The Awkward Squad

French author Hénaff’s fun first novel offers a wry look at Parisian policing and the infinite twists of the bureaucracy of French law enforcement. Commissaire Anne Capestan, her career on tenterhooks for her role in the shooting of a suspect, takes charge of a cold-case squad populated by departmental castoffs who can’t be fired but refuse to quit. Starting with a sense of wounded pragmatism that gives way to an increasingly focused joy of the hunt, Capestan marshals a team consisting of a drunk, a cop whose partners keep getting injured, a policewoman who moonlights as a TV writer, and her former internal affairs nemesis into an idiosyncratic, surprisingly effective crime-fighting unit. The group connects the dots on a decade-old fatal burglary, an unsolved shooting of a sailor, and a long-ago shipwreck while navigating a labyrinth created by the Byzantine legal system—and some shrewdly placed obstacles from an opponent who knows when the Awkward Squad is getting close. Readers will hope a sequel is in the works. (Apr.)