Published by Éditions Albin Michel, 1982, 442 pages. Published in English as The Crimson Rivers, Harvill Press, 1999, 328 pages. Translated from French by Ian Monk.

A mutilated body, suspended in a crevice, has been found in the French town of Guernon, a town surrounded by mountains. Commissaire Pierre Niémans is sent from Paris to help in the investigation.

The body in the crevice is that of Rémy Caillois, the librarian at the University of Guernon. The university is not a standard institution: it is a place for the highly gifted. The faculty live on campus, and their children grow up together. They often marry each other, and their children also end up at the university. 

From the signs on Rémy’s corpse, it is clear that he has been tortured. His eyes have been removed and replaced with water. When Niémans has the water analyzed, the pollutants found in it show that it is water from several decades ago, water that can only have come from deep in the ice.

With the help of Fanny Ferreira, a professor at the university and an expert mountaineer, Niémans descends to the depth of the ice to see where the murderer had obtained the water. There he discovers another body, also mutilated, frozen into the ice. Is the murderer leaving clues?

The second body is that of Philippe Sertys, a nurse at the local hospital. What connects these two men? And what does the term “rivières pourpres” (crimson rivers), a term found in Sertys’s hidden lab, refer to? Unlike his colleagues, Niémans does not think it is a serial killer randomly targeting people. This is a well-thought-out campaign, which feels like vengeance.

Are there clues in Rémy’s thesis about the original Olympians and the sacred rites surrounding the first Olympic games? His apartment is full of photographs of Olympic champions—he seems to have been obsessed by those who were both physically and intellectually gifted.

In the meantime, in the nearby town of Sarzac, lieutenant Karim Abdouf, a young dreadlocked cop, is looking into the desecration of a child’s tomb. The child, Jude Itero, is a mystery. Karim cannot find any record of him. Jude was in a school in Sarzac for two years, but his files are missing, and there is not a single photograph—all the class photos of the two years that he was there have disappeared.

Karim finds out that Jude was killed in a car accident, an accident that his mother survived. But there is no trace of her either. His investigation eventually leads him to Philippe Sertys. That in turn leads him to Niémans, and the men realize that the two investigations are linked.

Slowly, everything starts to fall into place. The mutilated bodies, the desecration of the tomb, the disappearance of Jude, and the crimson rivers, all lead to the shocking truth hidden in the university’s depths.

The convoluted plot is typical of Jean-Christophe Grangé’s books (and I cannot resist a convoluted plot!). Grangé does not let up the pace, and the book is hard to put down. I enjoyed the way he brings the two seemingly unrelated investigations together. He does this quite far into the book, so you follow them separately without realizing how they are linked.

Karim, as an Arab cop with dreadlocks, is an interesting choice: it makes him an outsider even though he is part of the establishment, and he brings another perspective to the story. He was delinquent as a teenager, a car thief lucky to have never been caught. This gives him a familiarity with the world of crime. Niémans and Karim get on well—they are both unorthodox and extremely bright.

The book is atmospheric and quite dark. The descriptions are vivid, and you can feel the cold and the wind, and the strangeness of the university. 

Les Rivières pourpres was made into a film by Mathieu Kassovitz in 2000. Like Stanley Kubrik’s The Shining, the film is more a take on the book than a faithful rendition (Grangé was part of this project). The film sticks to the main plot but has extensive alterations, including changing Karim Abdouf to (a non-dreadlocked) Max Kerkérian, which I personally think is a pity.

The book isn’t for the squeamish—the descriptions of the corpses are pretty graphic and there is a fair amount of violence. But for those who can take it, it is thoroughly enjoyable, especially if you want something complicated and engaging.