La part du mort

Yasmina Khadra. La part du mort. Paris. Julliard. 2004. 414 pages. euro21. ISBN 2-260-01644-8

IN La part du mort, Yasmina Khadra resurrects Commissioner Llob for another thrilling investigation. Even though Llob was killed off at the end of L'Automne des chimières (1998), in La part du mort, Khadra turns the clock back to just before the October 1988 riots that launched Algeria's ill-fated experiment with democracy. In terms of Khadra's detective series, the novel is set between Le dingue au bistouri (1990) and Moritori (1997).

Khadra typically uses his police fiction to undertake a probing investigation into contemporary Algerian society. But in this latest polar, Khadra-unlike other Algerian writers-boldly traces the genealogy of the horrific violence of the 1990s to the reprisals...