The Statement

The sun-drenched landscape of the south of France is the setting of this chilling tale of crime, pursuit, and punishment. Here, almost fifty years before, Pierre Brossard, empowered by the World War II Vichy government, massacred fourteen Jews in the town of Dombey. Since the Allied victory he has been a man on the run, condemned in absentia to death, but protected by friends in the highest offices of the French government and the Church. He has become an artist of escape, moving like a fox through the underground maze of monasteries and safe houses, able to turn the tables on those who would deliver a death sentence on him, and to secure fresh sanctuary from those whose ties with him remain as strong and sacred as they are secret. Now, however, time is running out. The chess match against capture that Pierre Brossard has played so skillfully and so long has reached its endgame. His friends are aging, and their fervor is fading. New forces in the government and the Church are unearthing buried war guilts and demanding a reckoning. And even as those who once saved Brossard prepare to set him up as a sacrifice, a vigilante organization of Holocaust avengers sends out their dedicated assassins to take for themselves what French justice has failed to deliver. What Brian Moore has achieved is an extraordinary superimposition of terror and violence upon the picture-postcard image of the cities and towns, abbeys and churches of French Provence and the Riviera, as he tightens the screws of suspense shock by shock. In Brossard, he has succeeded in giving abysmal evil an indelibly human face. And in the figures of both Brossard's protectors and pursuers, he illumines the double-faced nature of loyalty and vengeance, and the no-man's-land that lies between murder and execution.


Genre: Mystery