BEFORE
A man running along a remote clifftop path on an icy-cold February morning.
A woman standing on the cliff's edge.
A red scarf on the ground between them.
AFTER
The man is alone - paralysed by fear.
The woman is on the beach below - dead.
The red scarf is now perfectly - and impossibly - arranged around the woman's broken neck.
A handful of seconds. Two lives colliding.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Never Forget, Michel Bussi
THE OTHER MOTHER and NEVER FORGET are two Michel Bussi novels that I'd somehow managed to miss reading, until I was reminded recently. Luckily the library had copies of both of them, so that gap, at least, has now been closed.
NEVER FORGET (unlike THE OTHER MOTHER) is very much a return to previous thriller stylings in books like BLACK WATER LILIES, AFTER THE CRASH and DON'T LET GO.
The story starts out with a young Arab Para-Olympic contender, on a self-imposed training camp, running along a clifftop on the coast of France in 2014. After picking up an expensive red silk scarf caught on a fence, he then comes across a beautiful, but distressed and dishevelled woman, preparing to jump from the cliff. Despite his attempts to calm her and then draw her away from the edge, she grabs the proffered scarf and jumps to her death. Young Jamal is an easy, dare we say, convenient suspect, despite his prosthetic leg, and the very unlikely possibility that he's either a rapist or a murderer, especially when the reader discovers that two women had already been attacked in the same location, in the same manner, ten years before.
Already distressed by what he has witnessed, and then by being considered a suspect, he starts to receive envelopes with details about the prior murders and investigations, when he discovers that the latest victim is the spitting image of one of the women who were killed in 2004. Which leaves him conducting his own investigation, in an attempt to clear his name, and out of a sense of basic common decency.
In this novel Bussi is exploring not just rape, murder and overt violence, but expectations, aspiration, racism, and attitudes towards disability and difference. He does that in a twisty, dark, psychological thriller style, that will have your head spinning, and any sense of clarity and understanding blown out from under you chapter by chapter. It does beggar belief that despite the timings, despite the witnesses to this latest fall, and despite the unlikeliness of Jamal as a suspect - just based on the time gap between the three rapes and murders, that he would remain prime suspect for a nanosecond, but this is the sort of story where you just have to go with the flow, ride the peaks and troughs and stay with Jamal and his battle to discover the truth.