My Books
Captivating!
"Le jeu de l'ogre is part of this new wave of Quebec authors who are rather adroitly surfing the crime scene... We are not playing the sensationalism card here caused by a series of spectacular murders with shocking and aestheticized staging; rather, we modestly seek to elevate the genre into a sphere where intelligence and insidiousness come to the fore."
Le jeu de l’ogre
Tingwick, 2008. As she prepares to take legal action against the man who stole her youth, Marie-Paule Provost loses her life in a car accident. Her two daughters, Nickie and Alexandra, take over her quest. What follows is a death, a disappearance, a family tragedy, so many criminal incidents that leave few clues about the thin thread that connects them. Judith Allison, a recruit to the Arthabaska Regional Police Service, is convinced that the motive for each crime is contained in the one that preceded it. A scaffolding that she will strive to dismantle, piece by piece, despite the difficult working climate.
Even ex-investigator Denise Cormier, who was supposed to lend her a hand, will try to cover her tracks. Why? A police investigation that we follow hour by hour, for 20 days, at the end of the summer of 2009, the rainiest that Quebec has known. A trap where characters seek revenge, in the daily rural life of the Centre-du-Québec. In Le jeu de l'ogre, good and evil, like greatness and distress, merge, and the truth of each often gives reason to the crime.
In awarding the Arthur Ellis Prize to L'enfant promis, the judges of the Crime Writers of Canada said:
"With remarkable mastery, in an effective style, Maureen Martineau portrays a realistic and plausible investigator character. Judith Allison takes the reader into an investigation full of emotions, carried out in an exemplary manner not only by the detective sergeant, but also (and above all!) by the author, who achieves the feat of making us experience two police investigations : the disappearance of a young child and the discovery of unidentified human remains. L' enfant promis is an excellent detective novel, which reveals the great talent of Maureen Martineau."
L’enfant promis
Tingwick, 2011. In a Saints-Martyrs-Canadiens maple grove, the bones of a woman are discovered. To whom do these unclaimed human remains belong when no parent steps forward? The next day, five-year-old Lucas Blondin goes missing. Runaway or kidnapping? In the middle of a July heatwave, Judith Allison, detective sergeant with the Arthabaska Regional Police, finds herself with two investigations on her hands.
To follow the thin thread to which the research clings, she infiltrates the Rainbow community and traces the Indigo Children's network. These incursions which turn her life upside down will lead her into a world where distress commands crime, and where the child justifies everything.
"Ecological thriller without being didactic, The Activist confirms the talent of the prolific Maureen Martineau."
L’activiste: Le jour des morts
The novel, entitled L’Activiste: Le Jour des Morts (The Activist: the Day of the Dead) features Detective Sergeant Judith Allison, who, in November 2013, is assigned to investigate the explosion of a bomb in the small community of Tingwick in central Quebec. The detective discovers that the man who masterminded the explosion is pursuing his final target: the former head of the Quebec asbestos industry.
When the ex-manager of a major Quebec asbestos mine disappears, the investigation takes on an international scale, involving both chrysotile asbestos lobbyists and human rights defenders who are fighting them. The investigation takes the detective to Jharkhand in India, to the Roro valley, where thousands of villagers, living alongside a abandoned asbestos mine, live with a bomb in their lungs.
"Bridging the gap between the history of Hull and the tragedies experienced in the Indigenous Far North is already a tour de force. Thanks to Maureen Martineau, it becomes a superior category thriller.
[…] An intelligent and captivating novel!"
La ville allumette
Even though he is a hunted fugitive, activist Jacob Lebleu prepares attacks against Jean-Marc Courville, an unscrupulous real estate developer with megalomaniacal projects. The latter particularly has in his sights the island of Hull and the last “matchstick house” on Falardeau street, spared by his father's cranes in 1969. That year, nearly 6,000 residents of modest means were expropriated to allow the construction of the federal buildings of the new National Capital Region. Ten years earlier, it was the Gréber plan that sounded the death knell for LeBreton Plains, a working-class neighborhood in Ottawa. Lebleu, originally from the region, has not forgotten it. With the “great debacle” that he is preparing, he wants to bring justice to these tragedies and lend a hand to the Algonquin nations who are also seeking to prevent a real estate project on Chaudière Island, a sacred ancestral site.
The activists will confront Detective Sergeant Judith Allison, who came to the Outaouais to follow the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's counterterrorism training course. She has no idea that she will soon be propelled into a breathtaking investigation that will take her to Nunavik in pursuit of Jacob Lebleu. The psychological duel between the investigator and the environmental terrorist is at the heart of this admirably constructed thriller.
"So much the better if the reader is taken aback by Une église pour les oiseaux by Maureen Martineau, this completely wild short thriller that leaves you speechless."
Une église pour les oiseaux
Taking refuge in the church tower, chimney swifts are desperately trying to migrate to Central America. Ham-Sud, a small village in Estrie, is plagued by serious contamination which affects animals and human beings. Far from suspecting that she had been targeted, the mayor, overwhelmed by the disaster, leads the investigation.
Held behind bars, the young escort Jessica Acteau tries to put into words the horror of the last twenty-four hours. What part did she really play in the sordid murder of which she is accused? Why did she attack one of her clients with such savagery? By kidnapping him, does she know that she prevented him from committing a crime in turn? Her frail voice mingles with that of the birds and little by little reveals the filthy truth.
"Martineau's writing is sometimes luminous, other times dark, in perfect communion with the nature she describes. Certain passages give the impression that we ourselves are half-opening the tent in the early morning and seeing the rays of the sun dissipating the mist which slowly rises above a lake while all the forest birds sing their joy at being there…"
Zec La Croche
Haute-Mauricie. The train moves slowly between lakes and forests. At the Rapide-Blanc station, old Mikona Awashish gets off to join her daughter, who is waiting for her on the platform. Through the window of the wagon, wildlife protection officer André Chillas spies on the two Atikamekw, convinced that they are there to poach. But it is another type of hunting that the women intend to indulge in. They will drag young Lorie into their dark plan, as she comes to meditate at the edge of the Lac à Matte, which is the campsite where her mother was killed last summer. A paradise where, at nightfall, all kinds of predators lurk.
Criminelles
— EXTRACTS FROM THE FOREWORD —
… we then thought that crime loves accomplices and that it would be stimulating to concoct villainous plans together. We could write a four-handed collection, which would take as its setting the dark forests, their zecs, the chalets near sometimes anonymous lakes.
We also have in common, since our first writings, the propensity to camp our stories in the region, in rural areas or in sparsely inhabited territories... in all the stories, women are involved in misdeeds in different ways, "signing" them » or would sometimes be witnesses…
– Ariane & Maureen
Crimes à la bibliothèque
After the success of the collection of short stories “Crimes à la librairie”, the director of the publication, Richard Migneault, like an unrepentant criminal, does it again. He invited seventeen other authors to take over a different place of culture, reading and research, to stage crimes: the library. François Barcelo, David Bélanger, Roxanne Bouchard, Laurent Chabin, Sylvie-Catherine De Vailly, Hervé Gagnon, Anna Raymonde Gazaille, Maxime Houde, Michel Jobin, Jacqueline Landry, Jean Lemieux, François Lévesque, André Marois, Maureen Martineau, Maryse Rouy, Francine Ruel and Martin Winckler.
All these fabulous writers have taken up the challenge: they open up their imagination to us, draw us into their intrigues and delight us with their unique styles. They invite us to follow them in places where crimes are unlikely: the library of a church basement, a high school, a municipality, or even a religious community. Whether these libraries are located in Quebec, the Middle East, Venice or the Far West, bring your membership card and arm yourself with courage, because the librarian is waiting for you there in dark company.