This is the first of Jacques Tardi’s four major graphic novel adaptations of legendary French crime writer Lo Malet’s original “Nestor Burma” novels in this one, Burma avenges the death of an old anarchist friend.

Paris, 1950s. In this graphic novel adaptation, Nestor Burma’s past comes knocking when Blita, a young woman, leads him to the Salpetriere hospital, where he discovers the recently deceased Abel Benot, an old buddy from his anarchist days. While Burma has chosen to move onto the (more or less) straight and narrow as a private eye, his friend had stayed on the other side of the law as a counterfeiter and worse, until his own past caught up with him lethally. So now it’s up to Malet to avenge his friend, and hopefully unravel a mystery whose roots run far and deep back into the past…