Small-town mysteries: A Case of Matricide, by Graeme MacRae Burnet, reviewed

The gifted writer Graeme Macrae Burnet makes a mockery of the genres publishers impose on credulous readers. The author of two ostensibly literary novels (both longlisted for the Booker prize), Burnet has also written a trilogy of self-declared thrillers. Yet the concluding volume, A Case of Matricide, demonstrates literary talent of the highest order.

It features the same protagonist as in the two earlier volumes – Inspector Georges Gorski, chef de police in Saint-Louis, a provincial French town near the Swiss border. Divorced from his wealthy wife, whose father is the corrupt and powerful mayor of Saint-Louis, Gorski lives rather sadly with his mother, who suffers from increasing dementia. He seems virtually friendless, and an embryonic relationship with the owner of a flower shop below his apartment is the only hint of romance in his life.

The inspector’s morose equilibrium is disturbed when a stranger shows up in town and attracts the suspicions of the keeper of the inn where he is staying. Interest piqued, Gorski visits the man, who is unforthcoming and seems untroubled at being questioned. After putting surveillance on him, Gorski discovers that the man is actually following him. Then a local factory owner is found dead, and despite the attending physician’s insistence that it was an accident, Gorski investigates what he believes has been a commissioned hit. Gradually the skeins of the story start to suggest their interconnection. Has the mysterious stranger been hired to murder the factory owner? Is the crooked mayor, Gorski’s former father-in-law, somehow involved?

These are links that are never fully realised, and the ending defiantly fails to resolve much of anything other than Gorski’s continued tenure as chef de police. Denied the usual satisfactions of a thriller’s closure, we begin to realise that even the suggestion of a conclusion is being made more by us than by the author.