The Circle

Starred review from August 24, 2015
Dolls float on the surface of a swimming pool. A young man dangles his legs in the water, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. In the house adjoining the pool, a woman lies drowned in a large, old-fashioned bathtub, her body tightly bound by rope and a small flashlight rammed down her throat. French author Minier’s second psychological whodunit featuring Commandant Martin Servaz (after 2014’s The Frozen Dead) shows his mastery of the creepy setup. Servaz, who has been following the 2010 World Cup with his Toulouse crime squad team, is alerted to the bizarre poolside scene by an old love, Marianne Bokhanowsky. Marianne’s 17-year-old son, Hugo, is the prime suspect in the slaying of Claire Diemar, a teacher of Hugo’s with a doll obsession, and she implores Servaz for help in proving his innocence. Meanwhile, another figure from Servaz’s past resurfaces, Julian Hirtmann. The Hannibal Lecter–like genius serial killer, who shares Servaz’s taste for Mahler and remains at large, sends the detective taunting messages. The Russian nesting doll of a plot is perfectly executed and delivers two genuine gut punches at the end.

October 1, 2015
Minier's atmospheric and creepy debut novel (The Frozen Dead, 2014) was published in a dozen languages and became a best-seller in Europe. This time, Toulouse's top detective, Commandant Martin Servaz, gets a phone call from a former lover. Her son has been found at the home of a beautiful young professor from a well-respected lycee in a leafy university town outside Toulouse. The professor has been murdered, trussed up with rope and drowned in her bathtub; the boy, one of her best students, claims he was drugged and remembers nothing. As in The Frozen Dead, Minier introduces a second plotline: a woman who has been abducted, kept in darkness, and drugged and raped on a regular schedule. The novel begins with this woman's captivity; her despair, captured in a brief prologue, is haunting. Servaz, the cerebral, Mahler-loving detective, is a richly developed character who becomes more interesting with each page, and Minier's painterly portrait of the beautiful Midi Provence region stands in juxtaposition to the awful crimes Servaz must investigate. Minier belongs on the reading lists of anyone interested in international crime fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)