The black jersey A novel

Jorge Zepeda Patterson

Book - 2019

"There are riders willing to die just to win a single leg of the Tour, careening downhill at a suicidal ninety kilometers per hour; now I know there are also riders ready to kill for it. Marc, a French-Colombian professional cyclist with a military past, is on an elite Tour de France team led by his best friend, Steve, an American star and a favorite to win this year's Tour. But the competition takes a dark turn when someone begins eliminating racers in a series of violent "accidents," and all the remaining athletes become suspects. Marc agrees to help the French police with their investigation from the inside, but as the days progress, the dangers grow, and the number of potential murderers--and potential winners--shrin...ks. In fact, if there's any team that has been favored by the murderer's actions, it's Marc and Steve's. Who can Marc trust? Who should he protect? As the finish line approaches, Marc must decide what he's willing to risk for justice, victory, and friendship"--

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MYSTERY/Zepedapa Jorge
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Subjects
Genres
Thrillers (Fiction)
Detective and mystery fiction
Published
New York : Random House 2019.
Language
English
Spanish
Main Author
Jorge Zepeda Patterson (author)
Other Authors
Achy Obejas, 1956- (translator)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xiii, 312 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9781984801067
9781984801074
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

For three weeks in July, cycling fans across the globe follow the most famous bicycle race in the world, the Tour de France. Patterson, a Mexican journalist, brings an original twist to the event with this thriller about murder and deadly sabotage among the competitors. Marc Hannibal Moreau, a French Colombian professional cyclist, is the domestique for the Fonar Team, and his job is to lead American superstar Steve Panata to his fifth Tour crown. After a series of suspicious accidents, Moreau, who has a military background, is summoned to provide leads for investigators from his perspective inside the peloton. Everyone is suspect: top rivals, coaches, mechanics, soigneurs (therapists), even members of the Fonar team. It's a bit of a stretch for a professional racer like Moreau to compete for 23 days covering 2,000 miles at the top level while expending energy on the investigation (and spending nights with his lover, Fiona Crowley, a mechanic and International Cycling Union (UCI) official), but the fast pace and numerous plot twists will keep readers in suspense until the end, when the cyclists cross the finish line at the Champs-Élysées.--Brenda Barrera Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Set during the Tour de France, this thrilling mystery from Mexican author Patterson (Milena) boasts as many twists and turns as the treacherous bicycle race that winds through the Alps and the Pyrenees. When a series of tragic events begins forcing participants out of the grueling 23-day race-such as the brutal assault on a cyclist while on a practice run and another's apparent suicide-the detective in charge of investigating the incidents enlists the help of Marc Moreau, a French cyclist with military police training. But as Moreau-who is on a top team led by former champion Steve Panata-investigates the increasingly desperate attacks on riders, he must also deal with his own pressing issues, which includes a girlfriend and mentor who believe Moreau can, and should, step out of his longtime supporting role to Panata and win the yellow jersey for himself. This meticulously plotted novel about riders willing to die-and possibly kill-to win cycling's biggest race will have readers guessing until the very last page. Patterson should win a wider American audience with this outing. Agent: Marina Penalva, Casanovas & Lynch (Spain). (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A brilliant and devious criminal turns the Tour de France into a life-or-death race.Following a glossary of cycling terms and a cast of characters, the story kicks off in the arch narrative voice of Marc Moreau, a "domestique"that is, a nonleading member of a cycling team, "from the French for 'servant.' " He's been aware of both the star quality and cockiness of American cyclist Steve Panata from the moment they both joined the tour in 2006. Ten years on, Steve is at the top of his game and he and Marc have developed a deep synchronicity. As the extended 2016 race proceeds in stages, with regular updates of the leaderboard for the reader, British cyclist Saul Fleming is found dead in his bathtub, his wrists slit. At first his death looks like suicide. But after police comb through the crime scene, they decide it was probably murder, for Fleming drowned with bruises on his body as if he'd been held down. When the police confidentially share their findings with Marc, asking for his help getting inside the cycling circuit because he's a former military policeman, he seizes the role of amateur sleuth. His close relationship with the other cyclists is complicated by his new love, the mechanic Fiona. Worried that this wonderful development may compromise his synchronicity with Steve, Marc still manages to identify one of Steve's chief rivals as the likely killer, but how to prove it? When a suspicious accident lands Steve in the hospital, Marc realizes just how urgent it is to catch the killer. Patterson (Milena, 2017) offers complex character portraits, a dramatic depiction of the Tour de France, and a nifty whodunit. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

2006 Everyone hated him the minute they laid eyes on him, except for me. He was chewing gum nonstop, and every three seconds he would push back a lock of hair as if it were an extension he was afraid of losing. But even without those tics, he would've provoked the group's ill will. He arrived at camp driving a limited-­edition Land Rover and unloaded an aerodynamic bike that the rest of us had only seen ridden by the most elite professionals. It didn't help that he was American, that he had a face like a Holly­wood actor, and that he flaunted the smile of somebody who always gets his way. But I welcomed him with open arms. A new guy was the only way the others would leave me in peace. Ever since I had arrived at training camp two weeks prior, my teammates had made me the butt of their practical jokes, the hazing a product of the excess of anxiety and testosterone that you might expect from our vigorous training sessions. They had turned my first few weeks as a professional--­if getting paid fifty euros a week had made me that--­into a kind of lonely purgatory, so I was grateful for the chance to not be the solitary victim of their abuse. Maybe that's what brought us together. We took the torments the others inflicted on us philosophically and chose to treat them as some kind of initiation ritual directed at newbies. Although, to be more accurate, Steve took it philosophically and I just went along with him. "Don't eat the oatmeal," he said the first time he ever spoke to me. "I think they spit in it." And then he offered me a protein bar. He seemed more pleased than upset, as if the fact that he'd figured it out made him cleverer than the others. After a few days, we understood it wasn't an initiation ritual. Simply put: Our new teammates were scared of us. Of the forty-­six racers who had started out at training camp for the Belgian team Ventoux, the legendary breeding ground of professional cyclists, only twenty-­seven would be kept, and only the best nine would make it onto the first team, the one they take to the trials that really matter. A month later, when the training became more demanding and the races turned into 160-­kilometer journeys that included steep expanses, we understood their fear was justified. We were better. Steve Panata raced with a natural rhythm and elegance I'd never seen before and never would again. He devoured kilometers effortlessly, at a speed that would have forced anyone else to bend over the wheel. I balanced him with a physiological anomaly that in other circumstances would have made me a circus freak. My father was a native of the French Alps, and his DNA must have had a very good time with the Colombian genes from my mother's Andean ancestors because they ended up gifting me a third lung. Not literally, but the levels of oxygen in my blood are such that, for all practical purposes, I'm high when I'm racing. Once we were actually on the road, Steve and I began to take revenge for all the affronts we had suffered. We did it almost without thinking. When we got within twenty or thirty kilometers of the goal set by our coaches, he'd smile slyly at me; I'd give a gesture of complicity, and we'd pick up the pace. We'd do it subtly at first so the others wouldn't immediately surrender and would make more of an effort. Ten kilometers later, when we sensed the group had hit its limit, we'd speed up again and leave them definitively behind. But not before Steve put in his final touch: He'd start talking in a very calm voice about the last movie he saw, like someone who's chatting in a bar instead of climbing a slope that had taken everybody else's breath away. Resentment soon mingled with the fear we inspired in our teammates. Now and again I thought that, stuck up on those mountain retreats in Catalonia among dozens of spiteful contenders determined to become professionals at any cost, we might be vulnerable to the kind of beating that would put our own careers at risk. For a lot of those guys, myself included, making the cut and being on the Ventoux team was the only thing keeping us from having to endure a mediocre job at a farm or a factory. To be honest, a couple of them looked like they had nowhere to go but jail. That wasn't the case with Steve, for whom professional cycling was just one option among many, in a lavish and generous future. Yet another reason to hate him. It also didn't help that he could be irresistibly charming when he wanted to be, especially when it came to women, directors, and coaches. Charming in a way that provoked more than one brawl with the locals on the few occasions the group would go out to a local bar, even if it was just to have root beer. A passing flirtation or an exchange of napkins with scrawled telephone numbers was enough to unleash a fracas that would often end in blows. Despite so frequently provoking envy and resentment among others, Steve was notoriously incapable of defending himself. All the poise he displayed on a bike or on the dance floor would turn into ineptitude the instant punches flew. We managed to get out more or less unharmed anyway, thanks to my military police training and some army experiences dealing with hotheaded drunks in dive bars. Locals were one thing. But in the end, I had to neutralize the damn bullies on our own team, starting with the group's bruiser, a hard and rough Briton with the thighs and face of a bulldog. He weighed about twenty-­five pounds more than I did, but he hadn't grown up in a slum in Medellín or spent three years in the army barracks in Perpignan. I'd developed a survival strategy that was, in essence, conflict avoidance, which fit my temperament perfectly. But it's a strategy that only works if you're willing to commit to violence on the rare occasions when conflict is in­evitable. Such as the time I had to defend Steve from Iván, the bruiser. Iván had punctured my friend's bike tires a few times during the night, which forced us to make frantic repairs in order to report on time to the coaches. One morning, we discovered Steve's bike had disappeared altogether, and the smirk on Iván's face made it obvious he was the responsible party. I supposed he assumed Steve would finally have to confront him. He never saw me coming. I threw my forearm with all my strength and hit him in the face with my elbow: right between his jaw and temple. That imbecile fell like a rock while his minions looked on, astonished by my inconceivable aggression. And they certainly weren't expecting what happened next. I kicked up a storm as the goon's body curled up into a ball, not stopping until he confessed where he'd hidden the bike. After that incident, they left us in peace. Excerpted from The Black Jersey: A Novel by Jorge Zepeda Patterson, Achy Obejas 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.