Of course there are bodies, investigations and cops, but ” THE sound of our footsteps at night » the new book of Benoit Severac edited at the Book factory is much more than a simple thriller. In this nuanced novel, the author talks about couples in all their states but also about the need to create bonds, the only means to survive in an increasingly harsh society.
Benoit Severac
There is the very dark backdrop. The drama of migrants, the degraded daily life of the police and the selfishness of a certain bourgeoisie. The author plunges the hero of one of his previous books into this quagmire “Kill the son”, the commander Cerisola melancholic and intuitive cop, who has aged a little. He must investigate two cases: the suspicious suicide of a young woman who had everything to be happy and the discovery of an anonymous corpse in a vault in the Versailles cemetery. He is supported by his team from the Versailles crime squad, Nicodemoa sixty-year-old burdened with a large family, and the young taekwondo prodigy Big stones. A male ecosystem gently shaken up by the arrival of a young post-meetoo recruit, the lieutenant Krzyzaniak, which forces them to question themselves. Cerisol must also conduct another, more intimate investigation. His wife Sylvia, its “base” vanished during a disabled sports competition in Japan.
What is remarkable here, as in all of Benoit Severacit is his ultra-sensitive apprehension of human nature with its fragilities, its doubts, its cowardice sometimes. The author also has tenderness and indulgence for his characters, which makes them terribly endearing. Cerisol has major flaws and minor weaknesses like his taste for jam and corny songs. He must face the difficult daily life of police officers in France, between rotten premises and political pressures. The couple is also at the center of the novel. That of Cerisol, in full disintegration, that of his colleague Big stones who is reeling after a failed move to Israel and the adulterous one of the suspects who turns out to be rather shabby. The investigations send the team members back to their own complicated lives. And it is within the group that they talk and find comfort like a blended family that would not have the neuroses of the original.
It is our humanity that we look at in a mirror here and this is undoubtedly why we feel so close to all the protagonists to the point of, upon closing the book, not being able to completely hate the culprit.
Emmanuelle Franck
The sound of our footsteps at night • La Manufacture des livres
