Blurb
Paris. 1930.
Salazar is an English detective haunted by his experiences of the Great War, who wiles away the days playing chess and taking on as little work as possible. When the alluring Marie Poncelet hires him to find a missing man he quickly realises it's a case he wishes he'd refused.
Finding a missing man isn't anything like finding a man who doesn't want to be found and Gustave Marty has covered his tracks with a smokescreen that will push Salazar beyond the limits of physical endurance and to the edge of insanity.
As he's drawn deeper into the shadowy underbelly of the City of Light, Salazar's closed, structured world is blown apart by the arrival of a friend from his pre-war youth, the beautiful Megan Fitzwilliam, whose tenderness and love of life is a stark contrast to the brutal violence that lies within him.
When that violence threatens to engulf them both, Salazar must seek redemption or lose the very thing that has finally made his life worth living.
Review
Salazar is an Englishman in Paris. A private detective of independent means, a man who drips with ennui. He is not bored of his profession, he is bored of life. One of the millions of emotionally ravaged remnants of the First World War, Salazar has turned private eye merely to embue the days with some sort of meaning. He is a morally complex individual, able to exist comfortably in both sides of 1930's Paris - the decadence and the squallor.
When Marie Poncelet walks into his office and gives him the name of a man she wishes found, it is not even a crime to solve - merely a person to locate. A simple endeavour. Surely. But as Salazar peels back the layers of a man called Gustave Marty, Salazar's own demons surface - as they surely must.
A Citizen of Nowhere is a complex, delicious novel - a riveting story in a sublimely drawn setting, rife with sparkling dialogue. A novel that kept me hooked right through to the grizzly, horrifying climax where we discover the true nature of the man called Gustav Marty.
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