Secrets and lies
Lexie Elliott’s debut novel, The French Girl, will keep you turning pages until you’ve entirely forgotten whatever else it is you’re supposed to be doing. Laundry? Groceries? Those unreturned emails? Who cares. This book is all-consuming. The French Girl is a cleverly conceived, briskly paced, completely compelling whodunit that takes place in London and probes an unsolved erstwhile disappearance, now decidedly a murder, that took place in the French countryside 10 years earlier.
The story is narrated by Kate Channing, a quick-witted, wry, bold 31-year-old legal headhunter whose fledgling company is just beginning to take off. When the story starts, Kate and her closest friends find themselves being questioned anew regarding the disappearance and murder of a 19-year-old French girl they briefly knew while on holiday.
New evidence has come to light, and Kate and her friends now find themselves questioning all that they thought they understood. Each of the friends begins to suspect the other as they come to grips with the idea that some of them might not be as innocent as they want to seem. As Kate and her friends puzzle out their own predicament and begin to point fingers, we come to know the murdered girl a bit better since she has apparently decided to permanently take up residence in Kate’s mind as Kate’s dispassionate yet haunting familiar.
Elliott’s prose is sharp and bracing. We read of an ignored cell phone call “The phone subsides into sulky silence,”; we watch as a posh character comes to a discomfiting realisation with “a frown corrugating her ordinarily smooth forehead,” and we learn about how Kate comports herself with her often more fancy acquaintances: “I almost drowned in an army of girls just like her at Oxford before I learned how to swim in a big pond. It’s important to kick.” The mystery at the heart of this book, as well as the skilled turns of phrase, will pull you headlong into this story.
This is a novel about friendship, mystery, distrust, trust and love. Elliott has written a smart, generous, deftly paced and thrilling book that ratchets up the tension and keeps us hooked with telling small gestures, sharp dialogue and endearingly complex characters.
We come to care about these rich, nuanced characters and as the pages are turned the mounting tension grabs us: “I look around the table again. It’s impossible not to think, as each face passes under my gaze, Was it you? Could you have done it? And, most disturbing of all, How far will you go to blame someone else?”