Night, Bernard Minier
"Dark, deep and cerebral, but the danger will almost stop your heart"— Sunday Times Crime Club
The latest novel in Bernard Minier's series follows inspector Kirsten Nigaard as she teams up with Toulouse policeman Martin Servaz to hunt down Julian Hirtmann, the elusive killer the police has been chasing for years. Set on the shores of the North Sea, this thriller unfolds as a series of mysterious photographs found in a missing man's cabin reveal his identity as Hirtmann, leading Nigaard straight to the office of Servaz, who appears in several of his photos.
The plot thickens as they discover another photo, of a child, accompanied with the name "Gustav", and both detectives have to embark on a quest to defeat their longstanding enemy.
Night marks the comeback of Minier's emblematic characters, Martin Servaz, the debonnaire, learned cop, and most importantly his nemesis Hirtmann, the former prosecutor turned evil, for their first confrontation since Iced.
"A super-accelerated version of a Hitchcock thriller, with thrills and shocks on nearly every page . . . Minier reels out lurid, quick and dirty prose, dirty enough to blacken the fingers as we read" - Spectator
Night is published by Hodder and Stoughton.
Bernard Minier grew up in south-west France and spent a happy childhood in the foothills of the Pyrenees before going to university in Toulouse, the town where Servaz is a policeman. He had a career as a customs official before publishing his first novel, The Frozen Dead, in 2011, which has since been translated into a dozen languages and has earned critical acclaim as well as several literary prizes in France. All three novels in the Servaz series, The Frozen Dead (adapted into an original Netflix series), A Song For Drowned Souls and Don't Turn Out the Lights have been bestsellers in France. Minier has twice won the prestigious Prix Polar at the Cognac Crime Festival.