The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair

More Hairpin Turns Than an Alpine Pass

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker won the French Grand Prix du Roman. The Americans were not so impressed.

A love-it or loathe-it slice of Americana, (written by a Swiss man).

Synopsis

Nola Kellergan is a beautiful but troubled 15-year-old girl. She has a dysfunctional relationship with her mother, unstable mental health and a father who doesn’t understand her. She is also in love with a man twice her age. One summer evening, a woman phones the police, claiming she has seen a man chasing a girl through the forest. By the time the police arrive, the witness has been shot dead, and neither Nola nor her pursuer is seen again.

Thirty years later, labourers dig up a teenage girl’s body in a famous author’s garden.

Review

Joël Dicker writes a tangled tale. Set in New England in the 1970s and early 2000s, his story is a one-fifth love story and five-fifths thriller. Like my description, the story doesn’t quite add up; the writing is full of cliches – “The truth will set us all free” – and stereotypical Americans; it even has a Jewish mother.

You won’t read this book to the end for its literary greatness nor its strong characterisation, but you may finish it all the same. You will become so het up trying to work out what happens next that you’ll forgive its linguistic failings.

This novel did very well in Europe; we Europeans loved it for its pace. It got a distinctly tepid response in The United States; the Americans thought it was shallow.

I thought the hairpin turns more than outmatched the stereotypes, but I am distinctly European.

Excerpt

“Writer,” he said breathlessly when he’d caught up with me.

“Good cops don’t focus on the killer … they focus on the victim. You need to find out about the victim. And you have to start at the beginning, before the murder. Not at the end. You’re making a mistake by concentrating on the murder. You have to find out who the victim was. Find out who Nola Kellergan was …”

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker