Grandville Force Majeure
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
In the middle of a gang war, wanted for murder, truly alone and outside the law, Detective Inspector LeBrock is on the run from both the police and gangster assassins, the victim of a diabolical scheme to annihilate himself and everyone he holds dear, engineered by mastermind crime lord Tiberius Koenig, one of the most despicable villains in the history of detective fiction.
A fiendishly ingenious story of love, tenacity, treachery and tragedy, this fifth, final and longest stand-alone volume of the Eisner and Hugo Award-nominated Grandville series by master storyteller and graphic novel pioneer Bryan Talbot is a veritable rollercoaster of a detective thriller, featuring Grandville’s trademark high-octane excitement, humour and deduction on a Holmesian scale as we finally meet LeBrock’s mentor, Stamford Hawksmoor, and discover LeBrock’s untold backstory. Fan-favourite characters Detective Sergeant Roderick Ratzi and LeBrock’s vivacious fiancée, Parisian prostitute Billie are joined by a new badger in town! Enter Tasso, an Italian badger who’s bigger, meaner and uglier than LeBrock – but is he a force for good or evil? A battle royale ensues as LeBrock fights against truly outrageous odds. How can he possibly survive?
Prepare to be royally badgered!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lively final installment in Talbot's Grandville series is set in an alternate 19th century in which England is under French rule, steampunk technology proliferates, and, oh yes, everyone is an anthropomorphic animal. Grandville is named after a classical French caricaturist but is perhaps more directly influenced by the French/Spanish Blacksad series. In this volume, hero Archie LeBrock, a police detective with the deduction skills of Sherlock Holmes and the tenacity of a badger (which he is), takes on an international reptile crime organization that puts his family in jeopardy. The convoluted story takes a while to pick up steam, but the action-packed climax resolves mystery after mystery with panache. Half the pleasure of the series is in Talbot's carefully drawn menagerie of animal characters, from horned toads to baboons to honey badgers, and in beastly gags like a pair of gangster crayfish called the Cray Brothers and, inevitably, a cameo by slimy piscine pulp writer Byron Turbot. It's a rousing finish to a series that displays Talbot's fertile imagination at its best.
