Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
By a Booker Prize nominee and an internationally bestselling author: a captivating homage to Georges Simenon, an absorbing character study and a highly original detective story.
Manfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Ad le Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis. But one day, she simply vanishes into thin air.
When Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, is called in to investigate the girl's disappearance, Manfred's repressed world is shaken to its core and he is forced to confront the dark secrets of his past. The Disappearance of Ad le Bedeau is a literary mystery novel that is, at heart, an engrossing psychological portrayal of an outsider pushed to the limit by his own feverish imagination.
Graeme Macrae Burnet on PowellsBooks.Blog
On July 26, my second novel,
His Bloody Project, was slumbering in comfortable obscurity somewhere around the 300,000-mark on the Amazon U.K. charts. By close of play the following day, it had reached 32. Seven weeks later — as I write this article — it’s at number 9. That’s a very giddy height for any novel, never mind one set in a tiny crofting community...
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