Original and amusing, it's French noir with a sly smile (Karen Robinson The Times Crime Club).
After their successfully exposing corruption by solving three cold cases at the very highest level of the Paris police force, Anne Capestan’s squad of misfits and no-hopers are at the peak of their career and should be celebrating. However, now despised by their colleagues at 36 quai des Orfèvres and worried for their future, the Awkward Squad have never felt so depressed.
Capestan does her best to motivate her troops, but even she cannot maintain a cheerful façade. One day, she is handed a complicated and deeply personal case as she has to investigate the murder of Commissaire Serge Rufus, the father of her ex-husband. Worse, it soon appears that his murder is linked to two other victims, both of whom were warned by the killer before they struck...
Translated to English by Sam Gordon.
Sophie Hénaff is a journalist, author and former Lyonnaise bar owner. She began her journalism career as a critic at Lyon Poche, before moving to Paris to write for Cosmopolitan, where she established her own humorous column, “La Cosmolite”. The Awkward Squad was first published as Poulets grillés in 2015, and is her first novel.
Sam Gordon is a London-based freelance translator working from French and Spanish into English. After completing his undergraduate studies in French and Spanish at the University of Bristol, he went on to take his MA in Translation at the same institution, where he now tutors part-time. He has translated work by writers as varied as Pierre Reverdy, Marcel Schwob, Timothée de Fombelle, Nicolás di Candia and Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, with translations appearing in The White Review, Asymptote and Palabras Errantes. Other non-literary translation work focuses on the fields of advertising, marketing, tourism and food/wine, though occasionally veers into areas such as secure logistics and industrial trailers. Arab Jazz by Karim Miské (MacLehose Press, 2014) is his first novel-length translation.
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