The Accident on the A35, Graeme Macrae Burnet

Having read the third in the series A CASE OF MATRICIDE very recently I was intrigued enough by the prospect of the two earlier books that I managed to get the 2nd via the local library. Hence it jumped quite a long way up the queue in order to be able to return it. 

Luckily this doesn't seem to be a series that is suffering from my backwards approach. Georges Gorski is a fascinating sort of character, bought to life, as I said in the review linked to above, by a writing style that combines wry humour and detailed observations. Everything's wonderfully understated, with a gentle, but skewering analysis of human nature along the way.

In this story, Gorski's personal life is imploding, and his professional life seems to be caught up in the most mundane of small town goings on. What seems like a straightforward death in a road accident twists somewhat after Gorski visits the widow to deliver the bad news. Mme Barthelme, seems surprisingly unmoved by the news of the death of her husband, and her teenage son Raymond, who has some problems of his own, instigates his own search for the truth about his father's whereabouts on the night he died with devastating consequences. 

The story turns on the question of personality, and control. The dead man's presence weighed heavily on his household, his behaviour a burden for them all. His beautiful wife might seem a little ineffectual, but she can manipulate, something Gorski must learn for himself. Their son has chafed against the control of his father, and you'd think, his curiosity about his father's activities might be a way to purge some demons, but nothing is ever as straightforward in these novels. Whilst Gorski is busy trying to piece together the timings, and paths that lead to the accident, young Raymond is trying to understand a father who was always aloof. An austere figure of rigid rules and behaviours, the lead up to his own death seems to be the most unpredictable thing about him.

As with the earlier book, this is another masterful psychological study of human nature and small town life. In the small moments, the day to day angst and small humiliations of growing up, and living lives closely observed by those around you, THE ACCIDENT ON THE A35 is as much about the death of a tyrant as it is the lives lived around him.