Time is a Killer
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4.3 • 6 Ratings
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gripping noir from Bussi (After the Crash), Clotilde, husband Franck, and their 15-year-old daughter, Valentine, take a vacation in Corsica, where, 27 years earlier, Clotilde survived a car crash that killed her mother, father, and only brother. When she revisits the scene and makes overtures to reconnect with her Corsican grandparents, Clotilde receives a freshly written letter in what appears to be her mother's handwriting that triggers a spate of questions about her family's fate. The dizzying spiral of recall and disconcerting events related to the crash are set off by entries from 15-year-old Clotilde's diary from 1989, charting a narrative of teenage hormones, marital friction, and island politics that peaks with a devastating discovery of parental betrayal that led to the fatal crash. The climactic sequence, on the same fateful stretch of road, is a fine payoff. Bussi takes his time, maybe too much time, setting the stage and ratcheting up the tension between past and present, but manages to resolve most of the tangled relationships while keeping the reader intrigued.
