For the King

Delors has created an intense story in the tumultuous setting of post-Revolutionary France. While narrator Steven Crossley provides a meticulous reading, his British accent is sometimes at odds with the French setting. Police Inspector Roch Miquel is the focus of the novel as he attempts to investigate an attempted assassination of Napoleon Bonaparte while also trying to protect his father from the machinations of the scheming police minister Fouche. Crossley provides excellent voices for each character, but the impeccable Britishness of his pronunciation doesn't make it easy for an American listener to drop into the sense of place that one usually expects from a historical novel. R.F. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

May 3, 2010
Delors follows Mistress of the Revolution with a gripping historical that chronicles the efforts of a young police inspector to capture the men responsible for trying to kill Napoleon Bonaparte. After a botched assassination attempt on Napoleon kills several bystanders, chief inspector Roch Miquel races to find the men responsible. His investigation is hindered by corruption and jealousy among his colleagues in the police force, notably from Fouché, the stridently unsavory minister of police, who, in order to keep Roch under his thumb, imprisons Roch’s father under false pretenses and threatens to have him deported. Meanwhile, Roch finds some comfort in his married mistress, Blanche Coudert, who has a very unfortunate secret that will harshly complicate Roch’s already precarious situation. It’s not a surprise that Delors’s sympathies are with her hero, and his adversaries are depicted as satisfyingly despicable. Themes of class conflict, the messy process of change, and impossible love are nicely woven into the tense central plot of this fast-moving chase through the damp, rutted streets of turn-of-the-19th-century Paris.