Jacquot and the Fifteen [Import] [Hardcover]

Martin O'Brien (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Headline Review (July 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0755344596
• ISBN-13: 978-0755344598
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

More About the Author

Martin O'Brien was born in Torbay, South Devon, in 1951. The son of a teacher and naval officer he was educated at the Oratory School in Berkshire and at Hertford College, Oxford. He was travel editor at British Vogue in the 1970s and has written lifestyle and travel features for a wide range of international publications. He lives in the Cotswolds with his wife and two daughters, and writes his Jacquot novels in a garden shed.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars So-so faux-French detective in faux-French mystery in faux-French countryside, January 7, 2009

By 

L. E. Cantrell (Vancouver, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jacquot and the Fifteen (Paperback)

This is the latest in a series of mysteries featuring the pony-tailed Chief Inspector Daniel Jacquot. Jacquot is the creation of Martin O'Brien, who worked for some years as a travel writer for English publications. Chief Inspector Jacquot is a Frenchman, a successful unraveler of murder mysteries who, for some reason no doubt explained in an earlier novel, has departed his former hunting grounds and taken up re-assignment in a new city in the South of France.

This novel essentially limits itself to telling us two significant things about Jacquot. The first of them is that almost two decades earlier, he had warmed the bench for the French National Rugby Team and, in his one and only time on the field before a career-ending injury, had somehow managed to score a winning goal against the English National Team. For some utterly incomprehensible reason, he and the people around him appear to consider this some sort of big deal, against which all other accomplishments are insignificant. The other thing we learn about Jacquot is that his relationships with past girlfriends--and very likely the current one--tend toward instability. (Maybe the man cannot progress emotionally beyond that one goal, alors, who can say?)

Author O'Brien writes exactly as one would expect of a man who has made his living writing travel articles for British magazines. His Jacquot is a typically repressed literary English-type, who wears a pony-tailed hair-do for no particular reason, and who lives and works in pre-Euro France. The particular France in which he lives is, of course, the English tourist's notion of France. And, of course, the French people he encounters (including himself) are typically English national types who on rare occasions speak in a kind of schoolboy French.

Try as I could, I could find nothing uniquely French in this book beyond a few tags of speech, the occasional prop at hand, and the scenery in the distant background. With a few hours work, the setting of the book could easily be shifted to Liverpool in England--or, for that matter to Cincinnati or Canberra.

This un-Frenchness certainly extends to Jacquot's work, in which not even lip service--such as is to be found in the Maigret novels, for example--is paid toward the French police and judicial systems. Jacquot is a Chief Inspector who appears to have no administrative or hierarchical duties. He has just one subordinate. He has just one visible superior, who in the single chapter in which he appears seems inclined to exert no particular control over him, despite the fact that Jacquot has been raising hackles in other jurisdictions. Jacquot, it need hardly be said, has no case load, so he is free to wander over half of France on a case which, through most of the book, exists only in his mind.

The plot of the book--which some dolt quoted on the blurbs attached to the English paperback version actually had the nerve to compare with Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None"--involves a re-union of that long-ago French National Rugby team. Jacquot and his latest girlfriend depart from their own district to attend. In the course of the night, one of the players dies in what Jacquot regards as questionable circumstances, despite assurances from the local flics in charge of the investigation that it was an obvious case of suicide. In short order, Jacquot determines that far too many of the original fifteen have died recently and in far too short a span of time. The deaths have been scattered in various police jurisdictions and attributed to various and usually, but not always to unsuspicious causes. Jacquot rapidly concludes that all the deaths are murders and that they are all related. He spends the greater part of the book attempting to convince others of this conclusion, and to prevent other deaths, of course. Without spectacular success, I might add.

(On this point, I draw your attention to the Amazon UK reviewer who pointed out that if this team were really such a big deal in French consciousness, these deaths would surely be blazing across the front pages of tabloids across the breadth of France.)

The bulk of the book has Jacquot doing a lot of traveling and asking a lot of questions, all without much in the way of forward progress. Suddenly, though, at a point where the remaining pages have dwindled to precious few, and with a simple changing of gears [those who actually read this book will recognize the foregoing pun], Jacquot instantly knows the what, the who and the why of the crimes. Reasonably discerning readers will probably have worked out most of this revelation about a hundred pages earlier, but for Jacquot, it all seems just a bit too much of a flash. Frankly, I felt that the book stopped, rather than ended. (Again, I draw attention to the Amazon UK reviewer who remarked on the typically weak endings in this series.) And after all the page turning, the justification for the crimes seems more than a little weak. (A final nod to the acute Amazon UK reviewer.)

This book isn't bad. It's mildly entertaining in a sort of by-the-numbers way. It even appears to have enthusiastic fans in Britain. But I can't really say that it is good. This is the kind of book that is just worth reading when there is nothing else on hand.

Three so-so stars.

LEC/Am/1-09