Three

April 18, 2022
Friendship is complicated in Perrin’s (Fresh Water for Flowers) enticing exploration of a trio who meet on the first day of fifth grade and remain inseparable. Adrien Bobin, Etienne Beaulieu, and Nina Beau grow up in 1980s Le Comelle, France, where they become obsessed with movies and music, fantasize about leaving home, and are bound by two tragic events. As teens, they’re certain their new wave band will give them artistic, intellectual, and personal freedom, but heartbreak strikes when Nina’s mail carrier grandfather, beloved by the friends, is struck and killed by a van. In 2017, a body discovered submerged in a car in a nearby sand quarry may be that of a schoolmate, Clothilde Marais, who went missing at 18. Perrin wily withholds facts about the deaths through much of the novel, along with the secret identity of a freelance journalist narrator, a supposed outsider with an ill-defined suspicious past who seems to know more than is likely about the group. The numerous twists and eye-opening revelations will keep readers riveted. This offers a bounty of rewards.

May 4, 2020
Mishani (the Avraham Avraham series) displays a superior gift for psychological suspense in this taut and twisty standalone. Orna Azran lives in Holon, Israel, with her nine-year-old son, Eran, and is still coming to terms with the end of her marriage to Ronen. A teacher, Orna works tirelessly to support her family and to help Eran, who is socially awkward, to weather the absence of his father; Ronen, who has moved to Nepal and remarried, can’t even be relied upon to wish Eran a happy birthday. Orna finds a change of pace from her exhausting, self-sacrificing routine after she meets Gil on a dating website for divorced singles. Their relationship develops slowly, partly due to her own ambivalence about becoming intimate again, and partly because of increasingly troubling signs that Gil is not who he says he is. Things take an unexpectedly dark turn before veering in a direction few will anticipate, but which pays off in the end. Mishani imbues his flawed, plausibly-drawn characters with a deep melancholy, spinning the noirish elements into a deeply satisfying conclusion. Mishani demonstrates a real flair for literary crime fiction.

April 15, 2022
A decades-old mystery comes back to haunt four childhood friends in this dark contemplation on growing up and apart. Set in La Comelle, a small French town, the novel centers on three close friends in the 1980s and '90s. Nina, Adrien, and �tienne meet in the fifth grade when they're all assigned to the same dreaded teacher, and they quickly become inseparable. Through adolescence and into their late teen years, the group sees each other through the highs and lows of growing up. Virginie, a classmate, wants to be friends with them as well, but she's always aware of the difference between the relationship they have with each other and the relationship she has with them. But by the time Virginie, now a journalist, moves back to La Comelle in the late 2010s, the three have largely lost touch. That changes when a submerged car is found in the lake where they once spent time together, a discovery that seems connected to the 1994 disappearance of an 18-year-old girl that haunts the four of them. While the mystery of the car and what it might contain is thrilling and heartbreaking, the real power of this work, translated from the French by Serle, is in the way Perrin captures the experience of growing up and the myriad ways Nina, Adrien, and �tienne give each other a place of safety--even as they are capable of inflicting great pain on others. While readers may want to know more about Virginie, her distance from the center of the story is fitting for the in-group, out-group tension that drives an underlying darkness from the very beginning. Tender and often raw, this moody novel is a complex tale of friendship wrapped around a mystery.

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April 22, 2022
Nina, Adrien, and �tienne meet as 10-year-olds in the French village of La Comelle, and remain inseparable throughout their teen years. Their plans to move to Paris to begin their adult lives are derailed by a series of tragic and unexpected incidents that begin to tear the trio apart. Decades later, in 2017, a car is dredged up from the bottom of the village's lake, and Virginie, a mysterious woman with a connection to the now-estranged trio, arrives in La Comelle. What follows is a process of reckoning and reconciliation that will transform their lives. Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers, 2020) uses alternating chapters to reveal the characters in their youth as well as the present day, heightening the suspense surrounding both the wreckage in the lake and Virginie's identity. There's a lot to follow--almost too much--but patient readers will be rewarded with a clever resolution that provides each of the characters with the forgiveness and redemption they need to move forward with their lives. Suggest this to fans of reflective psychological fiction.

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