Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JAXON REED – THE EMPATHIC DETECTIVE – KINDLE PRESS – 2016

If you like suspense and detective stories you will like this book. You also have to be aware there is a slightly science-fictional environment with flying cars and a few other things of the type. Back to the Future has always been a strong inspiration to a whole generation.

The central core of the story is a lot more interesting than flying saucers, oops, sorry, flying cars. And that element is directly borrowed from the mind of Fox Mulder and his X files. Another unavoidable inspiration of a whole generation. Some people, in rare blood lines, are empathic, that is to say they can read the emotions of other people directly in their minds. That’s rather banal. Empathy has become a very strong emotion and behavior in our modern world.  Isn’t Harry Potter the supreme empathic wizard?

But these blood lines can cross and they can produce once in several life’s times, or is it several lives’ time, one harpy who is not only empathic but can control and command the emotions of other people. They are power hungry and not power freaks because they have the means of their ambition. So imagine such a harpy in Texas and you will have the recipe of a dramatic event. We of course know by heart the two occasions Shakespeare quoted such female beings in The Tempest III, iii, 50-54 (the lines apparently change from one edition to another of the play):

ALONSO          I will stand to and feed,

Although my last – no matter, since I feel

The best is past. Brother, my lord the Duke,

Stand to, and do as we. Thunder and lightning.

(Enter Ariel, like a harpy,

claps his wings upon the table, and, with a quaint

device, the banquet vanishes.)

and in Much Ado About Nothing II, i, 221-228 (the lines apparently change from one edition  to another of the play):

BENEDICK Will your grace command me any service to the world’s end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on. I will fetch you a toothpicker now from the furthest inch of Asia, bring you the length of Prester John’s foot, fetch you a hair off the great Cham’s beard, do you any embassage to the Pygmies, rather than hold three words' conference with this harpy. You have no employment for me?

The challenge is then for an empathic detective to lead the way against that harpy and defeat her, with a little help from some Europol police-people (a man and a woman like the Detective and his partner, a man and a woman: let’s be diversity addicts and proponents) from The Hague, The Netherlands. They will also need the troops of the local Russian mafia (only men on this side) and that will enable the Russian Mafioso to air his anti-European feeling:

“Never trust a Central European, Detective. Never trust a Southern, Eastern, or Northern one either. Just don’t trust Europeans. They are untrustworthy. But Central Europeans are the worst.”

If you don’t believe this Russian, just check in your daily press and find out about Brexit. Do not forget the British are Europeans at first sight, Farage willing or not willing. They used lies, fake arguments, unwarranted menaces, plain psychological blackmailing to carry a referendum that has no constitutional or legal value since for it to become something like a reality, Parliament has to appoint a new Prime Minister, who has to be the new leader of the Conservative Party who has not yet been appointed, the main pro-Brexit Conservative personality, Boris Johnwon, refusing to be the appointee. Then Parliament will have to repeal the 1971 act that authorized the United Kingdom to join the European Union, but only once the new government is instated by Parliament, and in the meantime the Scots will have probably decided to step down from the United Kingdom with the Queen of Scotland having to decide if she wants to remain the Queen of this seceding Scotland while she would be the Queen of England at the same time.

You see when Western Europeans try to trust Central, Eastern, Northern and Southern Europeans, they are in a real mess. I guess the cherry on the pie or the ice cream of the pie à la mode with vanilla ice cream on top, though under the topping cherry, is the real epilogue, or end, of the novel. I will not tell, but keep in mind that Western European can only be found in the British Isles, and Ireland is not British at all, hence not part of Western Europe. The Europol representatives from The Hague who speak French or Flemish, also known as Walloon or Dutch, are the most perverse and treacherous European beings who have little to do with humaneness, humanity, or any serious religion, though the Flemish woman is a Lutheran.

But there is some light in this perversion. Just beg for Russian help against these mischievous and treacherous Europeans. You will get there people of one word only, theirs, and they can keep it, because obviously the Russians are not Europeans. Stalin had cleaned up these blood lines of monstrous harpies (“harpy: fabulous monster, rapacious and filthy, having a woman's face and body and a bird's wings and claws, supposed to be a minister of divine vengeance.” A Shakespeare Glossary, C. T. Onions. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1911). And what’s more Hitler could have been, would have been, should have been and probably was a male harpy, a transgender harpy, horror and calamity!

Maybe slightly extreme, but there is no pleasure in moderation and limitation. Extremism is the salt of the earth in literature and I must admit this story flirts and woos with extremism. Thank you, author, for a few hours of pleasure.