The Awkward Squad
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Suspended from her job as a promising police officer for firing "one bullet too many", Anne Capestan is expecting the worst when she is summoned to H.Q. to learn her fate. Instead, she is surprised to be told that she is to head up a new police squad, working on solving old cold cases.
Though relieved to still have a job, Capestan is not overjoyed by the prospect of her new role. Even less so when she meets her new team: a crowd of misfits, troublemakers and problem cases, none of whom are fit for purpose and yet none of whom can be fired.
But from this inauspicious start, investigating the cold cases throws up a number a number of strange mysteries for Capestan and her team: was the old lady murdered seven years ago really just the victim of a botched robbery? Who was behind the dead sailor discovered in the Seine with three gunshot wounds? And why does there seem to be a curious link with a ferry that was shipwrecked off the Florida coast many years previously?
Translated from the French by Sam Gordon
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French author H naff's fun first novel offers a wry look at Parisian policing and the infinite twists of the bureaucracy of French law enforcement. Commissaire Anne Capestan, her career on tenterhooks for her role in the shooting of a suspect, takes charge of a cold-case squad populated by departmental castoffs who can't be fired but refuse to quit. Starting with a sense of wounded pragmatism that gives way to an increasingly focused joy of the hunt, Capestan marshals a team consisting of a drunk, a cop whose partners keep getting injured, a policewoman who moonlights as a TV writer, and her former internal affairs nemesis into an idiosyncratic, surprisingly effective crime-fighting unit. The group connects the dots on a decade-old fatal burglary, an unsolved shooting of a sailor, and a long-ago shipwreck while navigating a labyrinth created by the Byzantine legal system and some shrewdly placed obstacles from an opponent who knows when the Awkward Squad is getting close. Readers will hope a sequel is in the works.
