The Hanged Man of Conakry
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3.7 • 9 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Something has got Aurel Timescu’s attention: an unsolved and apparently unsolvable crime. A vacationer has been found hanged. And it is a crime that will go unpunished if Aurel isn’t ready for the fight of his life.
Aurel Timescu’s French is tinged with a Romanian accent, he has the disheveled air of a character from between the wars, and a past as a performer in piano bars. Nobody can quite understand how he got to be Consul. Now, he’s taken a position in French Guinea—what a place for a man who says he can’t stand the heat! He passes his time perspiring, drinking gallons of Tokay, and composing librettos.
Until, that is, a vacationer is found hanging from the mast of a sailboat. How did he end up dead, on a mast, on Aurel Timescu’s watch? Had his personal life been hanging by a thread? Was he hanging around waiting for love to be reciprocated? Had he been hanging out with the wrong crowd? Had he hung his hat on the peg of some quixotic dream?
Prize-winning and best-selling author, and a former diplomat, Jean-Christophe Rufin brings Aurel to vivid life in this entertaining and gripping story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, this gem of a diplomatic thriller from Prix Goncourt winner Rufin (The Red Collar) opens with a crowd of locals gazing at the body of a man hanging by one foot from the mast of a sailboat moored in a decrepit marina. The victim, a vacationing Frenchman who's been in the marina for months, also has a large wound in his chest. How he ended up hanging dead from a mast presents a puzzle that Aurel Timescu, a minor French embassy official with a lifelong passion for investigating crime, is determined to solve. Scorned by most of his French associates, Aurel, a small man of indeterminate middle age with an odd dress sense, grew up in Communist Romania, where he became accustomed to the "permanent union of respectability and crime." Yet this outwardly ridiculous character possesses cunning and other hidden strengths based on such experiences as time spent in Ceausescu's jails, where he was tortured, that make him a good detective. Rufin offers razor-sharp insights into cultural clashes in the former French colony as economical prose drives the intricate plot to a powerful ending. Readers will be reminded of Georges Simenon, only better.
