A wildfire, a corpse, and the ghosts of Yugoslavia in Jurica Pavičić's new crime novel
In «Allumettes» (Matches), the Croatian author opens on a cataclysmic forest fire threatening Split, then follows the investigation into whether it was arson.
Jurica Pavičić's new noir novel, reviewed in Le Temps, opens with a gigantic fire that devastates the mountains above Split and threatens the city itself. Breaking out in the dead of night at the end of winter, the blaze — described as having "des allures de fin du monde" — spreads all the way down to the sea, destroying several boats moored in the port. According to Le Temps, 3,500 hectares burn and the material damage is estimated at several tens of millions of euros.
The disaster turns into a criminal case when the charred body of a woman, Irena Mijač, is found trapped in her car. Once the wind drops and the worst has passed, a young policeman, Petar Fradelić, and a civil-protection inspector, Stanko Barada, go to the scene together. It falls to Barada — a specialist whose only interests outside work are classical music and his cat, built on decades of accumulated knowledge — to determine whether the fire was the result of malicious intent, reading the scorched landscape, as Le Temps puts it, like a grimoire.
As in his earlier work, the Croatian writer uses the present to interrogate the past, and the review notes the novel's unavoidable resonance after the wildfires that ravaged parts of Europe this past summer. Le Temps describes «Allumettes» as rich in nuance, subtle and finely written.
Sources
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