reviews
Our first foray into international best-selling novelist Michel Bussi’s work, Never Forget, published in the UK by W&N, doesn’t disappoint. Literary crime at its best, it opens with a report from a lieutenant of the National Gendarmerie requesting help with an investigation, after a rockfall west of Yport in Normandy reveals the skeletons of three people, as yet unidentified. But how does this relate to Jamal Salaoui, the young man with a prosthesis, whom we meet immediately afterwards?
While out for a run, Jamal comes across a red cashmere scarf caught on some barbed wire, and then moments later a very distressed beautiful young woman, poised at the edge of a cliff top. He tries to help her, but she jumps to her death, the scarf mysteriously found wrapped about her neck. Although Jamal seems clear about what happened, the facts don’t seem to support his recollection and the investigators into the woman’s death seem to think he’s involved in some way. Did events really unfold as he imagined, is he involved in her death or is something else at play?
This is a tightly written book, Bussi’s plot suitably creepy and suspenseful, with another threads and twists and turns to keep the reader’s interest. Recommended.
Never Forget | Michel Bussi | W&N | hardback | £14.99 | 9 July 2020 |
Acknowledgements: This review is published as part of the W&N publisher book tour. Many thanks to Alex Layt, Publicity Manager, Orion Publishing Group, for the invitation and for supplying a review copy. All opinions are our own. All rights reserved. Please check out the other reviews on this tour.
See also: ‘Chris Whitaker’s small-town America’; ‘Nora Roberts’ Sanctuary: an Old Familiar’; Carver’s Nothing Important Happened Today’; By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’; ‘Yvonne Battle-Fenton’s Remembered‘; ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised‘; ‘We should all be feminists‘; The not-so-invisible woman: 150 greats in their own words’; ‘How Penguin learned to fly – Allen Lane and the Original “Penguin Ten”‘; Dorothy L. Sayer’s Busman’s Holiday – Romek Marber for Penguin Crime (book covers we love).
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