An extension of “Darwyne”, which won the Grand Prix for detective literature in 2023, “Wallace” takes us on the trail of Méryane, a teenager who disappeared between attractive noises and threatening wildlife.
Find on this page all the latest crime fiction news and books that caught the eye of Libé. And subscribe to the Libé Polar newsletter by clicking here.
For Mathurine, the Amazon rainforest is a wonder. She feels at home in the undergrowth, the river, in the rain which falls suddenly, shaking all her bearings. For Wallace, his 9-year-old son, the jungle is worrying, it seems to be everywhere, the “surround as if preparing to swallow it in one go”. And then, these stories of frightening, legendary animals, like the Mapinguari with its claws and its monkey head or the Maskilili and its upside-down feet, do not reassure him. Mathurine works for child protection and the disappearance of a teenager named Méryane does not escape her mind. The young girl ran away and, like so many others, disappeared. His father, a man more clumsy than violent, doesn’t get over it either. A hunter, he walks through the forest and thinks he sees a silhouette, feels a strange presence that reminds Mathurine of so many things, so many memories that she would like to erase.
In Colin Niel’s previous volume, Darwyne (Grand Prize for detective literature 2023, just published by Livre de Pocket) set ten years earlier, we were already in Guyana with a 10-year-old kid with a strange physique, his abusive mother, and Mathurine who had become attached to the ‘child. Colin Niel takes his readers back into this universe where legend and reality merge. Mathurine adores her son but the forest obsesses her and forces her to move forward until she gets lost, forgetting her life, even erasing the memory of her little boy waiting for her. She is as if bewitched.
For each character in this fascinating novel, you will have to cross these chimerical places, this threatening fauna, sometimes attractive, sometimes diabolical and this is where Colin Niel is at his best. He weaves a story of filiation between a mother and her son, a father and his daughter, in an almost parallel world, full of animal cries, unfolding arches, whirring cicadas, lianas, hissing. But the novelist does not just describe the fauna, flora and magic, he takes us with him, moves us by accompanying these lost children and these parents who are not always up to their family mission. The Amazon becomes mythological when fiction traces its route. We come away overwhelmed, the emotion is so palpable. “I love you with a love as big as all the Amazon”, repeat Mathurine and Wallace, finally sweeping away all their ghosts and ours.
