Marilyn's Mystery Reads

I have several confessions to make before you start reading this review:  first, I have never watched a Tour de France race; second, I do not know how to ride a bicycle; third, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The Black Jersey is written in the first person by Marc Moreau, the domestique of the Fonar cycling team.  Thanks to the extremely helpful glossary at the beginning of the novel, I now know that a domestique (French for servant) acts as an assistant to the leader of the peloton (French for platoon) and seeks to advance and protect the team’s leader.  It’s kind of like an aide de camp; this is the most French I’ve ever used at one time.

Marc himself is a gifted rider; in fact, several people believe that he should be the leader of the team rather than his best friend and “bro” Steve Panata.  But Marc is devoted to Steve, with whom he has ridden for eleven years.  The two met when Steve became the newest member of the team, relieving Marc of that doubtful distinction, and it became obvious almost immediately that they were the best of Team Fonar.

Steve has a natural rhythm and grace, and Marc, combining his French father’s familiarity with the Alps and his Colombian mother’s Andean ancestors’ genes, is gifted with an amazingly high oxygen level perfectly suited to the mountainous terrain of the race.

The Tour is twenty-three days long, broken up into twenty-one stages for a distance of two thousand miles.  The team is competing against others from all over the world, but their closest rivals are from Spain, Italy, and Poland.  The riders use every possible advantage–the type of bicycles they ride, the materials that make up their racing clothing, the food they eat that will give them the necessary calories to compete, the amount of sleep they need each night–everything is calibrated by their directeur sportif, their coach, and their soigneurs, who give massages and physical therapy as needed, to make them the best.

But this year, the riders seem to need something more–protection against someone who appears to be trying to reduce the number of riders, by murder if necessary.  The number of accidents/incidents seems too high to be coincidental, and although the riders’ concerns are at first brushed off, they are finally taken seriously when one is killed.

Because of Marc’s background in the National Gendarmerie, he is asked to help with the investigation.  Commissioner Favre tells Marc that it’s obvious that there has to be involvement from within the cycling circuit; no outsider could have gotten close enough to the participants to wreak such havoc.  Although Marc insists that he can’t imagine how he could help, Favre tells him that “until we know what’s behind all this, you and your teammates are in danger,” so Marc finally agrees.

Reading The Black Jersey is a lot safer and almost as exciting as taking part in the Tour.  It’s a breathless journey in every sense, and Marc Moreau is a smart, appealing narrator who takes the reader along for the ride.

Jorge Zepeda Pattterson is an economist, sociologist, and journalist as well as a novelist.  You can read about him on various internet sites, although most of the ones I found are in Spanish.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.