This book was a real thought provoking gem. Captain Jacques le Garree is a French Resistance Hero and a former detective. He had gone to Algiers to serve, but now his home, accused of war crimes. While home awaiting trial is enlisted to solve the murder of a local ingenue.

That premise alone sets this book aside from the usual fare. James Brydon has written something special here. He skillfully weaves the French Resistance, the French occupation of Algiers, and a local murder into one of the most compelling reads of the year. Love, love, love, this book. ( )

For me this was one long atmospheric novel of interrogation and brutality. The parallel of the narrator's attempts to uncover Anne-Lise's murderer is set against his attempts to understand and perhaps justify his own involvement in the torture of political prisoners in Algeria as represented by the story of Amira. The book, I have to say, was well written and raised interesting considerations of colonialism, torture, and guilt but it was not the way I would have chosen to spend my reading time if not for being an early review book. ( )

I was drawn to The Moment Before Drowning because of its period and its setting: 1959 in Algiers and France during the Algerian uprising to force the French from the country. I know two men who fought the French in that war as teenagers and survived to tell about it despite the fact that one was sentenced to death and imprisoned in France before being released after the war due to the age at which he was involved in a terrorist bombing of a French cafe in Algiers.

The hero of the novel is a French captain who goes to Algeria to interrogate political prisoners without realizing that each of the prisoners would ultimately be tortured to death no matter what degree of cooperation or opposition they showed. Finally, in an attempt to make the captain a scapegoat, he is accused of murdering a teenage girl brought in for questioning, and is returned to France for a public trial.

In the week that he has to prepare himself for interrogation, the captain takes on the cold case (he is a former French policeman) involving a young French girl who was murdered just over a year earlier. The investigation of the girl's murder is generally well handled and suspenseful, but part of this plot line does not ring true. In particular, there is the case of the uncouth barbarian in charge of the local police who, as it turns out, keeps a diary of the "real investigations" he undertakes...pages and pages of detail that never make the official record. This character, portrayed as almost sub-human for page after page to this point, suddenly turns out to be quite the writer. His diary record reads as the work of an educated man, something this great oaf should not have been capable of accomplishing. And rather irritatingly, there are complete paragraphs in German and French (poetry) that the captain searches for clues in the case that are not translated into English for the reader, a frustrating experience when the author makes it clear that the captain is having his eyes opened to something having to do with the murder.That is not playing fair with the reader.

All in all, though, The Moment Before Drowning, is a decent first novel (especially the historical setting) but the author has left plenty of room for improvement in his next effort. This one is intriguing enough to put him on my radar, and I'll be looking forward to reading what he comes up with next. ( )

Interesting story of the price of torture on the torturers. Especially those who don't want to be torturers. Capt. le Garrec is put into an emotionally untenable situation and pays the price. A very French voice to this novel. ( )

In 1959, France, and much of Europe, is still recovering from WWII. Tensions remain. In the small Breton town of Sainte-Elisabeth those who have been deemed to have collaborated with or comforted the occupying Germans are still reviled. Anne-Lise Aurigny, the half-German teenage daughter of a woman marked as a comfort to Germans has been mutilated and murdered. France is now mired in its own war in Algeria. Jacques le Garrec, a former French Resistance fighter and Police Detective working with military intelligence returns under a cloud to await proceedings in the death of an Algerian Resistance member, also a young woman.

He is asked to look into the murder and does so, apparently as a way to seek some personal redemption. Le Garrec skillfully and intuitively follows leads that the local police Captain, Lafourgue, did not. Lafourgue holds the victim, and her mother, in contempt, but is surprisingly helpful to le Garrec, who holds no official police powers.

This is an atmospheric, beautifully written story that also carries the plot powerfully, lovingly. Brydon sets the tone and place as he tells the story.

“Out by the sea, which I can only perceive as a howl frustrated by the rocks, the beam of the lighthouse flashes its warning into the encroaching dark; a fragile blade of light that swings away and is lost, only to return each time and abide in the blindness of the night." ( )