Reflex, the second novel by Maud Mayeras, takes you to dark and haunted territories where a scorching heat sticks to the characters’ skin. A hard-hitting second novel filled with darkness that Nice Premium has read for you.
Iris is a photographer for the police, more specifically for the Judicial Identity department. She captures crime scenes, photographing them from all angles, the traces of blood, the mutilated bodies, and pain on film, to assist the police in their search for the truth, in finding the guilty party, but mostly to forget. The cadavers she encounters through the lens of her reflex camera help her forget that of her son, brutally murdered 11 years ago.
With a new call from her boss, she finds herself in her hometown, the town of her childhood, her crazy mother, her anxieties, and most importantly, the sites of past dramas. This town where a serial killer skins victims with a particular technique reminiscent of someone else…
This town where, for Iris, everything will unfold.
To forget his laugh, I tried to understand those who sought to erase it. To forget his face, I looked for others more damaged. To forget the softness of his skin, I surrounded myself with cold bodies. And to forget his smell, I chose the stench of death.
Let’s start with the end: once Reflex is finished, the reader will inevitably be knocked out, down for the count, like after a harsh boxing match.
It all begins 360 pages earlier with the phone call that brings Iris back to her hometown. Iris, single, professional to the fingertips, in conflict with a tyrannical mother who now resides in an asylum, will brutally dive back into a painful period of her life. The murder of a child reminds her of what happened to her own, to Swan, a case that was never resolved. It’s an opportunity for her to discover the truth, a truth far beyond what she imagined.
Parallel to this intrigue, Maud Mayeras takes us back in time to 1919, when Julie Carville, after being savagely raped, is rejected by her family and the entire village. She ends up in a convent, run with an iron fist by nuns who are more stern than tender. Her child, Lucie, is born there.
Reflex is divided into eight parts, from 4021 days to 4242 days, with Iris’s chapters, many of which start with “I don’t like…” and are written in the first person; and the – Silence – chapters, which describe, in the third person, the life of Julie and then her daughter’s.
To this original construction is added Maud Mayeras’s quality of writing. Her absolutely perfect pen from beginning to end makes us fully enter the life and memory of Iris. We are with her, we follow her like a shadow. It’s poetic, delicate despite the harshness and suffering that emanates from the whole book. A brutal dive into the human soul where Mayeras creates profound and moving, dark, very dark characters. A mastery of character psychology like rarely seen, reaching the reader, filled with empathy, to the deepest level.
Iris is a well-crafted character, a suffering mother and daughter, stuttering, who drives a Superduke, a big motorcycle from KTM, with a profession rarely explored in crime novels. She is the central figure around which secondary characters revolve: Diane, her mother, Jackie Philco, the large neighbor, Henry Witkin, Charles, Lucie…
An intense rhythm, a controlled writing style, the oppressive and muggy heat adds even more to the ambient tension created by Maud Mayeras. Reflex, with a complex, perverse plot, a suspense that builds crescendo, and an undetectable ending, is much more, much more than a thriller.
