A dizzying descent into the shadows of the soul

Published in 2000, Jessica Blandy – Comme un trou dans la tête continues the long, inward wandering of the most tormented heroine in Franco-Belgian crime fiction.
Under Jean Dufaux’s sharp pen and Renaud’s sensual lines, this twelfth volume once again plunges Jessica into a universe where sex, manipulation, and death collide.
Between psychological thriller and existential drama, the authors deliver a story that is at once disturbing, unsettling, and fascinating.

A journalist in search of oblivion

Jessica Blandy, a journalist with fragile beauty and an indomitable spirit, attempts to escape her painful memories. After years spent brushing against danger and corruption, she seeks to rebuild herself, far from the tumult of the press and the violence of men.
But peace never lasts for long. When a series of savage murders shakes her circle, Jessica is caught up by the past. The investigation she undertakes brings her back into a world she thought she had left: one of dark desires, manipulations, and invisible wounds.

Very quickly, she understands that these crimes are not just a matter of revenge or jealousy. They resonate like a mirror of her own pain — that of a woman condemned to eternally relive the same torments.

The weight of shattered illusions

Comme un trou dans la tête explores the mental fragility of a heroine who can no longer distinguish the line between reason and madness.
Jessica moves as if in a waking dream, haunted by faces from the past, by lost loves, by the memory of the men who betrayed her.
Around her, the male figures oscillate between predators, victims, or puppets in a world without markers.

The title, ironic and cruel, summarizes the entire ambiguity of the narrative: a symbolic “bullet in the head,” one that does not kill the body, but the conscience.

A tale of poisonous beauty

Jean Dufaux delivers here one of the darkest scripts in the series.
His pen, at once poetic and cruel, dissects human impulses with surgical precision.
He seeks neither to justify nor to condemn: he simply exposes the shadow that slumbers in everyone.

Renaud’s drawing, with its icy elegance, elevates this permanent tension between seduction and death.
His cinematic framing, his faces marked by doubt or desire, establish an atmosphere of dark eroticism and diffuse anxiety.
Each panel seems bathed in end-of-the-world light, caught between beauty and despair.

Between Eros and Thanatos

Through Jessica, Dufaux and Renaud explore the universal themes of solitude, power, and survival.
Their heroine is neither a victim nor a heroine in the classic sense: she embodies absolute lucidity, this awareness of life as a succession of illusions that one chooses to love despite everything.

The narrative thus becomes a metaphor: that of an imaginary bullet, the one we carry in our heads when we have seen too much, lived too much, loved too much.

Conclusion

With Comme un trou dans la tête, Jean Dufaux and Renaud deliver an episode of rare intensity, where the thriller flirts with psychological tragedy.
More than an investigation, it is a plunge into the meanders of a broken soul, in search of meaning in a corrupt world.

✨In summary:
A disturbing, sensual, and desperately human story.
Jessica Blandy – Comme un trou dans la tête is a hypnotic work, where each panel reflects the fragile beauty and silent pain of a woman struggling against herself.
A classic of adult Franco-Belgian crime fiction, as elegant as it is disturbing.