I don’t really like thrillers that come to us with a far-fetched finale. So I raised my eyebrows when I closed Guillaume Musso’s latest novel. The resolution of his enigma rests on what the English call “suspension of disbelief”.
The story we are told is very unlikely, but it keeps us in suspense. Isn’t that the goal of a detective novel?
Initially, it is the setting in which the plot of Someone else who attracted me: a rich Italian heiress who made a career in journalism, a murder committed in the bay of Cannes, an investigator with a pig’s head… When reading, however, I was put off by the rubbish of clichés that this novel contains: the lonely policeman who wears rumpled clothes or whose love life is a disaster, the condescending millionaire, the eccentric financier who pulls the strings behind the scenes… We have read that so often… Nothing surprising or original in these descriptions of places and characters. There remains the rhythm and there, Musso masters it very well: we move from one character to another, from one point of view to another through short, well-crafted chapters. The suspense, well constructed, achieves its objective: we turned the pages until very late in the evening to find out the ending. If this is the sole objective of a thriller, then it is a success.
Someone else
Calmann Lévy
345 pages