Review: NEVER FORGET, Michel Bussi

• 
  this edition an e-book made available on Libby by my local library
• first published in French 2014
• translated into English from French by Shaun Whiteside 2020
• ISBN 9781474601856

Synopsis (Amazon)

Jamal loves to run. But one morning - as he is training on a path winding up a steep cliff - he stumbles across a woman in distress. It's a matter of seconds: suddenly she is falling through the air, crashing on the beach below.

Jamal is only an unlucky bystander - or is he?

His version of events doesn't seem to fit with what other eyewitnesses claim to have seen. And how to explain the red scarf carefully arranged around the dead woman's neck? Perhaps this was no accident after all.

Or perhaps there is something more sinister afoot - a devilish plan decades in the making, masterminded by someone hell-bent on revenge.

My Take

You always know with a Michel Bussi novel, that nothing is going to be simple. 

From the beginning there are apparently two separate stories: on July 12th 2014 a section of cliff near Yport collapsed, and scattered over 40 metres of the beach among the debris are three human skeletons. Five months earlier a macabre event occurred with no apparent connection to the three skeletons. Out for his morning jog, Jamal witnesses a girl leap off the cliff to the beach below. By the time he gets down to the beach, she is dead, and there are two people standing there looking st the corpse.

There are inconsistencies that Jamal does not understand, and as days progress, he feels uncomfortably that the police are trying to imply that he has had something to do with the death.

Jamal discovers that the event is horribly similar to one that took place almost exactly 10 years earlier on a nearby coastline. The police thought that one was a rape/murder, and it was followed quickly by another. The murderer was never identified.

The thing I find about Michel Bussi plots is that they play with your mind.You begin to wonder whether the narrator is reliable, or whether the whole thing is just a nightmare that you somehow slipped into.  But good things come to those who persist.

My rating: 4.7

I've also read

4.8, BLACK WATER LILIES
4.5, AFTER THE CRASH
4.5, DON'T LET GO
4.7, TIME IS A KILLER

Review: TIME IS A KILLER, Michel Bussi

• format: Kindle (Amazon)
• translated from French by Shaun Whiteside
• File Size: 3241 KB
• Print Length: 466 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1474606679
• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (April 5, 2018)
• Publication Date: April 5, 2018
• Sold by: Hachette Book Group
• Language: English
• ASIN: B06XW3PNT9

Synopsis (Amazon)

It is summer 1989 and fifteen-year-old Clotilde is on holiday with her parents in Corsica. On a twisty mountain road, their car comes off at a curve and plunges into a ravine. Only Clotilde survives.

Twenty-seven years later, she returns to Corsica with her husband and their sulky teenage daughter. Clotilde wants the trip to do two things - to help exorcise her past, and to build a bridge between her and her daughter. But in the very place where she spent that summer all those years ago, she receives a letter. From her mother. As if she were still alive.

As fragments of memory come back, Clotilde begins to question the past. And yet it all seems impossible - she saw the corpses of her mother, her father, her brother. She has lived with their ghosts. But then who sent this letter - and why?

My Take

An intriguing book which keeps the brain working at the little mysteries that the author presents for resolution. We mainly see the story through Clotilde’s diary which she kept in the days before the car crash that killed her father, mother and brother. But we know that the diary is not in Clotilde's hands, so who is it reading the story to us? And how reliable was Clotilde's point of view? She was after all only 15 years old and brought a teenager's interpretation to her observations.

Twenty seven years later Clotilde, now a successful Parisian lawyer, brings her family to Corsica for the first time, and becomes obsessed with the idea that her mother is still alive. But how can that be? Surely the bodies in the car were identified at the time. And then little things beginning to occur which could not be coincidence. Clotilde’s obsession strains her marriage. Then a retired policeman tells her that he has proof that the car crash was not an accident. Her father's car had been tampered with. Her family was murdered.

A slightly lower rating than I might have otherwise have given, due to some reservations about the final pages.

My rating: 4.7

I've also read
4.8, BLACK WATER LILIES
4.5, AFTER THE CRASH
4.5, DON'T LET GO

Review: DON'T LET GO, Michel Bussi

• this edition first published in Great Britain by Wiedenfeld & Nicholson 2017
• translated from French by Sam Taylor
• ISBN 978-1-474-60179-5
• source: my local library
• 324 pages

Synopsis (Amazon)

Picture the scene - an idyllic resort on the island of Réunion. Martial and Liane Bellion are enjoying the perfect moment with their six-year-old daughter. Turquoise skies, clear water, palm trees, a warm breeze...

Then Liane Bellion disappears. She went up to her hotel room between 3 and 4pm and never came back. When the room is opened, it is empty, but there is blood everywhere. An employee of the hotel claims to have seen Martial in the corridor during that crucial hour.

Then Martial also disappears, along with his daughter. An all-out manhunt is declared across the island. But is Martial really his wife's killer? And if he isn't, why does he appear to be so guilty?

My Take:

There are several narrators in this story: Martial Bellion, his small daughter Sopha, police investigator Captain Aja Purvi, her sergeant Christos Konstantinov, just to name a few.

Liane Bellion's disappearance from her hotel room is treated very seriously right from the beginning, particularly because of the blood stains on the bed and the floor. It seems that her husband Martial is in the clear until it is discovered that he visited the bedroom shortly after Liane went there. His access to a laundry trolley seems to indicate that he may have disposed of her body before he roused hotel staff to her disappearance.  And then suspicion lands squarely on him when both he and his daughter go missing.

I found the structure of the book distracting, particularly because there are places where French or Creole terminology is used in the text, with footnotes in English. As the reader, you are not sure whether it is important for you to remember this, whether that term will appear again.

However there were a number of mysteries to be solved, and the plot had many twists, with the effect of raising the tension and level of mystery. The final explanation and plot resolution is ingenuous and I began tossing up a number of denouements from about half way through.

My rating: 4.5

I've also read
4.8, BLACK WATER LILIES
4.5, AFTER THE CRASH 

Review: BLACK WATER LILIES, Michel Bussi

• first published in France as Nymphias Noirs in 2011
• translated into English by Shaun Whiteside
• this edition published in Great Britain in 2016
• ISBN 9-781474-601757
• 350 pages

Synopsis (Amazon UK)

Giverny. During the day, tourists flock to the former home of the famous artist Claude Monet and the gardens where he painted his Water Lilies. But when silence returns, there is a darker side to the peaceful French village.

This is the story of thirteen days that begin with one murder and end with another. Jérôme Morval, a man whose passion for art was matched only by his passion for women, has been found dead in the stream that runs through the gardens. In his pocket is a postcard of Monet's Water Lilies with the words: Eleven years old. Happy Birthday.

Entangled in the mystery are three women: a young painting prodigy, the seductive village schoolteacher and an old widow who watches over the village from a mill by the stream. All three of them share a secret. But what do they know about the discovery of Jérôme Morval's corpse? And what is the connection to the mysterious, rumoured painting of Black Water Lilies?

My Take

I was absolutely gobsmacked by the ending of this book. Nothing had prepared me for the way the author had played with various time frames, and with my mind. Initially I was left feeling that perhaps I hadn't read it carefully enough.  But then as I looked back over the pages I could see how he had done it.

We see most of the book's action through the eyes of an elderly woman, a recluse who lives in the water mill next to stream that runs through Monet's Garden. She lives on the 4th floor, a vantage point that allows her to observe most of what goes on in the small village. Nothing escapes her attention it seems.

We are so taken up with the investigation into the death of Jerome Morval and the possibility of a lost Monet painting that we don't recognise the signs that our path meanders. I wonder if the author has played fair with the reader?  What strikes at the end though is that the novel is itself a tribute to impressionism.

My rating: 4.8

About the author
Michel Bussi (born 29 April 1965 in Louviers, Eure, France) is a French writer of detective novels, and a political analyst and Professor of Geography at the University of Rouen, where he leads a Public Scientific and Technical Research Establishment (French: Unité mixte de recherche, "UMR") in the French National Centre for Scientific Research (French: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, "CNRS"), where he is a specialist in electoral geography.

According to the Le Figaro/GfK list of bestsellers, he was one of the ten bestselling French writers of 2013, selling around 480,000 books.