When Manu was killed Ugo returned from Paris to Marseille.  He stayed with Lole, Manu's girlfriend, just long enough to prepare his plans.  A few days later he tells Lole to seek a safe place, and he goes and shoots down who he believes is the one who gave the order to kill Ugo.  Not long after Manu is shot dead by the police.

Fabio Montale, a policeman in Marseille, is the last of a trio of boys that grew up in Marseille.  Ugo and Manu were the other ones.  As teenagers they robbed a few shops, but when it went wrong at a drug-store Fabio left them.  After having been abroad in the army he became a cop.  Now, 20 years later, he works in one of the worst of Marseille, where racism and fear, desolation and anger rule.  He does his best to find a balance between repression when he needs to, and conversation when it still is possible, even if his superiors don't really appreciate that approach.

And now that Leila, the one woman he really loved but only from a distance, is brutally killed and now that he is the last one remaining from his inseparable childhood trio, his one passion left is to find the true guilty ones behind all this.  It's not easy though.  Certainly when what at first seems like a relatively simple clash between organised crime-gangs turns into a more nasty game in which the ugliest side of rightwing extremists plays its role as well.

Okay, this is a cop-story, the hard-boiled loner solving a crime.  But as soon as you start reading you'll notice that the true protagonist is not Fabio Montale, but the city of Marseille itself.  Charming, beautiful, ugly, suppressing, inviting, spitting out.  The laid-back life of the richer (no matter how they got their money) and the dead end life of the young black or brown people whose future is a choice between poverty or crime.  Despite Izzo's sharp depiction of the hopeless situation of so many of its citizens, you can feel his love for this city in every chapter.

Fabio Montale is sort of what the cliché expects from him.  He has had many women but with none he feels truly at ease, still he's surrounded by so many that love him in one way or another.  He is rather disillusioned, his career looks like a dead end waiting for the last kick in the butt.  He's good at his job, but even in the police he doesn't have many friends, he doesn't allow anyone to come close.  But, cliché or not, he is a living creature, he is a very credible character, like anyone else in the book.

Is this a good crime-story?  Yes, but not extraordinary.  Is this a good book?  Ah, but that's a different question, one I can answer with a very enthusiastic Yes!  Better than any news report or in-depth interview this book explains exactly what the recent riots in Paris were all about.  By using the city as a main character, by using the bubbling brewing mixture of cultures and origins Jean-Claude Izzo lifts this book way above the ordinare cops-and-robbers story.  Hey, and you get the built-in crime story as a bonus!