The Roma Plot

September 15, 2017
A strange case of wholesale murder has roots in the second world war and the brutalities of the German concentration camps.New York-based con man Max O'Brien (The Kashmir Trap, 2016) has flown to Bucharest to help his old friend Kevin Dandurand, improbably suspected by police for the murder of 23 Roma. Max gets a crash course in Romanian history and some details of the recent massacre from his local guide, Toma Boerescu. The Roma, it seems, were squatters in a condemned building that went up in flames. Ever since their origin in India a millennium ago, the Roma have been nomads, widely persecuted and thrown into concentration camps alongside the Jews during World War II. So it's thoroughly logical that a subplot introduced in the opening chapter and woven throughout the story is set in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and features the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. As additional flashbacks dramatize the roots of Max and Kevin's friendship in the early 1990s and its vicissitudes up to the current day, Max struggles both to piece together the story behind Kevin's alleged crime and to find his friend, who's on the run but checks in periodically by phone. At length, Max finds the immediate causes of Kevin's crisis in a $38 million deal, a sketchy Italian company, and a fateful meeting involving Max and Kevin's ambitious father at, of all places, Trump Tower. Displaying a lively curiosity for Romanian history and contemporary life in Bucharest, Bolduc weaves seemingly disparate plot threads into a twisted yet coherent yarn.

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September 25, 2017
The original edition of this earnest novel (following The Kashmir Trap) in screenwriter Bolduc’s series featuring professional con man Max O’Brien won an Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Book in French. Max travels to Bucharest looking for his good friend and former colleague, Kevin Dandurand, who has been accused of burning down a building and killing the 23 Roma people living there. Max teams up with Kevin’s half-sister Josée, a lawyer in Paris, to uncover the truth about the fire and prove Kevin’s innocence. Their quest leads them to Emil Rosca, a Roma man who has “been caught in nearly every storm of the twentieth century,” and his descendants. As Max and Josée try to discover how his story is entwined with Kevin’s, Bolduc delves into the history of the Roma people from the concentration camps of WWII up to 2007, when this story takes place. It’s not the kind of lively caper readers might expect from a con man protagonist, but the book will appeal to readers who like to have their history lessons wrapped in a good yarn.

October 1, 2017
Originally published in Quebec in French in 2008, and winner of the prestigious Arthur Ellis Award, this is the second novel (after The Kashmir Trap, 2016) to feature likable professional con man Max O'Brien. After finding out that one of his closest friends is on the run in Romania, accused of burning down a building and killing 23 people, Max immediately heads overseas to help his friend prove his innocence. It turns out that the arson and murders are somehow connected to the activities at a certain German concentration camp near the end of WWII. The author bases his fictional story on real historical events, and some real people make appearances in the book, the most notable (and slimiest) being Josef Mengele, the German doctor famously known for his cruel experiments on young people, especially twins. A serious story told with a light touchthe lively dialogue and characterizations counterbalance the weighty subject matterthat should appeal to most historical-mystery readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)