Code 93: The Suburbs

16 hrs. 14 min.

Language Russian

Author Olivier Norek

Narrator Egor Partin

Everyday life of the criminal police in the French department of 93 (Seine-Saint-Denis) is half a front-line drama, half a vicious absurdist spectacle. Captain Victor Cost, who leads one of the investigative teams, has long learned to endure it all with almost inhuman calm—and with inevitable irony. Right during an autopsy, the corpse “comes back to life” on the pathologist’s table. A burned body’s chest suddenly rings with a telephone. An unknown person sends Cost strange letters about crimes that no one—and never has anyone—has ever been assigned to investigate. On the streets, a twelve-year-old child methodically eliminates local “influential” figures. In City Hall, a scheme of the century is brewing. The police have more than enough work—and it seems that ironic resilience is the only thing that keeps you from going mad in a department where crime is not just high, but frighteningly inventive, and where no one has yet devised a universal solution to this problem.

Olivier Norek served in the police of Seine-Saint-Denis for seventeen years—so his detective thrillers sound especially convincing. He knows police reality from the inside, draws generously on authentic stories he encountered in the line of duty, and knows how to twist the plot so that his novels invite comparisons to books by Jo Nesbø and Jean-Christophe Grangé. Victor Cost and his team are the imperfect ideal we dream of seeing in people in uniform when we turn to them for help; but the world in which they have to work is all too familiar and recognizable. The Paris suburbs are seething—and this is only the beginning. In this volume, the first two novels of the Victor Cost series are collected, a phenomenon that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in France and beyond and brought the author fame and prestigious awards. The translation of «Code 93» is published in a new edition; «Districts» is being published in Russian for the first time. A sequel follows.

1. Code 93 (narrated by Sergey Krasnov) 1. Code 93: The Suburbs

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