Archives de Tag: sphere

Career of evil – Robert Galbraith

11 lundi Jan 2016

Posted by in Policiers / Thrillers, Romans étrangers

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Robert Galbraith - Career of EvilLes premières phrases

«  He had not managed to scrub off all her blood. A dark line like a parenthesis lay under the middle fingernail of his left hand. He set to digging it out, although he quite liked seeing it there: a memento of the previous day’s pleasures. After a minute’s fruitless scraping, he put the bloody nail in his mouth and sucked. The ferrous tang recalled the smell of the torrent that had splashed wildly onto the tiled floor, spattering the walls, drenching his jeans and turning the peach-coloured bath towels – fluffly, dry and neatly folded – into blood-soaked rags.

Colours seemed brighter this morning, the world a lovelier place. He felt serene and uplifted, as though he had absorbed her, as though her life had been transfused into him. They belonged to you once you had killed them: it was a possession way beyond sex. Even to know how they looked at the moment of death was an intimacy way past anything two living bodies could experience.  »

Circonstances de lecture

Voici la suite des aventures du détective privé Cormoran Strike, sous la plume de Robert Galbraith, alias J.K. Rowling.

Impressions

Décidément, j’adore J.K.Rowling et son nouveau héros, le détective privé Cormoran Strike, ancien soldat mutilé. Quand son assistante, Robin, reçoit par la Poste une jambe de femme, Cormoran sait qu’on le vise personnellement. Il se met aussitôt à enquêter sur quatre personnes de son passé susceptibles de ce genre d’horreur. Reste que le serial killer entend bien parvenir à ses fins…

Ici, J.K.Rowling nous plonge dans une histoire des plus sombres, avec un serial killer entre Hannibal Lecter du Silence des Agneaux et un Jack L’Éventreur moderne. Glaçant… Elle n’en oublie pas pour autant de faire évoluer les relations entre son héros et sa jolie assistante, qui s’apprête à épouser son fiancé… Un thriller glaçant, sanglant, plein de suspens – et d’humour, aussi ! Disponible en version française en mars 2016.

Un passage parmi d’autres

 Up the echoing metal staircase that wound around the broken birdcage lift she walked, her heels clanging on the metal. The glass door flashed as she unlocked and opened it and the engraved legend – C. B. STRIKE, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR – stood out darkly.

She had arrived deliberately early. They were currently inundated with cases and she wanted to catch up with some paperwork before resuming her daily surveillance of a young Russian lap-dancer. From the sound of heavy footfalls overhead, she deduced that Strike was still upstairs in his flat.

Robin laid her oblong package on the desk, took off her coat and hung it, with her bag, on a peg behing the door, turned on the light, filled and switched on the kettle, then reached for the sharp letter-opener on her desk. Remembering Matthew’s flat refusal to believe that it had been flanker Jacques Burger’s curly mane she had been admiring, rather than Strike’s short and frankly pube-like hair, she made an angry stab on the end of the package, slit it open and pulled the box apart.

A woman’s severed leg had been crammed sideways in the box, the toes of the foot bent back to fit.

Robert Galbraith – Career of Evil – 2015 (Sphere)

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The Silkworm – Robert Galbraith

11 vendredi Juil 2014

Posted by in En VO, Policiers / Thrillers, Romans étrangers

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Robert Galbraith - The SilkwormLes premières phrases

«  « Someone bloody famous, » said the hoarse voice on the end of the line, « better’ve died, Strike. »

The large unshaven man tramping through the darkness of predawn, with his telephone clamped to his ear, grinned.

« It’s in that ballpark. »

« It’s six o’clock in the fucking morning! »

« It’s half past, but if you want what I’ve got, you’ll need to come and get it, » said Cormoran Strike. « I’m not far away from your place. There’s a… »

« How d’you know where I live? » demanded the voice.

« You told me, » said Strike, stifling a yawn. « You’re selling your flat. »

« Oh, » said the other, mollified. « Good memory. »

« There’s a twenty-four caff… »

« Fuck that. Come into the office later… »

« Culpepper, I’ve got another client this morning, he pays better than you do and I’ve been up all night. You need this now if you’re going to use it. »

A groan. Strike could hear the rustling of sheets.

« It had better be shit-hot. »

« Smithfield Café on Long Lane, » said Strike and rang off. « 

Circonstances de lecture

Parce que c’est J.K.Rowling qui se cache derrière ce pseudo.

Impressions

Après « The Cuckoo’s Calling », voici la deuxième aventure du détective privé Cormoran Strike et de son assistante Robin. Cette fois-ci, J.K.Rowling nous plonge dans le milieu littéraire de Londres. Une femme vient solliciter Strike pour qu’il l’aide à retrouver son mari, un écrivain disparu depuis quelques jours. Une enquête parfaitement menée et parfaitement écrite. Du suspens jusqu’au bout. Bref, on redemande très vite un troisième tome !

Un passage parmi d’autres

 Paper rustled under his feet. Looking down, he saw a smattering of takeaway menus and an enveloppe addressed TO THE OCCUPIER/CARETAKER. He stooped and picked it up. It was a brief, angry handwritten note from the next-door neighbour, complaining about the smell.

Strike left the note fall back onto the doormat and moved forwards into the hall, observing the scars left on every surface where the chemical substance had been thrown. To his left was a door; he opened it. The room beyond was dark and empty; it had not been tarnished with the bleach-like substance. A dilapidated kitchen, also devoid of furnishings, was the  only other room on the lower floor. The deluge of chemicals had not spared it; even a stale half loaf of bread on the sideboard had been doused.

Strike headed up the stairs. Somebody had climbed or descended them, pouring the vicious, corrosive substance from a capacious container; it had spattered everywhere, even onto the landing windowsill, where the paint had bubbled and split apart.

On the first floor, Strike came to a halt. Even through the thick wool of his overcoat he could smell something else, something that the pungent industrial chemical could not mask. Sweet, putrid, rancid: the stench of decaying flesh.

He did not try either of the closed doors on the first door. Instead, with his birthday whisky swaying stupidly in its plastic bag, he followed slowly in the footsteps of the pourer of acid, up a second flight of stained stairs from which the varnish had been burned away, the carved banisters scorched bare of their waxy shine.

The stench of decay grew stronger with every step Strike took. It reminded him of the time they stuck long sticks into the ground in Bosnia and pulled them out to sniff the ends, the one fail-safe way of finding the mass graves. He pressed his collar more tightly to his mouth as he reached the top floor, to the studio where a Victorian artist had once worked in the unchanging northern light.

Strike did not hesitate on the threshold except fot the seconds it took to tug his shirt sleeve down to cover his bare hand, so that he would make no mark on the wooden door as he pushed it open. Silence but for a faint squeak of hinges, and then the desultory buzzing of flies.

He had expected death, but not this.

Robert Galbraith – The Silkworm – 2014 (Sphere)

The Cuckoo’s Calling – Robert Galbraith

10 samedi Août 2013

Posted by in En VO, Policiers / Thrillers

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Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's CallingLes premières phrases

«  The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies. Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, their breath rising like steam. Snow fell steadily on to hats and shoulders; gloved fingers wiped lenses clear. From time to time there came outbreaks of desultory clicking, as the watchers filled the waiting time by snapping the white canvas tent in the middle of the road, the entrance to the tall red-brick apartment block behind it, and the balcony on the top floor from which the body had fallen.

Behind the tightly packed paparazzi stood white vans with enormous satellite dishes on the roofs, and journalists talking, some in foreign languages, while soundmen in headphones hovered. Between recordings, the reporters stamped their feet and warmed their hands on hot beakers of coffee from the teeming café a few streets away. To fill the time, the woolly-hatted cameramen filmed the backs of the photographers, the balcony, the tent concealing the body, then repositionned themselves for wide shots that encompassed the chaos that had exploded inside the sedate and snowy Mayfair street, with its lines of glossy black doors framed by white stone porticos and flanked by topiary shrubs. The entrance to number 18 was bounded with tape. Police officials, some of them white-clothed forensic experts, could be glimpsed in the hallway beyond. « 

Circonstances de lecture

Parce que sous le pseudo de Robert Galbraith se cache J.K. Rowling…

Impressions

Ici, rien à voir avec Harry Potter ou The Casual Vacancy… A part ce style, cette écriture propre à J.K. Rowling et que j’adore !

J.K. Rowling s’essaie au roman policier et réussit à nous tenir en haleine jusqu’aux toutes dernières pages. Son héros, un détective privé ancien soldat en Afghanistan, est attachant. Tout comme sa toute nouvelle secrétaire. Un duo que j’espère pouvoir retrouver dans d’autres aventures.

Un passage parmi d’autres

 There’s a client here for you. Shall I show him in? »

« There’s a what? »

« A client, Mr Strike. »

He looked for several seconds, trying to process the information.

« Right, OK – no, give me a couple of minutes, please, Sandra, and then show him in. »

She withdrew without comment.

Strike wasted barely a second on asking himself why he had called her Sandra, before leaping to his feet and setting about looking and smelling less like a man who had slept in his clothes. Diving under his desk into his kitbag, he seized a tube of toothpaste, and squeezed three inches into his open mouth; then he noticed that his tie was soaked in water from the sink, and that his shirt front was spattered with flecks of blood, so he ripped both off, buttons pinging off the walls and filing cabinet, dragged a clean though heavily creased shirt out of the kitbag instead and pulled it on, thick fingers fumbling. After stuffing the kitbag out of sight behind his empty filing cabinet, he hastily reseated himself and checked the inner corners of his eyes for debris, all the while pondering whether his so-called client was the real thing, and whether he would be prepared to pay actual money for detective services. Strike had come to realise, over the course of an eighteen-month spiral into financial ruin, that neither of these things could be taken for granted. He was still chasing two clients for full payment of their bills; a third had refused to disburse a penny, because Strike’s findings had not been to his taste, and given that he was sliding ever deeper into debt, and that a rent review of the area was threatening his tenancy of the central London office that he had been so pleased to secure, Strike was in no position to involve a lawyer. Rougher, cruder methods of debt collection had become a staple of his recent fantaisies; it would have given him much pleasure to watch the smuggest of his defaulters cowering in the shadow of a baseball bat.

The door opened again; Strike hastily removed his index finger from his nostril and sat up straight, trying to look bright and alert in his chair.

« Mr Strike, this is Mr Bristow. »

The prospective client followed Robin into the room. The immediate impression was favourable.

The Cuckoo’s Calling – Robert Galbraith – 2013 (sphere)