Jugan
peut-être, par la Gitane en robe rouge, qui, surprise à voler dans les rayons de la supérette de son père, lui a craché au visage d'étranges imprécations.
- Vermillon
- Paru le 03/09/2015
- Genre : Littérature française
- 224 pages - 140 x 205 mm
- EAN : 9782710377368
- ISBN : 9782710377368
Foreign Rights
Jugan
All rights available
Presentation
While on vacation on Paros, in the Cyclades, the narrator is haunted by memories of Noirbourg. It was there that he had begun his teaching career twelve years earlier at the Barbey d’Aurevilly junior high school, “deep in the Cotentin peninsula, at the intersection of three four-lane roads.” And it was there that one fine morning, Joël Jugan – former leader of the far-left group Action Rouge – showed up and ordered a beer on the terrace of the Brasserie de Paris, just like in the old days.
The sulphurous Jugan, so loved by women, had been brought to a halt after a series of hold-ups and worse crimes, including the assassination of the chief executive of Noirbourg Ironworks. He is fresh out of prison, where he had served eighteen years under high-security, and had “become a monster, morally and physically”. One of his old accomplices, the fearless feminist and left-wing activist Clotilde Mauduit, has set up a study-group for kids in the Zone: a mix of young gypsies and children from the projects. Her team includes the narrator and the young accounting student Assia Rafa, whose father is a manager of a minimarket in the Zone. Widowed, he has invested all his love in his precious daughter.
But Assia is captivated by the man with the ravaged face that she glimpses sitting on the Brasserie terrace. And perhaps bewitched, furthermore, by the gypsy woman in the red dress caught stealing from the supermarket aisles who spat strange curses in her face. When Clotilde recruits Jugan for her study group, Assia gives herself up to him, body and soul. In no time at all he is leading her to hell.
With this biting and suspenseful story told in full and powerful prose, Jérôme Leroy brings a burst of incandescence to noir fiction.
Born in Rouen in 1964, Jérôme Leroy has published more than 20 novels and collections of short stories including Le Bloc (Série Noire, 2011; Folio, 2013, winner of the Prix Michel Lebrun), L’Ange gardien (Série Noire, 2014, winner of the Prix Quai des Polars, 2015) and Un peu tard dans la saison (La Table Ronde, 2017).
"A magician of the noir." Le Figaro Littéraire
"Leroy, a great tragedian of our every day life." Service littéraire
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