History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 7/10 · Translated from French

• Plot: A Paris secretary borrows her boss’s car for a weekend, drives south, and everyone she meets insists she passed that way the day before.
• Clues: Richly strange: an injured hand, a mysterious coat, a body in the boot.
• Reveal: Clever, logical and a relief, though the explanation is less haunting than the questions.

Dany Longo is a shy, short-sighted, twenty-six-year-old secretary at a Paris advertising agency. Her boss asks her to type a report at his house overnight and then drive him and his family to the airport and return his car. Instead, on impulse, she keeps the white Thunderbird and heads for the south coast.

At a service station on the road, a stranger attacks her and injures her hand. Then things become stranger. A garage owner, a lorry driver and the staff at a hotel all say they saw her the day before, driving north. She has never been here. Later she finds a body in the boot.

Japrisot’s specialty is the destabilised heroine, and Dany is an appealing one: insecure, funny, stubborn and increasingly frightened. The road trip gives the book a cinematic energy, and the images of the white car on sunny French roads are strong.

The structure alternates Dany’s point of view with other characters’, and the reader begins to piece together a scheme before she does. That creates suspense, but it also reduces the book’s early dreamlike uncertainty.

The solution, when it comes, is ingenious and consistent. Yet it can’t quite live up to the eerie middle section, which suggests something more uncanny than a plot.

The 7 reflects a stylish, playful thriller that is slightly less brilliant than Trap for Cinderella. It was filmed in 1970 and again in 2015, and it remains one of the most enjoyable French suspense novels of the decade.