"Ovaloid Skulls," by Benoit Séverac, in Toulouse Noir, edited by Charles-Henri Lavielle, Akashic Press, 2026.
The publisher sent me a copy of this book.
Hervé Roblés came up with a clever scheme to smuggle migrants but the Albanians who had the monopoly on that sort of thing did not appreciate the competition. Therefore he has had to exile himself to Toulouse. While he waits for things to cool down he has a late-night job handling phone calls for a computer service agency.
Everything is okey-dokey until one night he looks out the window and sees someone wandering through the old cemetery outside. He becomes fascinated, if not obsessed: What is that guy doing wandering around in the middle of the night?
In this very clever and suspenseful story Séverac has combined a very old type of crime with a 21st century innovation.
