Spectacle

It’s Paris, 1887, and teenaged Nathalie is – mostly - enjoying her job as a journalism intern.  Nathalie’s task is to write a daily fatalities report for her newspaper, which necessitates regular visits to the city morgue.  Though she sometimes finds the display of corpses quite gruesome,  Nathalie is happy to accept the challenge of introducing human interest into the cold facts of death.   But one day, when viewing the body of a murder victim, Nathalie has a frightening vision of the woman’s last moments as she is hacked to death.  As a result, the young journalist is drawn more deeply into her stories than she’d ever expected.

 

The author does a fine job of recreating the physical and cultural world of Paris near the end of the 19th century.  Sensory details abound, from the texture of grave dirt in the Paris catacombs to the smell of cherry preserves being made.  The book’s plotting is equally intricate.  There’s a strong sub-plot involving a scientist who, in the book’s recent past, attempted to endow humans with supernormal abilities.  How Nathalie is involved in this matter is but one example of the many twists and turns this historical thriller has to offer.