John Brooke's new mystery (the second in a series), Stifling Folds of Love (Signature Editions), tackles both the cult of celebrity and the idealization of one's love object, while adding more insights into the mind of his favourite inspector, Aliette Nouveau and of her colleague, Claude Néon.

When seven men, who are linked by their love for a schoolteacher named Pearl, die from heart attacks in “a city on the Rhine,” Claude Néon gets a chance to lead the investigation but, to Aliette Nouveau's displeasure, he becomes entangled in the web that seems to surround Pearl. Reading more about Aliette Nouveau and the weird workings of the French police force made it worthwhile for me to overcome my reluctance to believe that seven men from the same city, who knew each other well, would die from heart attacks within weeks of each other, but when the story got into the metaphysical and diabolical possibilities of photography I had to roll my eyes, even as I kept on reading. This is not your usual murder mystery but it's worth trying, as was the first book in this series (The Voice of Aliette Nouveau) which I reviewed in Geist 36.