The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund’s discovery in central Spain of a strange series of “memorial cities,” built in Atlantis’ image by its refugees after the city’s likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

According to Freund, the ruins — 60 miles inland — were buried under water by a massive tsunami millennia ago.

Read more about Freund’s Atlantis findings at Reuters

The artifacts, packed in sealed boxes, were misplaced because of poor coordination between the Iraqi government ministries in charge of recovering and handling archaeological treasures, said Tourism and Antiquities Minister Qahtan al-Jabouri.

He blamed “inappropriate handover procedures” but did not go into detail.

Iraqi and world culture officials have for years struggled to retrieve looted treasures but with little success.

Thieves carted off thousands of artifacts from Iraqi museums and archaeological sites in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and in earlier years of war and upheaval. Many items ended up abroad. Collections that were stolen or destroyed at the National Museum chronicled some 7,000 years of civilization in Mesopotamia, including the ancient Babylonians, Sumerians and Assyrians.

Only a fraction of the items have been recovered.

Authorities only realized the items misplaced at the prime minister’s office were missing when they began putting together a public display of recently recovered artifacts in Baghdad on Sept. 7.

The prime minister’s office investigated, located the items and handed them over to the Antiquities Ministry on Sunday, al-Jabouri said.

“Sealed boxes were located in a storage among kitchen supplies,” al-Jabouri said at a news conference. “They were opened and artifacts were found inside.”

So far, 5,000 items stolen since 2003 have been recovered. More than 15,000 pieces from the National Museum are still missing.

In other words, Frank looks like one of crime fiction’s stock crusader types (although, thank god, he hasn’t got a murdered family to avenge, the cheapest, tiredest device in the TV screenwriter’s toolbox). He’s the guy Raymond Chandler was talking about when he wrote, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

Frank, however, is in a Tana French novel, an environment that makes Philip Marlowe’s L.A. look like a church picnic. French herself doesn’t play by the rules, and the prime rule of crime fiction, no matter how grisly, cynical or edgy, is that the plot begins with a disruption of order (the crime itself) and ends with the restoration of it, albeit in some slightly battered form. The guilty parties are identified and usually punished, secrets are unearthed and, above all, the world returns to intelligibility, however bitter the message it has to tell.

In French’s previous two novels — the mesmerizing “In the Woods” and “The Likeness” — and now with her third, “Faithful Place,” she has introduced the insolvable and the uncertain into the rigorous mathematics of the detective story; she’s the Kurt Gödel of crime fiction. A thread of the uncanny runs through “In the Woods,” a thread that got finer in “The Likeness,” and has in turn entirely vanished from “Faithful Place.” But, as in those earlier books, French considers the possibility that some things can’t be known or fathomed; in “Faithful Place” it’s the detective, as much as anyone else, who simply refuses to see.

Frank is a minor character from “The Likeness,” the boss of the Undercover Squad, a team whose work allows French to burrow into the puzzle of identity and its fragility, how easily it can become unmoored and capsize. As in the previous two novels, “Faithful Place” has a murderer who will be identified, but in the process of discovering that truth, the detective’s own psyche will be dismantled. Detective fiction’s legions of brooding sleuths have paid lip service to Nietzsche’s observation that if you look long enough into the abyss, the abyss starts looking back. In French’s novels, the person looking becomes the abyss.

Faithful Place is a cul-de-sac in a part of Dublin called the Liberties, once synonymous with poverty and working-class desperation. “Everyone I grew up with was probably a petty criminal, one way or another, not out of badness but because that was how people got by,” Frank observes. He hates Faithful Place not for the crime but for the pettiness — the pervasive gossip (“a competitive sport that’s been raised to Olympic standards”) and the narrow, Catholic censoriousness, the shriveled expectations and the cheap melodrama. His father is a brutal drunk and his mother has a black belt in manipulation with added superpowers in guilt, disapproval and schadenfreude. That’s why, once he got out at the age of 19, Frank never came back and has kept Holly scrupulously away from his folks. “You don’t meet my family,” he explains to his middle-class ex, “you open hostilities.”

Frank meant to run much further away; he planned to emigrate to England with his girlfriend, Rosie, on the night he left for good, 22 years ago. But Rosie never showed, and he’d always assumed she decided to leave without him. “Rosie Daly dumping my sorry ass had been my landmark,” he says of this turning point, “huge and solid as a mountain.” He blamed his “crazy” family for scaring her away. He never got out of Dublin, but he could not have settled on a more emphatic way of sticking his thumb in the collective eye of Faithful Place than by becoming a cop.

So when Rosie’s mouldering suitcase and then the bones of Rosie herself turn up in a derelict house on Faithful Place, Frank feels the mountain of that ancient rejection shift, “flickering like a mirage and the landscape kept shifting around it, turning itself inside out and backwards; none of the scenery looked familiar any more.” He enters into a complex and destabilizing negotiation with his own past and its legacy as he searches for Rosie’s killer. He sees his parents again, sits on the stoop with his four siblings, feeling how “we fit together like pieces of a jigsaw,” and tries to ignore the way the painstakingly constructed barrier between himself and Faithful Place begins to erode. The more he tells himself that he’s utterly changed, the more it becomes apparent that he hasn’t.

French’s hypnotic storytelling remains in full force in this novel, despite having shaken off the dreaminess that suffused “In the Woods” and “The Likeness.” This is Roddy Doyle territory, an excavation of that particular torture experienced by those who want to break out of a hopeless, working-class world but keep getting sucked back in by the loyalty that is its one redeeming quality. “Faithful Place” is wrenching to a degree that detective fiction rarely achieves: Frank — a cocky devil who prides himself on his skillful lying and ability to play other people — gets pulled apart psychologically as he pursues Rosie’s killer, and the reader undergoes it with him. By the end, it’s difficult to distinguish what the real crime is or who committed it.

Which is not to say that French doesn’t solve the novel’s technical mystery or that the answer isn’t tightly cinched into her larger themes. Like Kate Atkinson, who has grafted the contemporary novel of manners onto the bones of the detective story in her Jackson Brodie series, French sticks to the genre’s brief while conveying it into new territory. But where the Brodie books are all pretty much the same in tone and subject matter, French does something fresh with every novel, each one as powerful as the last but in a very different manner. Perhaps she has superpowers of her own? Whatever the source of her gift, it’s only growing more miraculous with every book.

Since Lou narrates the Thompson novel, and film is by its nature a more detached and objective medium than fiction, there are limits to how well Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran can capture the book’s eerie, haunting power, or Lou’s willful lack of self-knowledge. But the novel’s most notorious scene, in which Lou calmly pulls on a pair of black gloves and sets about beating his hooker girlfriend to death, all the while apologizing to her and telling her he loves her, is rendered in explosive and terrifying detail. It serves as a rupture in the film’s narrative of reality, one almost as dramatic as the moment when the film appears to break in the projector during Bergman’s “Persona.”

Up till then, Lou appears to be an intriguing, somewhat dark film-noir hero. Yeah, he’s cheating on his wife, he bends his law-enforcement role to suit his own purposes, he has an appetite for sadomasochistic sex. You may or may not find that distasteful, but it belongs to the genre. This horror-show does not. Here is this handsome, intriguing good-boy/bad-boy character, in whom we have invested at least a little prurient identification, pummeling a beautiful woman’s face into a grisly, bloody mass while murmuring, “Hold on, sweetheart. It’s almost over.” You sit there in shocked disbelief: This can’t be happening. But it is.

It’s a dreadful scene that provokes powerful emotions: Pity and terror, of course, for Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba, in the movie), who loves Lou passionately and yearns to make him happy and would probably still forgive him for this vile betrayal. Beyond that, though, what’s also shocking is the sense that we are implicated in the crime: It’s as if, by taking the ride with Lou through his moral ambiguity and his smoldering, dangerous sex scenes with Joyce, we’ve given him permission to push through all possible boundaries of good and evil and decency and sanity, like a demented Nietzschean Superman. You get the same feeling, in a somewhat different fashion, from reading the book. Thompson almost taunts us: OK, crime-fiction readers, you want a story about a dark-hearted killer? That’s what you paid for, right? Well, try this.

Unfortunately, “The Killer Inside Me” has already become a Rorschach blot that reflects the public’s widely varying ideas about extreme media depictions of violence, especially violence against women. I say “unfortunately” because few of the pro-or-con responses based on that perception will do justice to the work itself. If you believe, or fear, that movie violence serves as a form of pornographic wish-fulfillment for male audience members, and may in fact legitimize or enable acts of real-world violence, then of course you’ll find the movie repellent and indefensible, no matter how well it’s executed or what its creators have to say about it.

One could certainly argue that that view is simplistic and uninformed. (I’m reminded of then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attacks on the “Grand Theft Auto” games, which she clearly hadn’t even looked at, let alone tried to play.) At the risk of starting a long and contentious sidebar discussion, I’ll suggest that generations of sociologists have tried and failed to establish clear links between watching violence on-screen and committing violent acts in person. Leaving that issue aside, the most common rejoinder from defenders of media violence — that it plays a complicated and cathartic role for the spectator, whose focus shifts back and forth from victim to perpetrator — may miss the point of Thompson’s novel even more.

Winterbottom’s adaptation of the novel is spellbinding cinema, with all the atmosphere, technical excellence and expert pacing the British director is known for. Perhaps more important, it captures much of the nihilistic soul of Thompson’s novel, which aims to be a self-undermining critique of crime fiction, as well as a bleak biblical parable about the darkness and violence he sees at the heart of America and masculinity and perhaps human nature. In a funny way, “The Killer Inside Me” comes closer to agreeing with its critics than its defenders; it’s almost a work that argues that it ought not to be seen (or read), or at least ought not to be necessary.

I would argue, in fact, that the book and movie’s portrait of Lou Ford pre-echoes some second-wave feminist ideas about men, women and rape, such as those of Susan Brownmiller. Thompson believed that male-female sexual relations, even in their so-called normal guise, contained hints of violence, and that it didn’t take much to tip them over into terrible brutality. He definitely does not depict Lou and Joyce’s S/M sexual relationship as innocent and consensual play (as contemporary p.c. sexuality would have it), but as the mutual opening of a door that leads to much darker places. There are hints of a psychological explanation, if you want them — Lou has a history as both a sexual abuser and an abuse victim — but the boundary between normalcy and raving psychotic madness seems dangerously permeable.

As I wrote in April, to complain that “The Killer Inside Me” is full of misogynistic violence is a little like reading “Moby-Dick” and objecting to all the stuff about whaling. Violence against women is Thompson’s text and theme and central metaphor — and in case I haven’t made this clear, anyone who might find the violence in this movie gratifying or arousing is already virtually beyond the bounds of professional help.

Played by Affleck with unruffled aplomb, Deputy Lou doesn’t even carry a gun because crime in the oil boomtown of Central City, Texas, is nearly nonexistent. But beneath his ultra-normal veneer Lou has the tastes and background of a depraved European aristocrat (indeed, I suspect Lou served as an inspiration for Thomas Harris’ creation of Hannibal Lecter). He’s probably the only person in Central City who reads Freud and listens to Schubert — or whose sexual appetites suggest the Marquis de Sade or Georges Bataille.

Within the first few minutes of the film, Lou is sent to run Joyce out of town and she responds by slapping and slugging him. She’s bored and lonely and sick of sleeping with ugly guys for money; she’s looking for a reaction, and she gets one: On the verge of walking out, Lou comes back and tackles her, pulling down her panties and whipping her bare ass with his belt. The sequence is both erotic and violent, profoundly troubling and potentially arousing, designed to provoke a whiplash of emotional, psychological and libidinal responses. It sets the table for what follows: an exploration of the dividing line between sex and death that’s at least as morbid and philosophical as anything in modernist European literature. 

Depending on your point of view, Lou is either a deranged sociopath or an inevitable product of his environment, and the genius of Thompson’s novel — and of screenwriter Curran’s extraordinarily faithful adaptation — lies in the fact that interpreting what happens is entirely up to you. Lou himself does not understand why he does the vicious and bloody things he does (Affleck narrates some portions of the film in bursts of Thompsonian prose), but as the story becomes increasingly fantastical and grotesque, he gets a pretty clear idea how it’s going to end.

You can make a case for “The Killer Inside Me” as one of the most important American novels of the 20th century, but it’s essentially a work of fatalistic allegory, and as Winterbottom’s film goes along it can’t help becoming more like an ordinary crime movie. Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas and Simon Baker stand out among the cast of befuddled Central City locals — Baker plays the out-of-town lawman who first suspects that Lou’s behind the local crime wave — but Kate Hudson is a bit stranded as Lou’s doomed fiancée, Amy. She meets a similar fate to Joyce’s, late in the film, and while Winterbottom is sticking close to the book here, as elsewhere, I think he’s violating a cardinal rule of moviemaking: Show us something shocking once, and it has a didactic force. Show it again, and it becomes technical, or sickening, or both.

If the pileup of corpses and the ensuing ludicrous conflagration that ends “The Killer Inside Me” is the only conclusion Lou can imagine, Winterbottom and Curran might have thought a little harder about the fact that Lou is completely insane. In a novel, especially one with an unreliable narrator, there is no necessary distinction between fantasy and reality, and no way to verify or falsify the narrator’s account. Lou Ford longs to destroy not just himself and those around him — especially those who love him — but also the story he’s telling and those of us reading or watching it. If Winterbottom’s film were literally a bomb that blew us all up after we watched it — that blew us up because we watched it — it might fulfill all its antihero’s and original creator’s ambitions.

“The Killer Inside Me” opens June 18 in theaters in many major cities. It will also be available  on-demand via IFC In Theaters, on most cable-TV systems. 

Author and literary critic Jessica Mann has given that subject a lot of thought — and concluded that the treatment of women in crime fiction has gotten so horrendously torture-porny, she won’t be reviewing any new titles that continue a trend she describes thusly: “Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or buried alive.” I’m nauseated, but on a day when I learned that the first five “Saw” movies have grossed $669 million, I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s enough to make one long for the days when female characters were merely weak, silly and two-dimensional.

In the most disturbing story I’ve heard about cover art bearing no resemblance to the text since Justine Larbalastier’s “Liar,” Mann tells of seeing a recent book with a dead woman on the cover, even though the novel’s victim is male. She asked the publisher what was up with that, and he told her, “Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don’t.” And even female writers apparently feel forced to choose between accepting that industry reality and being relegated to the remainder bin. Natasha Cooper, former chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, told The Guardian, “There is a general feeling that women writers are less important than male writers and what can save and propel them on to the bestseller list is if they produce at least one novel with very graphic violence in it to establish their credibility and prove they are not girly.”

I’m sure there’s a revolting amount of truth in that, and I’m certainly not one to be overly optimistic about western culture moving in more a female-friendly direction. Nevertheless, I don’t think the problem here is only systemic misogyny. It’s also that so much crime fiction these days — like so many mainstream movies — is churned out quickly, with little concern for strong writing and storytelling, let alone strong female characters. Sensationalistic violence becomes the chief selling point when the prose style is crap, the characters are underdeveloped, the dialogue is flat, and the plot twists are nonsensical. And just as with movies, there’s really no reliable data on whether women would spend money on compelling stories about women who do more interesting stuff than getting tortured, maimed and murdered, because those stories are so rarely made available anymore. Horrific violence against women is often the only thing in a crime novel or Hollywood film that’s not mind-numbingly predictable and boring.

Remember the days when movies had clever, crackling dialogue, tightly crafted plots, and whip-smart leading ladies, even though they were produced in a far more openly sexist era? Yeah, me neither. But I know they existed, once upon a time, and I might just spend less of my entertainment budget on renting old movies if new ones were half as good. Similarly, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were hardly feminists, but they’re a hell of a lot more fun to read than current crime novelists who phone in a new story about “brutalized dead women” every year because that’s the minimum the market will accept — so why bother aiming higher?

Tiny glimmer of hope time: I got that stat about the “Saw” movies’ disheartening success from one of many articles about “Saw VI’s” surprising and decisive box office defeat last weekend by the no-budget “Paranormal Activity” — which is, as Mary Elizabeth Williams recently wrote in Salon, “a hit for the most surprising reason of all: because it’s very good.” I haven’t seen that movie and have no idea if I’d enjoy it personally, or what a feminist critique of it might look like. But I do know it’s been widely praised for terrific storytelling and for drawing more on the lessons of horror classics than recent box office hits. As a result of those things (plus the extremely low budget and smart marketing), it’s already one of the most profitable movies ever made. Do you suppose Hollywood will take a lesson from that?

Probably not. And most publishers will probably not risk the profits that come from dehumanized, tortured female characters, just to see if a well-crafted little thriller might take off. But at least Jessica Mann has eliminated one more outlet for promoting lazy, misogynistic, lowest-common-denominator writing to a desensitized market that’s long since given up hoping for anything better.