I was only two. A few months later, with half his jaw shot off, groaning toward the scaffold, was Robespierre already composing apologies? We'll never know. There was no time for memoirs. Me, I have acres of time, but if I were to write up my life, I don't think I could start with the usual genuflections--all those ancestors in halberds, I mean, the midwives catching you in their calloused mitts. No, I'd have to start with Vidocq. And maybe end with him, too. A strange admission, I know, given that I spent no more than a few weeks in his company. Fifteen years have passed with virtually no word from him. Why, then, should I bother revisiting the terrible business that brought us together? Not from any hope of being believed. If anything, I write so that I may believe. Did it really happen? In quite that way? Nothing to do but set everything down, as exactly as I can, and see what stares back at me. And how easily the time slips away, after all. I need but shut my eyes, and two decades vanish in a breath, and I am standing once more in . . . The year 1818. Which, according to official records, is the twenty-third year in the reign of King Louis XVIII. For all but three of those years, however, his majesty has been reigning somewhere else entirely-- hiding , an unkind soul might say, while a certain Corsican made a footstool of Europe. None of that matters now. The Corsican has been locked away (again); the Bourbons are back; the fighting is done; the future is cloudless. This curious interregnum in French history goes by the name of "the Restoration," the implication being that, after senseless experiments with democracy and empire, the French people have been restored to their senses and have invited the Bourbons back to the Tuileries. The old unpleasantness is never alluded to. We have all seen enough politics to last us a lifetime, and we know now: to take a hard line is to take a hard fall. The Black Tower . Copyright © by Louis Bayard. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Black Tower by Louis Bayard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---