Pierre Porcher is the Head of Municipal Services in a moderately important Norman town. He’s the solitary type, and a bit uncouth. His coworkers tease him about his quirks, and everyone calls him by his nickname, No Sugar Added, but they all know he’s not a bad guy at heart. Pierre Porcher disdains gossip. He knows he has a true mission. Discreetly, he has been working for several years now for the Cause: the reunification of Normandy.
His supervisor’s name is Harold Osmond. He’s the Deputy Mayor. A real bourgeois, sexy, worldly, as ambitious as can be. He pretends to be a blue-blooded descendant of the Vikings – a superior race, as everyone knows. He’s a bit of a lunatic in his own way, obsessed with his own image and appearance, fixated on power… He fully intends to be Mayor one day. He’s still young, and can easily picture himself in Parliament in the near future.
But one morning, in the middle of an election campaign, a half-dead young woman is found in a flowerbed in the Parc aux Oiseaux. A few hours later, the anonymous woman expires. Harold loses his legendary sang-froid. A corpse in the town park was going to make the mayor’s office look awful! That’s when he remembers having seen No Sugar Added’s car parked in front of the Parc aux Oiseaux at an odd time of day during the week of the crime … Poor Porcher, the perfect scapegoat!

Cookie Allez paints a skilful portrait of this social microcosm (our own), through a pseudo-detective story in which the risible has to fight it out with the truly vicious.