The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (George Gorski #1)

It was an evening like any other at the Restaurant de la Cloche…

Manfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking & surreptitiously observing Adèle Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis.

But one day, she simply vanishes into thin air. When Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, is called in to investigate the girl's disappearance, Manfred's repressed world is shaken to its core & he is forced to confront the dark secrets of his past.

'The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau' is a literary mystery novel that is, at heart, an engrossing psychological portrayal of an outsider pushed to the limit by his own feverish imagination.

°°°

Graeme Macrae Burnet has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice - shortlisted in 2016 & longlisted in 2022. He is among Britain's leading contemporary novelists, whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages & achieved bestseller status in several countries.

Best known for his dazzling Booker-shortlisted second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), he is also the author of a detective trilogy set in Saint-Louis, France & written in a style influenced by the Belgian novelist Georges Simenon: The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014), The Accident on the A35 (2017) & A Case of Matricide (2024). His fourth novel, Case Study (2021), consists of a series of notebooks apparently sent to the author in 2020 to aid his research into a rogue 1960s psychotherapist.