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Summary
Summary
"A LABYRINTHINE, MATRYOSHKA DOLL OF A NOVEL, THE BOOK'S MANY LAYERS WILL SHOCK AND ASTOUND YOU." -- Mystery Scene Magazine
"UNPREDICTABLE IN A DELICIOUSLY DEPRAVED WAY" --Kirkus Reviews
With a new name and a new life, Sophie Duget hopes that she'll be able to put her demons to rest for good. It soon becomes clear, however, that the real nightmare has only just begun . . .
Young, successful, and happily married-- Sophie thought at first she was becoming absentminded when she started misplacing her mail and forgetting where she'd parked her car the night before.
But then, as her husband and colleagues pointed out with increasing frustration, she began forgetting things she'd said and done, too. And when she was detained by the police for shoplifting, a crime she didn't remember committing, the confusion and blackouts that had begun to plague her took on a more sinister cast.
Now, Sophie is in much deeper water: One morning, she wakes to find that the little boy in her care is dead. She has no memory of what happened. And whatever the truth, her side of the story is no match for the evidence piled against her. Her only hiding place is in a new identity. A new life, with a man she has met online.
But Sophie is not the only one keeping secrets . . .
Author Notes
Pierre Lemaitre is a French novelist, born in Paris in 1951. He is a former teacher of literature. His is the author of Camille, for which he won the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger. He and Fred Vargas won the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger for Alex. His novel, The Great Swindle, won the 2013 Prix Goncourt, France's leading literary award. In 2016, it won the International Dagger for the best crime novel not originally written in English.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Like an ingenious long con, this devious psychological thriller from Prix Goncourt-winner Lemaitre (The Great Swindle) promises a satisfying eventual payoff-but only to readers willing to persevere through a depressing first half centered on a protagonist who's pretty hard to root for, despite the many tragedies in her young life. Down-on-her-luck Parisian Sophie Duguet becomes the subject of a nationwide manhunt, accused of cold-blooded murders-including the strangulation of the six-year-old she was caring for-which she has no recollection of committing. From there things swiftly worsen for the fugitive, who seems to be struggling more with paralyzing nightmares and other manifestations of what she interprets as mental illness than with evading capture-until a second main character, the mysterious Frantz, bursts onto the scene. His arrival turns everything you think you know about Sophie and the story so far on its head, setting up an intensely suspenseful, if wildly unbelievable, cat and mouse game. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Out of Bounds by Val McDermid; Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman; Blood Wedding by Pierre Lemaitre; Black Night Falling by Rod Reynolds; Blackwater by James Henry Val McDermid's 30th novel, Out of Bounds (Little, Brown, [pound]18.99), is the fourth to feature DCI Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland's historic cases unit. When a teenage joyrider ends up in a coma, a routine DNA test reveals a close familial match to the perpetrator of an unsolved murder that took place in 1996. Discovering the killer's identity should be a fairly easy task, but, the boy being adopted, Pirie and her sidekick, the doltish but earnest DC Jason Murray, find themselves in a maze of red tape. Pirie, who is struggling to come to terms with the death of her partner, also becomes involved unofficially in the case of Gabriel Abbott, a lonely obsessive who has been found shot dead. DI Alan Noble, in charge of the case, believes it's suicide, but Pirie thinks there might be a link with the death of Abbott's mother, 22 years earlier, in a presumed terrorist attack. McDermid's expertly juggled plotlines and masterful handling of pace and tension tick all the best boxes, but what makes this book a real cracker is Pirie herself -- grieving, insubordinate and dogged in her pursuit of the various culprits. Inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird, Laura Lippman's Wilde Lake (Faber & Faber, [pound]12.99) is set in Maryland, where Luisa "Lu" Brant, newly elected as the first female state's attorney of Howard County, decides to prove herself by prosecuting a drifter accused of beating a woman to death. Intelligent and competitive, Lu comes from a family of achievers who enjoy status and privilege. Her father was a legendary state's attorney for the same county. AJ, her older brother, was a high school hero who saved the life of his friend Davey, the only black kid in their circle, when he was attacked by two brothers who believed he'd raped their sister. Two narratives, both from Lu's point of view, interweave past and present until she finds herself confronted with some unpalatable truths about her relatives. Subtle, moving and intriguing, this excellent book is a complex study of how, as Lu puts it, "we always want our heroes to be better than their times, to hold the enlightened views we have achieved one hundred, fifty, ten years later". Blood Wedding (MacLehose, [pound]12.99) by French author Pierre Lemaitre, translated by Frank Wynne, is the story of nanny Sophie Duguet, who is plagued by nightmares and memory loss. She becomes the subject of a nationwide manhunt after apparently strangling her charge, six-year-old Leo, with a shoelace. There's also the matter of her mother-in-law, who she may have shoved fatally down a staircase, and the mysterious death of her husband, Vincent. On the run and desperate for a new identity, Sophie decides to marry a soldier in the hope that he will be posted abroad, taking her with him -- at which point a second narrator, Frantz, takes up the baton, and it becomes clear that Sophie is not, after all, her own worst enemy. Utterly unpredictable and told with relish, Blood Wedding is a dementedly Hitchcock ian tale of gas-lighting: suspend disbelief and enjoy. Although Rod Reynolds set the bar extraordinarily high for himself with his debut novel, The Dark Inside, it's fair to say that his second book more than lives up to the promise of its predecessor. Black Night Falling (Faber, [pound]12.99) picks up with reporter Charlie Yates in October 1946, six months after his adventure in Texarkana. Yates, newly married and kicking his heels on a small newspaper in California, is asked by an acquaintance to help look into the mysterious deaths of three women in Hot Springs, Arkansas. On arrival, he discovers that his contact has perished in a hotel fire and that nobody in the place -- a sleazy hotbed of gambling, prostitution and corruption -- seems to know anything about the murders. Determined to do the right thing, Yates begins to investigate and soon comes up against some formidable adversaries. Smart plotting, immaculate research, a tersely precise style and a protagonist with a touch of the knight-errant about him add up to pitch-perfect American noir. Blackwater (Quercus, [pound]12.99) is the first in an Essex-based police-procedural series by James Henry, author of the prequels to RD Wingfield's DI Jack Frost books. The year is 1983 -- before the reforms of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act -- and things at Colchester CID are less "procedural" and more laissez-faire than they would be nowadays. DI Nick Lowry and his colleagues grapple with cases including an armed robbery at a post office, a massive shipment of drugs, a headless corpse and a fatal encounter between the local hard boys and the squaddies from the nearby garrison. An impressively complex plot, wonderfully atmospheric descriptions of the bleak estuary landscape, an engaging protagonist and some tasty villains get this series off to a flying start. - Laura Wilson.
Library Journal Review
In Lemaitre's (Camille) adrenaline-charged stand-alone novel, Sophie Duguet is typically a gentle, quiet woman, but an increasing number of forgetful moments and bizarre behavior she can't recall has her doubting her sanity. She's unable to remember where she parked her car the night before, if she had really shoplifted from a local store, or whether she murdered the six-year-old boy in her sole care. The police have noticed that bad things happen to the people around Sophie, and while Sophie desperately tries to figure out what's happening to her, she also manages to evade a massive manhunt. In the process, she reveals herself as a great deal cleverer and more resourceful than anyone suspected. Verdict The narrative is reminiscent of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl with numerous twists and turns as the story exposes layers of motives of the main characters. Highly recommended for all mystery fans.-Deb West, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.