The Awkward Squad

February 1, 2018

This debut mystery opens with disgraced Paris police officer Anne Capestan getting her badge back after a six-month suspension for the use of brutal force. Instead of being fired, she has been assigned to head up a new brigade of misfit cops--other officers rejected from their respective areas--to probe cold cases that no one expects them to solve. Capestan approaches this plan optimistically and tries to keep her group of disparate officers productive. The brigade combs through the many cold case files and they find two to investigate. Quickly they discover that the cases involving the murders of old woman and a sailor are linked, and that some malfeasance among their superiors might be afoot. Henaff deftly builds her characters, and readers will enjoy watching friendships and trust grow in the squad. VERDICT Readers who appreciate quirky and interesting characters with their mysteries will find much to savor in this series launch, which is as much about a crew of police rejects as the crimes they investigate.--Kristen Stewart, Pearland Lib., Brazoria Cty. Lib. Syst., TX

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2018
An Ile-de-France police squad specifically designed to corral misfits and make the rest of the department look good lands a pair of cold cases that promptly turn red-hot.Since Commissaire Anne Capestan half expected to be fired after her latest unauthorized shooting, she's half relieved to be placed instead in charge of a new squad nominally expected to reopen old cases that have slipped between the cracks. In truth, as her mentor, Buron, informs her with a straight face, the squad has been expressly designed as a dumping ground for drunks, insubordinates, and incompetents who can't be fired but who aren't expected to do anything else, including showing up in the office. Of the 40 cops assigned to the squad, Capestan expects maybe half of them to report for duty; the actual number turns out to be seven. She asks widowed Commandant Louis-Baptiste Lebreton to team up with celebrity mystery writer Eva Rosiere, back on the job after an extended leave to launch her TV series Laura Flames: Detective, to investigate the 1993 shooting of merchant navy quartermaster Yann Guenan while she pairs off with jinxed Lt. Jose Torrez, whose earlier partners have had a disconcerting habit of getting wounded or killed in the course of doing their jobs, to revisit the 2005 strangling of retired teacher Marie Sauzelle, apparently by an unusually tidy and solicitous burglar. Defying every expectation but that of the genre's conventions, the two cases turn out to be connected--and lead Capestan's squad to corruption deep in the ranks of upper-level colleagues who've made their disdain for the squad, though not their criminal complicity, clear from the beginning.Henaff's debut, an amusingly literal Parisian version of Jussi Adler-Olsen's tales about Copenhagen's equally marginal Department Q, combines conscientious mysterymongering with good, somewhat clean fun.

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February 19, 2018
French author Hénaff’s fun first novel offers a wry look at Parisian policing and the infinite twists of the bureaucracy of French law enforcement. Commissaire Anne Capestan, her career on tenterhooks for her role in the shooting of a suspect, takes charge of a cold-case squad populated by departmental castoffs who can’t be fired but refuse to quit. Starting with a sense of wounded pragmatism that gives way to an increasingly focused joy of the hunt, Capestan marshals a team consisting of a drunk, a cop whose partners keep getting injured, a policewoman who moonlights as a TV writer, and her former internal affairs nemesis into an idiosyncratic, surprisingly effective crime-fighting unit. The group connects the dots on a decade-old fatal burglary, an unsolved shooting of a sailor, and a long-ago shipwreck while navigating a labyrinth created by the Byzantine legal system—and some shrewdly placed obstacles from an opponent who knows when the Awkward Squad is getting close. Readers will hope a sequel is in the works.

March 15, 2018
A ragtag group of cops whom nobody else wants get their own squad. Could be a sitcom. Could be noir. Could be the first entry in this smart Parisian mystery series. After she shoots yet another suspect, Commissaire Anne Capestan is declared a little too trigger-happy to return to her beat. Instead, she's put in charge of a new squad assigned to clean up cold cases. Her crew includes a veteran officer who is considered such bad luck that no one will even ride in a car with him, an active alcoholic, a recently widowed gay man, and a female officer who's made a fortune off of her scripts for a crime drama. They soon realize that the cases they pulled all have something in common: a Florida shipwreck more than 20 years ago. Is this discovery really a coincidence, or is someone higher up at the police judiciare pulling their strings? Originally published in France as Poulets Grill�s, the novel won the 2015 Ars�ne Lupin Prize. The second volume of the series, Rester Group�s, was published in France in 2016 and should be highly anticipated here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)