Angélique

Description

“Angélique” is the title of the latest novel by French author Guillaume Musso (1974), whose Arabic translation, published by Dar Noufal and translated by Samar Maalouf, was not mistaken in describing him as the most widely read author of the last ten years. The novel is, in a sense, a detective story. It is also an adventure and action novel. A detective story, but while we are accustomed to such novels as a search for the killer in a crime, which often takes center stage, “Angélique” is not.

We learn from the outset that Stella Tbrenko, a ballerina, has died, and her daughter Louise suspects she was murdered. She confides her suspicions to a retired detective, Mathias Taiver, whom she visits in the hospital where she was receiving treatment, claiming she has come to play for him as part of a music therapy program. It doesn’t take long to discover that Louise’s suspicions are well-founded. Her mother wasn’t the only one to die this way; her neighbor, the painter Marco Sabatini, also met a similar fate. The midwife was a nurse who had replaced another who didn’t have enough time to care for the patient for the entire month. Marco was a painter who painted only himself with eyes without pupils, in a kind of self-portrait imagining himself dead and alive. He called his paintings on this subject “The Army of the Dead.”

The nurse, who had found a way to access Marco’s apartment, stole his paintings and sold them. She then decided to deceive his wealthy family, owners of a successful company in Venice, by claiming to be his girlfriend and pregnant with his child. But such a claim would be invalid if Marco were still alive. So, being an experienced nurse, she injected him with a lethal substance. All that remained was for her to kill the dancer, whom she feared would expose her to the Sabatini family. She went up to the dancer’s balcony and pushed her to her death.