“North-South” by Anne Secret: Paris in chiaroscuro

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In October 2010, Séverine thought she'd buried her past. After prison, she found work in a Parisian department store, between the cash register and stocking shelves, discreet colleagues and the detestable boss. She kept a low profile, didn't have many friends apart from Nadège, an employee who knew her story. But when she read in Le Parisien that Basile Rolzen had been shot dead, everything came flooding back: her fear, her months of incarceration, and her blind attachment to Baptiste, Basile's brother, who made her head spin, and more. Arrested for arms trafficking, she was only a small hand at the time, but she still got a year in Fresnes while the others, the real crooks, disappeared into thin air.

Séverine can't help but investigate, to find traces of this man who lied to her. This obsession leads her into the corridors of the Paris metro, rue Lamarck, avenue de Clichy, the Vaugirard railway workshops, and even the Bay of Somme. Men are following her; they are threatening, so the past will never stop resurfacing, like the escalators of the RER.

Anne Secret loves sleepy cities out of season, the old metro networks operated by the Nord-Sud company in the 1930s, and the streets of Paris, which she explores in the style of Patrick Modiano or Dominique Fabre. But she is attached to the detective novel, more Simenonian than bloody thriller. She imagines adventures in chiaroscuro and succeeds with a tiny plot to hook the reader and take them to the wet sidewalks of the capital, in the dead of night. "It starts to rain again. I start to go down. Every twenty steps, a landing leads to the building entrances. The old-fashioned streetlamps diffuse an unreal light. A woman comes from the other direction. When she reaches me, she stops, out of breath..." Anne Secret's writing is both precise and descriptive, but also disturbing in its sobriety, its changes of register, this disturbing taste for street corners that bode well. She knows, like her heroines, that death is never far away.