Summertime All The Cats Are Bored

By Philippe Georget

In shade of a mast bobbing o'er the wave
She waits and waits, a patient slave
The house of stone will be her grave.

Who does what, who catches who?
Who's the cat, who the mouse, who?

It’s the middle of a long hot summer on the French Mediterranean shore and the town is teeming with tourists. Sebag and Molino, two tired cops who are being slowly devoured by dull routine and family worries, deal with the day’s misdemeanors and petty complaints at the Perpignan police headquarters. But then a young Dutch woman is found murdered on a beach at Argelès, and another one disappears without a trace in the alleys of the city. Is it a serial killer obsessed with Dutch women? Maybe. The media senses fresh meat and moves in for the feeding frenzy.

Out of the blue, Inspector Gilles Sebag finds himself thrust into the middle of a diabolical game. In order to focus on the matter at hand, he will have to put aside his cares, forget his suspicions about his wife’s unfaithfulness, ignore his heart murmur, and get over his existential angst. But there is more to the case than anyone suspects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Jul 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781609451653

Philippe Georget

Philippe Georget was born in Epinay-sur-Seine in 1962. He works as a TV news anchorman for France-3. A passionate traveler, in 2001 he drove the entire length of the Mediterranean shoreline in an RV with his wide and three children. He lives in Perpignan. Summertime All the Cats are Bored, his debut novel, won the SNCF Crime Fiction Prize and the City of Lens First Crime Novel Prize.

Reviews for Summertime All The Cats Are Bored

[smik_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The setting of the novel is Perpignan, in the Catalan region of France, near the Spanish border, where the author himself now lives. It is the height of summer; many including Gilles Sebag's own family are on holiday, and tourists from the north are flooding into the district.Years of police work have left both Sebag and his partner Molino jaded and they have a reputation of being hard to motivate. Sebag does his best to work an "ordinary" working day but as his children and his wife leave for their summer holidays and he becomes an "empty-nester" he begins to think of nothing else but the cases he is working on: primarily the disappearance of a local taxi driver and his final passenger, a Dutch tourist.An engrossing read. Does the town now have a serial killer or are the three cases on the books all separate events?

[shannonrose4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved it. Great end of summer read!

[brianewilliams · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A languid police procedural set in rural France that eventually comes to a satisfying conclusion. It's a good introduction to Inspector Sebag and his colleagues, a bunch of quirky French cops.

[dabble58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's not often you read a detective book where the detectives are spending all their time trying NOT to work, looking for relaxation, really not driven at all. Usually the detective is hard-bitten with a past that drives him or her to exhaustion before they catch the bad guy...
So Gilles Sebag, bored detective, family man, parent to teenagers who find him dull, is a surprising treat to read about. He's Catalan, in an unusual setting, Perpignan (on the French Mediterranean), and the environment around him is as much of a character as he and his colleagues are.
So so far this all sounds like a slow, lolling book, filled with middle aged angst, but it isn't. The mystery develops quickly and despite himself and his doubts of adequacy, Sebag is pulled into a first rate thriller.
I truly enjoyed this book, from the title to the last page. Every character is well-drawn, and though this is a translation, the slightly awkward phrasing makes the Catalan/French distance acute.
Maybe it's because I'm over 50 and feeling my limitations, too, but every once and awhile I get sick of detectives who are all-knowing and street wise and the top of their fields and incapable of self-knowledge. Muscle men and women. They tire me out. Whereas Gilles Sebag and I could go into a pub and discuss the finer things in life and I'd love every minute.