Seeking Whom He May Devour Paperback
Fred Vargas | Vintage Books
21,500원 | 20150401 | 9780099515975
Each day, inhabitants of a small community in the French Alps find another of their ewes with its throat cut. When one of the villagers is also killed people begin to wonder - could it be the work of a werewolf? Soon suspicion falls on Massart, one of the villagers.
I On Tuesday, four sheep were killed at ventebrune in the French Alps. On Thursday, nine were lost at Pierrefort. "It's the wolves," a local said. "They're coming down to eat us all up." The other man drained his glass, then raised his hand. "A wolf, Pierrot my lad. It's a wolf. A beast such as you have never clapped eyes on before. II Two men were lying prone in the undergrowth. "You don't reckon you're gonna teach me how to do my job, do you?" said one. "Don't reckon anything," said the other. Tall, with long, fair hair. Name of Johnstone. Lawrence Donald Johnstone. They lay quite still, gripping their binoculars, observing a pair of wolves. It was ten in the morning. The sun was scorching their backs. "That one is Marcus," Johnstone said. "He's come back." His companion shook his head. A short, swarthy, rather pig-headed local. He had been keeping watch over the wolves in the Mercantour National Park for six years. Name of Jean Mercier. "That's Sibellius," he muttered. "Sibellius is much larger. Hasn't got that yellow tuft at the neck." Jean Mercier was needled, so he reset his binoculars, brought the viewfinder once more into focus, and looked closely at the male wolf prowling round his family lair and occasionally sniffing the wind, some three hundred metres to the east of their hide. They were near, much too near, it would be better to pull back, but Johnstone wanted to get one or two good shots at any cost. That's why he was there to film wolves. Then he had to go back to Canada with his documentary in the can. But he had been putting off going back for six months, for reasons that were not entirely clear. To tell the truth, the Canadian was rooting in. Mercier knew why. Lawrence Donald Johnstone, celebrated connoisseur of Canadian grizzly bears, had fallen in love with a handful of European wolves. And he could not make up his mind to say so. In any case, the Canadian spoke as few words as he could get away with. "Came back in the spring," Johnstone muttered. "Started a family. But I can't see who the she-wolf is." "That's Proserpine," whispered Mercier. "Out of Janus and Juno, third generation." "Alongside Marcus." "Alongside Marcus," Mercier agreed, after a pause. "And what's for sure is that there are brand-new cubs." "Good." "Excellent." "How many?" "Too soon to say." Mercier jotted some notes on a pad attached to his belt, took a drink from his gourd, and got back into position without snapping a twig. Johnstone put down his binoculars, wiped the sweat off his face. He pulled over his camera, focused on Marcus and smiled as he switched it on. He had spent fifteen years among the grizzlies, the caribou and the wolves of Canada, wandering alone across the vast preserves to watch, record and film, occasionally stretching out a hand to the oldest of his untamed friends. Not creatures to be taken lightly. There'd been Joan, an old female grizzly, who'd come at him, her head down, to get a good scratch of her coat. And Johnstone had never imagined that Europe so pinched, so wasted and tamed could have anything of interest to offer him. He had not taken on this documentary job in the Mercantour Range very gladly. But what was he going to do? And when it came to the crunch, he'd kept p
Each day, inhabitants of a small community in the French Alps find another of their ewes with its throat cut. When one of the villagers too is killed people begin to wonder: could it be the work of a werewolf? Soon suspicion falls on Massart, one of the villagers, because of his beardlessness (according to popular legend, werewolves have no hair on their bodies because they are inside the body). Soliman, the victim's adopted son; Le Veilleur, a lonely sheperd and Camille, a lovely girl from the city, decide to pursue Massart and their hunt leads them into the Alps, but their incompetence is undisguisable and they decide to summon Commissaire Adamsberg well known for his peculiar investigation methods to help. Thanks to his extraordinary intuition, Adamsberg unearths an astonishing truth, one that the villagers are going to find hard to believe. From the Trade Paperback edition.
'Ingenious. Slick, creepy and full of engaging odd characters, this thriller is a class act' Independent
"Vargas's prize-winning novel is a fascinating exploration of Paris's dark side." Guardian ". . . thoroughly high-class entertainment." Time Out From the Paperback edition.
