Customer Reviews

The Three Evangelists

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you enjoy "Monk" on USA, "Bones" on Fox, or "Cold case" on CBS, this is the book for you: quirky but lovable characters, a weird crime that digs deep, games and winks and humor even in darkness, a realistic plot, and a very unique universe you can't bear to leave. Little bonus: it's not ghoulish or gross, it contains no sex, and it's overall quite "clean" (unlike many mysteries these days.)
Plus how often do you find unemployed history majors/grad students as sleuths?

Tired of reading mystery books with the hackneyed Inspector/Sergeant couples mooching around? Here's the cure: fresh characters, humour, plot - all wonderful! From the opening pages where, in Paris, a protagonist finds a handy pebble to kick along ahead of him on his route, these are people you like immensely.

From the opening few pages, this mystery hooks you quickly. The characters are some of the most fascinating I've ever read - in many ways, I wish the author would write more stories involving them. So original.

The mystery itself is very well set up, the story flows at a good pace, and at the end, you will be amazed that you saw all the same pieces but still didn't "get it right."

Certainly this is Vargas' best work to date. Can't wait for her next book to be translated.

First Sentence: `Pierre, something's wrong with the garden,' said Sophia.

Three young historians, Mathias, Marc and Lucian, and Marc's ex-policeman uncle, Armand, buy a ramshackle house, known as the `disgrace'. When Armand sees the three young men standing each framed by a section of a gothic window, he coins them "the three evangelists."

Their neighbor, Sophia, is an former opera singer. When she finds a tree has been planted in her garden, it causes her worry. She hires the young men to dig it up, just to reassure her that nothing is planted under it. When Sophia disappears, the young men, with the help of Armand, are determined to find out what happened.

I particularly like books which are character driven, and this certainly was. I loved the characters. Sophia, the retired opera singer worried about a tree which appears in her garden, the three evangelists, so named by Armand, an ex-flic and uncle to St. Mark (Marc the Middle Ages historian who always wears black), St. Martin (Mathias the Prehistoric historian who dislikes wearing clothes), and St. Luck (Lucian the Great Wars historian who always wears a tie). I felt Vargas really liked her characters and made me like them in turn.

Even the house, in which the four men live, almost becomes a character in the story. The story is wonderfully plotted, escalating bit-by-bit to the final climatic reveal. The reveal itself was particularly well done as it wasn't dry and unemotional, as most are, but filled with pain and disappointment.

Perhaps because she is Parisian and writing about her own city, there wasn't as strong a sense of place as I, a foreigner, might have liked. However, it is her familiarity with place that made me feel comfortable there as well.

This was one of the better translations. The dialogue worked very well, particularly the occasional banter between the principal characters.

Vargas' writing captivates me. It is filled with warmth, humor and emotion. I highly recommend it.

This is not a Commissaire Adamsberg mystery, but every bit as delicious as they are. And these characters do re-appear later in Adamsberg's world, so fans of the chief inspector won't want to miss this reading experience.

Three thirty-five-year-old historians, all down on their luck, pool their resources to rent a tumbledown house on a quiet street in Paris. Mathias specializes in prehistoric man, Marc is a medievalist and Lucien lives and breathes the Great War. Marc's uncle, a sixty-eight-year-old disgraced cop who also lives with them, dubs the young men Saint Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke.

The nicknames stick, somewhat, because these three scholars with their heads in the clouds do have something rather saintly about them. Much as they'd all like to have a steady income and a woman, scholarship distracts them. They can't seem to keep their feet on the ground.

Nonetheless, their brains function beautifully, if circuitously, and when their marvelous neighbor Sophia, a fifty-year-old ex-opera singer, goes missing, they become obsessed with finding her killer. The hunt is a dangerous one, but the three Evangelists are too unworldly to feel fear.

Fred Vargas has an amazing gift for quirky dialog. Eccentric characters abound in all her books, and her plots are so riddled with odd happenings, there's no use trying to guess who did it. The bemused but happy reader just goes along with it all, sorry that the story has to end somewhere.

The characters are colorful, very human and so fresh! I really had a great time reading it, diving into the mysterious story and the great ideas of the author. Fred Vargas's style is definitely unique and I love it. I'm going through her other books, this particular one "the three evangelists" is very good.
Recommending it!

"The Three Evangelists" is one of Fred Vargas's best mysteries--and she's world-class. Some of the reviewers have said it's time for her to write more mysteries using the Evangelist characters. She already has. There are at least two more Three Evangelist novels which (the last time I checked) hadn't been translated yet.

Mademoiselle Fred, for God's sake hire someone to do the English translation and set the Evangelists free to enchant your American readers once again. It's time!

I thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend this mystery - such a wonderfully entertaining group of sleuths. I really like the way the author mixes a bit of history into her plots and I think this is her best book yet.

A retired opera singer, Sophia, looks out of her window one day and finds .... a tree. It wasn't there the day before, and it's not a new sapling, but an actual tree. There's no note attached to the tree, or any other clues as to who could have sneaked into her garden to plant the tree. Sophia disappears and is found burned in an abandoned car a few weeks later. Vandoosler, now no longer with the police force, his nephew and 2 other friends he charmingly names after saints, strike out on their own to try and solve this mystery. They seem to find suspects at every corner they come to, all with reasonable motives to have killed Sophia.

This is not a book to start reading if you know you have to go grocery shopping, start cooking dinner in an hour's time, go to work or study, or pick someone up from the airport because you may think you can put it down and pick it up again after a few hours, but what you'll find is you'll be compelled to ignore life around you and continue turning the pages of this wonderful thriller.

Ms. Vargas is a skilled writer. her chief character, inspector adamsburg is a sullen and dark hero, in my opinion. the Three Evanglists is a fine addition to this series. it centers about the "real french" and enters us in to a seemier side of France. Ms. Vargas always weaves a lot of French lore, history and little known facts in each of her novels which keeps me enthralled until the end.
Her supporting characters are all a bit off center, but work beautifully with each other and while thier frailties are not hidden, it all seems to work.
Pick up any of these novels and you won't be dissappointed.

The only down side to these novels in my opinon is Adamsburg's relationship or non-relationship to his woman..... it's odd, but typical of many people i am sure. I just can't really see the relevance to most of the stories, save the novel about the wolf killings.