An audio book.
Prologue - Paris, 1976. A man with a bloodstain on his clothes is about to return to the States. He regrets that he'll never she someone again - someone he saw 2 days ago?
After a talk by James Cobb (35) about altered states of consciousness - how hypnotism makes people more submissive rather than more honest - he's invited by a rich dying man, Fleicher (62), to visit for a huge amount of money. Cobb was investigated when Julie, a patient of his, killed herself (she'd tried 3 times before they'd met and killed herself a year after their last appointment. She's tried to seduce him).
In long monologues, Fleischer tells James that he followed a friend, Abe to Paris. A French women Abe was interested in, Simone, turned her affections to Fleischer. Abe said bad things about Fleischer to Simone. After a night when the 3 of them were together, Feischer had found Simone dead. He disposed of her body in a suitcase, thinking that Abe killed her but worrying that he, Fleischer, might have. Under hypnosis by James, Fleischer is more sure that he killed her, and James thinks he, Fleischer was somehow invoved. After, Fleischer tells James that he chose him because they shared an uncertainty about whether they were murders. Fleischer sends James a letter written by Julie. He dies.
James is sent some notes of a dead investigator who looked into the death of Abe in America. He'd died of an overdose in his room where there were 2 glasses, one with lipstick. While in Abe's room, reading notes, he's interrupted by a woman who he later meets. He thinks that Abe had loved the woman, Simone, but that a man, Fleischer had messed things up. He meets Fleischer, who seemed unaware that Simone was alive and in the States. When the investigator visits Simone, a call-girl, she assaults him and he ties her up in the bath. He sleeps. Next morning she's dead. Knifed.
The dead investigator had been to a psychiatrist who discovered that the investigator's story was untrue. He'd tried to knife Fleischer and had changed his name from Abe. He's paid a whore to dress up as Simone each week. He was mad.
James finds that there really has been a missing Parisian woman Simone. He thinks that Fleischer may only have pretended to be under hypnosis. He finds out that young Fleischer behaved strangely with women. His rich parents consequently stipulated that he'd lose his inheritance if he was ever arrested for accosting women. James interviews a US lover of Abe, an older woman who had followed him to Paris. He interviews a friend of Simone's sister and goes to Paris. Apparently Simone was a lover of neither Abe nor Fleischer. Did Abe cover for Fleischer's crimes?
James meets Laura, Simone's sister. He realises that Laura is actually Simone. Simone killed Laura because she was going to reveal their war-time hero father (who's still life) as a traitor. Julie's letter was actually for someone else. At the end Cobb wants to admit that Julie's death was his fault. He's banned for a few years.
There are many long, rather slow monologues in the book, from several perspectives. The final twist came out of the blue, which isn't a problem for me. Why does Fleischer ask to be hypnotised? Perhaps he really was unsure what happened that night. Why does Cobb ask to be investigated? Because someone had to pay for that murder 40 years before?
Other reviews
- ireadthereforeiblog (Chirovici’s literary psychological thriller is a smoothly written but thin affair that meditates on the nature of memory and the power of guilt but it’s hamstrung by a pompous main character whose reasons for investigating don’t quite ring true, a central friendship between two equally unpleasant men who I never connected with and an ending that feels like an unearned cheat and which left me unsatisfied. ... James never really rises about being a device that Chirovici uses to explore his main themes, which are the fallibility of memory, how memory can be influenced by guilt and how different people have different perspectives on the same events.)
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