After two first novels noticed and crowned with numerous awards, Cathy Bonidan returns with "Victor Kessler didn’t say everything" (Éditions de La Martinière). A book full of mystery that will delight fans of the genre. To discover now in bookstores.
In Victor Kessler did not say everything, brilliant third novel by Cathy Bonidan, chance does not exist. Destinies merge, the roads of each other intersect with an implacable fatality. What if everything was already written? What if the only issue was the manipulation of truth and falsehood?
“Sir, excuse me for annoying you, but I'm carrying out an investigation …"It’s with this innocuous phrase, spoken a thousand times, that Bertille, an investigator for a pollster, meets the man who will turn his life upside down on a Sunday morning in a supermarket. Facing her, the old man collapses. In her shopping bag, the young woman discovers the confession of a man named Victor Kessler on the murder of a child committed 44 years earlier in a small village in the Vosges. Would justice have imprisoned the bad culprit? And this Monsieur André, what is his connection to the case? Encouraged by the old man, Bertille made the trip to Saintes-Fosses to try to unravel the mystery.
To say more would be to say too much. You have to immerse yourself in Victor Kessler doesn't have everything said without preconceptions, forgetting the usual tricks of the investigation novels. This is, moreover, the path Bertille takes to forge his intimate conviction.
The young woman is an atypical heroine. If she has an apartment and a job, she lives on the fringes of the world, as on the outskirts of herself and others. Wounded woman, immensely fragile, yet she will find the courage to confront the secrets of her past. This stay in the small village of Vosges, very close to the place where she grew up, is for Bertille like a last chance to get out of the fog.
The reader is rightly caught up in this misty and gray landscape. The silent streets of this small town are crossed by the whispers of the living and the memory of the dead. Cathy Bonidan is committed to giving everyone a voice, but never judging her characters. These men and women who wear the thousand and one faces of guilt, whose memories and memories are as cloudy as the water in which the body of little Simon was found, drowned.
The novel, where one navigates from the past to the present, is very skillfully constructed. While we think we are touching the truth, the novelist leads us to another version, just as plausible, and questions everything. And then … is all truth good to unearth?
One inevitably thinks of the novels of the masters of suspense that are Guillaume Musso or Joël Dicker. But Victor Kessler did not say everything is also registered in another register: that of Three days and one life by Pierre Lemaitre or by Their children after them by Nicolas Mathieu, Goncourt Prize 2019. In the description of a world in desherence, of these small villages where everyone knows each other and from which one must know how to leave to survive. If at all possible.
But in Victor Kessler did not say everything, there is also a lot of love. Crazy, irrational love that destroys instead of uplifting. We travel these 400 pages on a tightrope, between tension and emotion, without ever catching our breath. Until the final revelation.
Victor Kessler did not say everything is available at Éditions de La Martinière