To a degree, it would be impossible for For The King to dip much below a C grade. Author Catherine Delors earned big buzz for her ability to evoke a bygone France in her debut, Mistress Of The Revolution, and she takes as her basis one of the great historical events that hasn’t been over-fictionalized: the attempt on Napoleon Bonaparte’s life (undertaken via a primitive bomb!) that led to one of the first modern police investigations. All Delors needs to do is set the wheels of conspiracy in motion and find an interesting police-officer protagonist to unravel them, and she’d have a crackerjack tale. She’d just need to get out of the way.
She’s mostly unable to, though, which undoes For The King in the end. The book is largely over-plotted, skipping between three different point-of-view characters, when it really only needs to follow Roch, the chief inspector at its center. Delors has a bad habit of having her characters talk with her narrator’s voice, so they’ll often speak in long passages of declarative sentences, flowery description, and tortured phrasing.
The book settles down a bit around the midpoint, as Delors spends less time hopping between viewpoints, and unleashes a twist that most readers will see coming, though it manages to remain interesting in the way it enlivens some previously bland characters. Around this point, Delors’ intentions become much clearer. Through telling the story of this famous investigation, she’s trying to paint a picture of 1801 Paris, a city filled with relics of a bygone aristocratic era hidden away in shabby apartments, and poverty-stricken people hoping they might rise up just enough to live a slightly better life.
When Delors is doing this sort of city-sweeping, the novel plays to her strengths, and the number of weird little curiosities of history she’s able to work into the narrative—like the idea of rabbit-skin men, who used to wander Paris, looking to buy and sell rabbit pelts—make the book feel more lived-in than the quality of the writing suggests. But every time the novel heads down one of these fun tangents, it rigidly snaps back to its police-procedural basis, with Roch chasing down yet another clue or conspirator. Delors has done an admirable job of simplifying the actual story of the attempted assassination, but there’s often a sense that she hasn’t simplified it enough, that the book would be better off with five or six fewer characters and more of the local color that spurs its best sections.
Delors ultimately pulls the tale together in a satisfying fashion, but it’s still stuffed with second-novel problems: It tries to do too much, and attempts things that are out of Delors’ depth. When she’s making Paris the main character of her narrative, it moves astoundingly well. When she returns to the people at her novel’s center, it grows shaggy around the edges.