Thirty-one-year-old Kate has recently started a legal headhunting business and is working hard to get it established so the last thing she needs is anything which will distract her attention. However, the news that a body has been found stuffed down a well at a house in France means that her life is about to be turned upside down as she is forced to confront events which happened there ten years earlier. It was intended to be a relaxing, post-graduation holiday for her and five fellow-students, one of whom was her boyfriend Seb, but the daily appearance of the enigmatic, beautiful Severine, who lived next door but came to use their swimming pool, created tensions within the group of friends. When the holiday ended there had been huge argument, Kate and Seb had split up and Severine had disappeared on the day they were returning home. An investigation at the time had proved inconclusive but the discovery that the body in the well was Severine means that the murder enquiry has been reopened. French detective, Alain Modan is sent from France to question the group of friends, now just five because one was killed whilst fighting in Afghanistan. Not only does this investigation, with the inevitable suspicion it arouses, threaten Kate’s fledgling business, but it makes her question her own recollections of the events which took place ten years earlier, as well as those of her friends.
This is not a fast-moving story but, told in first-person narrative from Kate’s perspective, explores how old, as well as new, rivalries and jealousies are exposed as the friends deal with all the pressures which emerge as the investigation gains momentum. The quality of the author’s gradual, detailed character-development is one of the central strengths of the engaging story-telling and, although the reader sees things unfold through the eyes of Kate, I felt that I got to know each of the other characters quite well. I really enjoyed the multi-faceted relationships, with their shifting loyalties, as suspicion fell first on one, then on another character and how they each adopted strategies to deal with present challenges, as well as their memories of past events. It soon became clear that each had had the means and the motive to murder the French girl although, for reasons which are gradually revealed, Kate becomes the prime suspect. As the investigation progresses, and as they feel their present-day lives begin to fall apart, their attempts at self-preservation become increasingly desperate. At a reunion of the five friends, the first since they had left France, Kate realises the extent to which she cannot trust either their memories of the week in France, or their responses now. Consequently, she becomes increasingly proactive in her attempts to find out what happened all those years ago, whatever the cost to either her friendships or herself.
I thought that in this impressive debut novel Lexie Elliott captured, in a thought-provoking and convincing way, the ways in which all these shifts took place and the almost visceral need of each of the characters to shift the spotlight of suspicion onto others, especially when feeling under threat. Just as Kate did, I found myself questioning everyone’s memories and motives as the story progressed and, as a result, there were moments when I found it rather disturbing to read. As I found myself increasingly engaged with the various shifts and reassessments of the evidence, I became almost as fearful as Kate that my beliefs about what happened would be challenged and disbelieved!
I liked the fact that the author didn’t use alternating “now and then” chapters to tell the story but opted to interweave the characters’ backstories with their current lives and their real-time reactions to the ways in which they are forced to confront their memories of the past. I thought that this made their gradual uncovering of memories, as well as their changing perceptions of all that had happened in France, much more realistic and powerful because, as a reader, I too was faced with trying to untangle the facts from unreliable and conflicting memories. This approach certainly highlighted the unreliability of memory and eye-witness accounts! It also added, at times, to an almost unbearable build-up of tension as buried recollections of the holiday surfaced and alliances shifted.
There is an extra character in the book in the form of Severine, who appears to Kate almost as soon as she discovers that the French girl’s body has been found. Initially as no more than an acute awareness in Kate’s consciousness, conjured up because so many memories have been resurrected, then as a pile of bleached bones, stacked in a pile on the kitchen worktop and finally as a very real presence. She becomes an increasingly frequent visitor in Kate’s daily life: a silent presence, as enigmatic in death as she was in life and apparently determined to oversee how the investigation into her death is handled. Although I can imagine that this literary device may not appeal to some readers, I found that Kate’s reactions to her ghostly companion added an important extra dimension to the flashback elements of the story, as well as to Kate’s struggle to both understand what went on in France and to clarify her own confused and ambivalent feelings about her changing relationships with her friends.
This is an eloquently written story which explores some powerful themes – the complex dynamics of friendships, the toxic nature of suspicion, the stresses of running a fledgling business, to name just a few – in an engaging and convincing way and, as such, it would be a good choice for reading groups.