With this 21st title in her series around investigator Maud Graham, Chrystine Brouillet continues to examine the many social problems resulting from the pandemic and their devastating consequences.
The month of the dead is a tightly tied web woven around several cases that give the police department of Quebec City a hard time, but also of Longueuil, where Maud Graham’s adopted son, Maxime, became a patrolman and begins to occupy a special place in the series.
From one city to another, mother and son echo each other, witnesses of crimes and human tragedies that make them doubt their slightest gestures and actions. “[Maud Graham] never knew what attitude to take when a hand reached out to her. More and more often. Everything was worse since the pandemic,” writes Chrystine Brouillet.
While his novel One Less, published last year, was darkly inspired by the alarming number of femicides in Quebec at the start of the pandemic, The Month of the Dead addresses the backdrop of growing poverty and the blatant increase in consumption of drugs that subsequently hit the province. The author takes us into the streets of the Montreal suburbs, into a shelter in Quebec and into a squat where a young artist who has fled his mother’s house is trying to survive; also in the sumptuous home of a rich entrepreneur who is thinking of going into politics, but who does not accept the homosexuality of his son – the central crux of the plot.
For her part, Maud Graham is looking for a man who allegedly duped a large number of vulnerable women, met online, and from whom he stole large sums of money. The different cases intertwine and come together to end up composing a novel which is aptly titled since there will be far too many deaths in this dark month of November 2022.
Through her characters, Chrystine Brouillet expresses more than ever her deep dismay at the crumbling of the social fabric, while demonstrating her commitment to denouncing reprehensible behavior such as homophobia – something she ensures she continues to do “as long as it will be necessary” in his note at the end of the work. The Month of the Dead is not the kind of thriller you read to escape, because you are confronted with all the dark news that has been making headlines more and more for some time. It is a deeply contemporary detective novel that boldly makes us think about the excesses of our society.
