BIBLIOGRAPHY
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The Flight of the Stork (Original Title: Le Vol des Cigognes)
Every year the storks set off on their miraculous 12,000-mile migration from Northern Europe to Central Africa. Then one year, inexplicably, they do not return.
At the invitation of the wealthy Swiss ornithologist Max Boehm, a young French academic, Louis Antioch, agrees to undertake a journey tracing the flight of the storks in an attempt to solve the mystery of the birds' disappearance. Before Antioch can set off on his trip, however, Boehm dies of a heart attack under suspicious circumstances, or so the police believe.
This is the background to Jean-Christophe Grangé's pulsating and darkly mysterious thriller. Its plot moves at a dramatic pace, from a Bulgarian Gypsy encampment to Israeli kibbutzim and to Calcutta from the green jungles of Central Africa. As the mystery deepens, it becomes clear that it is not only the stork that is an endangered species.
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Blood
Red Rivers (Les Rivières Pourpres)
 
Wedged in an isolated crevice on a rock face outside a university town in the French Alps, a mutilated corpse, naked and in the foetal position, has been discovered. Pierre Niemans, the ex-golden boy of the commando squad, a brilliant detective but prone to uncontrollable fits of temper, is sent from Paris to investigate." "Meanwhile, in a small town in rural France, another maverick policeman, Karim Abdouf, once a poor Arab boy from the back-streets of Nanterre, is trying to find out why the tomb of a child in the local cemetery should have been desecrated." "When another body is found, high up in a glacier, the paths of these two highly unconventional policemen are uncannily joined. Are they confronted by the operations of a satanic sect, or by a gang of crazed killers? Or do the hints of genetic manipulation point to an even more macabre form of vengeance?.
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The Stone Council (Le Concile De Pierre)
As a child, Diane Thiberge had been the victim of an assault. Now aged 30, an ethnologist specializing in the study of predatory animals, and a woman adept in the martial arts, she believes she has at last found a meaning and purpose to her life when she decides to adopt a five-year-old Thai boy, Liu-San, whom she christens Lucien." On her return to France, however, Lucien is involved in an accident and is declared to be brain-dead. A series of murders make Diane realize that her son is no ordinary child, but someone who, through no fault of his own, has fallen prey to sinister paranormal forces. In a denouement that takes her from Paris and Germany to the remote mountain fastnesses of Mongolia, she resolves to fight for her son's survival.
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Born
in Paris, Jean-Christophe Grangé must be considered to be one
of the most exiting authors of the new French Polar (the French
name for crime/detective fiction) scene. Until he started writing
fiction Grangé wrote for quite a considerable amount of magazines
all over the world before becoming an independent international
reporter and setting up his own news agency. Grangé's first book,
The flight of the storks (1994),
was almost ignored but not his second: Blood-red
rivers (1998). Despite coming on the market very quietly,
it became an international best seller and later a movie as well
as triggering sales for his first book. Grangé's third effort
The Stone Council has recently been
translated into English. 