Description
From the Booker-nominated author of Case Study and His Bloody Project comes the next adventure of Inspector Gorski.
In the unremarkable French town of Saint-Louis, the troubled Inspector Georges Gorski takes the case of a local woman who has called the to report that she suspects her son, a novelist named Robert, of plotting her death. Between the suspicious death of their dog, Robert’s callous disregard for his mother’s accusations, and her unreliable state of mind, Gorski decides to keep a close eye on their house. He visits with increasing frequency, trying to understand why—and how—a man might murder his mother. As Gorski’s closeness to the Duymanns swiftly slips from curious to dangerous, his grip on the case—and reality—irreversibly loosens.
In his unmistakably Nabokovian style, in which the line between fiction and reality blurs and narration and truth are questioned at every turn, Burnet constructs an elegant, bizarre, and destabilizing account of the ways guilt moves between mind and body, suspect and investigator, and writer and reader.
Praise for Graeme Macrae Burnet
“Case Study has a lot in common with the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Roberto Bolaño, in which invented characters pass through tumultuous episodes of literary history that never quite happened, though it seems as if they should have . . . Case Study is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades.”
—New York Times
“A mystery story—or is it?—that takes us into the heart of the psychoanalytical consulting room. Or does it? Interleaving a biography of radical ’60s ‘untherapist’ Collins Braithwaite with the notebooks of his patient ‘Rebecca,’ a young woman seeking answers about the death of her sister, ‘GMB’ presents a forensic, elusive and mordantly funny text(s) layered with questions about authenticity and the self.”
—2022 Booker Prize Judges
“A twisting and often wickedly humorous work of crime fiction that meditates on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself.”
—Gordon Burn Prize Jury Citation
“With its layers of imposture and unreliability, the novel suggests that our personhood is far more malleable than we believe.”
—New Yorker
“Macrae’s novel works on various levels. It is an elaborate, mind-bending guessing game; it is a blackly comic and quietly moving study of a nervous breakdown; and it is a captivating portrait of an egomaniac . . . Macrae has reliably delivered another work of fiendish fun.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Burnet is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Case Study serves as a worthy addition to his oeuvre.”
—Chicago Review of Books
