Time travel is no longer the terrain of science fiction.
In BLACK WATER LILIES, author Michel Bussi crafts a chrono- synclastic crime story, a horological homicide that adds a chilling new dimension to the term, cold case.
BLACK WATER LILIES begins with an epigraph from F. Robert-Kempf, “with Monet, we don’t see the real world, but we grasp its appearance.”
Eloquent and erudite, because nothing is what it seems on the surface of this murder mystery set in Monet’s backyard, the town of Giverny, a tourist Mecca because of the gardens where he painted his celebrated Water Lilies.
These flowers float on the surface, but it’s the depths underneath that concerns Bussi’s tale of inter-generational murder. Suitably, death by drowning is the method, but what is the motive?
A painting, a fabled lost masterpiece of Monet? Or jealousy, pure and simple, the green eyed monster with a black heart?
Bussie ingeniously muddies the waters, playing with time in playing for time, and giving us intriguing characters with who to play and pass the time.
There’s the investigating cop, the Tiger Triumph riding tyro, Inspector Laurenc Serenacand his sidekick Inspector Sylvio Benavides, a chalk and cheese double act that is delicious in it’s idiosyncratic symbioses. The dashing and debonair Laurenc is jauntily juxtaposed with the plodding, diligent, by-the- book Sylvio.
And there is the beautiful and seductive village school teacher, Stephanie Dupain, married to a prime suspect and an object of desire for Laurenc.
Central to this ingenious jigsaw puzzle of a novel are three women, all quite different, but all with something in common, a secret. The thirteen days from may 13 to may 25, 2010 pass like a parenthesis in their lives. The parenthesis opens with a murder on the first day and finishes with another on the last day.
Riddle upon riddle allow the prettiest of red herrings to live and thrive under the BLACK WATER LILIES, as Bussi threads his thriller with golden needles of classical literature and art.
Michel Bussi is one of France’s most prestigious crime writers. BLACK WATER LILIES is only the second of his novels to be translated into English, with Shaun Whiteside doing the honours on this occasion.
Murder, Monet and amour – it is a mystery merveilleux!
BLACK WATER LILIES by Michel Bussi is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.