Blood Wedding

Pierre Lemaitre has one of the most wonderfully twisted minds of crime fiction and psychological thrillers. Following his Commandant Verhœven trilogy (Irène, Alex and Camille, the latter two of which won the CWA International Dagger Award), Lemaitre has written a tremendous standalone novel in Blood Wedding.

Sophie Duguet is losing her mind. She's forgetting where she parked her car, the date she and her husband have theater tickets, items she put in her purse while shopping. She is also becoming uncharacteristically unreliable, spiraling into depression and paranoia. Worse, the visions she has of hurting people start playing out in real life.

When the bodies connected to Sophie begin to add up, she goes on the run, changing her name and location repeatedly to stay ahead of the authorities. Safety is hard to come by when she doesn't understand what she's running from, but as Sophie looks back she begins to figure out she's up against more than her own mind. Unsettling and smart, Blood Wedding is intricately plotted along parallel timelines, and Lemaitre ratchets the tension skillfully as he winds through Sophie's nightmare and toward the ultimate reveal.

Lemaitre's work is inspired and disturbing and can't be trusted. Although his novels are not normally for the faint of heart, Blood Wedding is more about psychology than violence and is thus relatively safe for the squeamish. With precise, elegant prose, he manipulates and unnerves. Like Sophie, the reader can be sure only that things aren't what they seem. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Powered by: Xtenit