Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

CHARISS K. WALKER – CRESCENT CITY – AN ALEC WINTERS SERIES - 2015

The first thing you are going to like in this book is New Orleans. You will recognize the places, the streets and the old French quarter. It all starts in the Café du Monde for breakfast with croissants and café au lait. Perfect.

Then, and from the very start, you are plunged into a world of phenomenal events. Strangely enough you are positioned on the side of the victims of some evil who are saved from that evil by some supernatural monstrous event and creature that looks like an angel to the retrieved person. You are on the safe side and you can only like and approve that justice being worked from atop, afar, ahigh, in other words from some supernatural superior level that is both monstrous and angelic, Lucifer and Gabriel in one person.

This justice boy, Alec Winters, deals with in succession a pedophile stepfather and his daughter, a pedophile priest and some boy pupil in a Catholic school, a violent man with his wife and three children, a journalist and two thugs from the Catholic Church, and a gangbang that has been going on for five years and that has systematically turned sour, meaning the girls died in the process and were buried in the backyard (which probably was the initial objective), and finally the abductor of Alec Winters’ lady friend. The details are slightly gruesome.

The positive stance you are set into by the author makes the book easy to read and even rather ethically satisfying though what this justice boy does is absolutely criminal. He turns himself into the police, the judge, the jury and the hangman, all in one for the thugs and other violent characters and at the same time a flash of light, wings of feathers, blue eyes and the softness and tenderness of an angel for the victims of the violence.

This ambivalence would make Sam and Dean Winchester confused and probably lost in motivations. Do we have to destroy the monster or do we have to protect the angel? That’s the question Vivien, the ex-journalist turned police advisor, will have to solve sooner or later since she is on the doorstep of truth, knocking at the door of the real human being behind the monster-angel.

It reads well and easy. It is entertaining. It has a good rhythm. It is in a way thrilling though we know the bad-good boy is going to come sooner or later. At the same time in most cases that do not have to do with children, the victims of the violence have caused that violence by their carelessness. A woman who marries the wrong man and has children from should be protected but she should have thought better before getting married. A provocative journalist is begging for trouble when attacking a rather shady institution. Two girls who run away from their parents for two days while they are out of town and accept to share drinks with a stranger and go to his place to save on the motel fee are yelling for trouble. Finally a woman who has been an escort with very wealthy but darkly shady people has been signing down her name on the list of those males’ victims to come.

This justice boy is thus not so much a justice boy as a protector of innocent but extremely careless people. Do they deserve to be protected? If you take risks you have to run them to the end. Maybe people should be more prudent, or is prudence today a politically incorrect word, concept, idea?

But you can always enjoy the story and read it just before going to sleep for you to invest it into your dreams that would probably become nightmares (and in some extreme cases they might turn into stampeding herds of night-stallions) and you will wait for Alec Winters or Dean and Sam Winchester to come and save you in the nick of time, just before you may be “nicked” out of this life by the monster you have been courting, calling for, begging to come and brutalize you. You just forgot that it might be “to death” in the mind of the pervert you are trying to use for your pleasure but perverts cannot be used. They use their victims and not the reverse?

Enjoy that nice and exciting dive and soak in bad events coming to some level of “happy” ending that makes you think the world is not so bad after all. And let’s meet them all next Saturday for the great show of the latest crazy deranged corrugated person who will come with a machine gun and kill twenty five people. Why don’t you invite the mass killer to your table before he performs to share a glass of sherry with him (most of these people are men) and you can and may wonder why so few women are in that professional activity, because it is a profession but essentially a male dominated profession like hangman. Do you know many hangwomen?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU