For the King, by Catherine Delors

I should probably mention at this point that I’m on a vacation from work.  However, since I work for a Not for Profit, money’s tight and I can never seem to afford to get away.  But I’m okay with that, since it gives me an opportunity to have a staycation, where I get to stay home and catch up on my reading and blogging!  That’s why there’s so many posts going up these days, and it’s likely to continue for the rest of the week.

So, that brings me to my latest read, For the King, by Catherine Delors.  For the King is the story of Roch Miquel, a young police officer in Napoleon Bonaparte’s early Paris.  Roch is working to determine who it was that planned to assassinate Bonaparte on Christmas Eve 1800 with a bomb as he made his way to the opera (which actually did happen).  Roch’s investigation involves a complex web of politics, personal ambitions, and his own personal life.

I found this book to be ho-hum.  It was fast paced enough, but it just wasn’t engaging.  Roch, as a main character, had some serious flaws that were hard to overlook.  Worst of all, I didn’t find him to be very well developed to buy into his ending.  The secondary characters had no development at all – we were just asked to accept them as they were without understanding really where the came from.  Admittedly, Delors was working largely from a cast of real people, but still…. a little more insight into her characters would have been appreciated.

In the author’s historical note, Delors claims that the investigation into the assassination attempt was the first modern police investigation.  I have read this claim about different cases so often that I now doubt it every time I do see it.  If that was the case, why didn’t Delors play on that theme more in the work?  It seemed like Roch’s actions were well understood and accepted, and his superiors didn’t questioned him – so had he always worked like that?  If so, than all his previous cases would have been done with modern techniques.  Maybe Delors made this claim to justify why her work reads like a script for one of the CSI television shows; I wouldn’t have been surprised if, at any point, we were informed that Roch slowly removed his sunglasses while making a pithy witticism about one of the victims…  I’ll admit this isn’t my historical area of expertise, but it seems to me that there were a lot of historical anachronisms that Delors included into her investigation.

So, final verdict?  Feel free to skip this one.  It’s a quick read, but it’s not really worth the time and effort.