FLIGHT OF THE STORKS

French author Grangé makes his US debut with a dismal thriller about a dreary hero who tracks the flight of outlaw storks.

Well, all right, it’s not the storks’ fault they’re criminals. Bad guys have concealed stolen diamonds in those metal leg bands ornithologists use to invade birds’ privacy. Louis Antioch, a young academic at loose ends, takes almost no time figuring out that part of Grangé’s tiresome puzzle. Hired by famed stork-watcher Max Böhm, Louis travels from Paris to his employer’s Swiss chalet but arrives just a bit late—that is, a day or so after Böhm's mysterious demise. Since Louis doesn't quite know what he was hired to do, and since he is as bored a young Frenchman as ever could be, he takes it upon himself to fashion his own job, following the storks on their flight from northern Europe to Central Africa. During this pilgrimage into the land of noir, he encounters an unstinting variety of unpleasant people engaging in all kinds of lowlife behavior. Diamond smuggling, for instance, is soon eclipsed by a lively traffic in human hearts. No, that’s not a metaphor: someone has been perpetrating gruesome homicides for the sake of those organs, and Louis, thirsting for adventure, is determined to find out who and why. He also wants to know who and what are behind an ostensibly humanitarian organization called One World. Persistence proves productive, but then Louis wishes it had been less so by the close, he’s left with home truths that make his previous innocence seem a blessed state.

The misogynistic Louis is almost as unappealing as the other denizens of Grangé’s dark, dismaying world, where few readers will find anyone to root for.