Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Framed as a translation of a lost French work from 1982, British author Burnet's entertaining first novel works best as a Simenon-influenced deconstruction of a crime story and as a character study of the two men caught up in the titular disappearance. Manfred Baumann, a lonely and quiet man, is the last person to see Adèle Bedeau alive in the small French town of Saint-Louis, and between that fact and his obsession with her, he naturally becomes a suspect in the crime. Insp. Georges Gorski is still smarting over a case from years ago that he believes resulted in the wrong person being convicted, and he's unaware that he's not only right but that Baumann was the real culprit. The guilt Baumann feels over the crime he actually committed clashes with his desire not to be accused of making Adèle vanish. The result is less a cat-and-mouse game than an examination of two men dealing with their respective guilt, but the wit that Burnet (whose second novel, His Bloody Project made the Man Booker shortlist) brings to the table keeps the story from becoming ponderous. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
While one definitely would not want to weekend in Saint-Louis, a nondescript French town on the Swiss border, reading a Georges Simenon-flavored novel about the place and its peculiar inhabitants is a different matter. This exquisitely fashioned cat-and-mouse game pits mouse Manfred -Baumann, a bank manager who seems as dependable as a post, against local gendarme Georges Gorski, who's saddled with a wife who constantly undermines him and haunted by a case from early in his career. In that instance, a woman's disappearance was blamed on a convenient tramp who, tired of living rough, welcomed jail time. Currently, Manfred obsessively retires after work to a café where he has the same order every evening and stares after the sullen but voluptuous waitress Adèle. When she disappears, Manfred seems an almost too likely suspect. Is Gorski simply repeating his earlier error? Or is Manfred more than he appears? When a third woman disappears from that hothouse of a town, what then? VERDICT There's more than enough existential dread and guilt to go around in this whip-smart metafictional novel by the author of the acclaimed His Bloody Project, short-listed for 2016's Man Booker Prize. It's a novel best devoured while wearing a trench coat, its collar upturned, and puffing on a Gauloises cigarette.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A waitress's disappearance pits a dogged detective against a man trapped by his own falsehoods.Manfred Baumann is an unusually regular regular at the Restaurant de la Cloche in Saint-Louis, a nondescript town at the far edge of Alsace. He always eats at the same table, drinks a carafe of wine one glass at a time even though he ends up paying twice as much, and has a secret crush on Adle Bedeau, the sullen young waitress. Years ago, Manfred's grandfather bought the restaurant for his parents, but it slipped through their hands, and Manfred remains an awkward patron on the fringe of life. By day he's a bank manager; once a week he joins in a poker game at the restaurant; and he has a regular appointment at a brothel in a ritual that never changes. But Adle interests him, and one night he hides in some bushes to watch her meet her boyfriend and ride off with him on a motor scooter. When she doesn't show up for work the next day, Manfred is so embarrassed about spying on her that he lies to Inspector Georges Gorskithen continues lying, even about things like having changed his normal lunch order the day Adle disappeared. Despite his aversion to hunches, Gorski has a strong intuition that Manfred is covering up something. Gorski often recalls, and even revisits, the scene of an old murder, a case that the once-junior detective hoped would advance him into a better position in a bigger city. Instead, he's still stuck in a provincial town and a loveless marriage, but his dedication to his work drives him to push Manfred harder. Gorski's persistence only increases Manfred's innate paranoia, and a door to the past leads to unintended consequences for both the hunter and the hunted. Burnet (His Bloody Project, 2016) sets up the book as an old French mystery that he's newly translated, attaching a "translator's afterword" to the back, but the metafictional elements add little to the novel. Dreary but worth reading for its insight into its sad, flawed, and sometimes-repellent characters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
