10. A book written in Europe: Miss Don’t Touch Me, Vol 1 by Hubert and Kerascoët

List Progress: 9/30

It takes a lot to make a thriller feel fresh. While the genre is often fun, and the trappings of it can be shifted around easily, the core tropes at its heart are fairly set in stone. But the 2006 graphic novel Miss Pas Touche by French creative team Hubert and Kerascoët (Miss Don’t Touch Me in the English translation) breathes some new life into the familiar beats by making its point of view character completely feral. You often see the antagonists get grubby and unhinged in thrillers, but this is a great example of the protagonist going fairly off the chains as well.

The first two books of Miss Don’t Touch Me (collected into Volume 1 for the English translation) follow the uptight young Blanche, navigating 1930’s Paris to the best of her abilities. When her fun-loving sister is murdered by the infamous “Butcher of the Dances” taking the city by storm, the police brush it off as a suicide, prompting Blanche to try to find answers and justice on her own. When the trail leads to a high-class brothel, Blanche weasels her way into a job as a “Miss Don’t-Touch-Me”; essentially, a dominatrix. Wealthy men pay to grovel and be beaten by her, and much of her repressed rage comes rolling out as soon as she has a target at which to point it. She ends up in squabbles and run-ins with the other women working there, but she is never distracted from her larger goal of hunting down the Butcher and ending him, no matter what. Her investigation is sloppy and fueled by rage and hurt, which gives it a real feeling of authenticity. Blanche is not a detective and doesn’t want to be, she’s just out for revenge. There will be no easy solutions and no easy answers, and even victory will not offer any relief.

Miss Don’t Touch Me will turn off some readers with the amount of sex and violence on the page, though the delicate colors and linework of the illustrations leave everything feeling slightly classier than it is. A lot of the supporting characters are more archetypes than developed people, but Blanche at the center is drawn richly enough to carry the story along. For those looking for a quick, engaging read through a grubby, dirty mystery, Miss Don’t Touch Me certainly fits the bill.

Would I Recommend It: Yes. (The comic continues for two more volumes, but those ones do not come well-recommended and the main plot arc feels like it ends fairly conclusively here, so I will probably leave it with this installment.)