Graeme Macrae Burnet is best known by readers for his Booker-listed novels His Bloody Project and Case Study. The author’s Gorski books are possibly in danger of being overshadowed, but with what we now know is a trilogy coming to an end with A Case of Matricide (following on from The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau and The Accident on the A35), it’s the perfect time to look not only at this final entry, but also at what the series tells us as a whole.
Chief Inspector Georges Gorski still walks the streets and frequents the bars of the French town of Saint-Louis, encountering familiar faces in the same places he has for years. As such, a stranger stands out a mile, and when he is asked to investigate one who seems to be overstaying his welcome (in Saint-Louis, more than a couple of nights becomes suspicious – why would anyone stay longer?) it throws his life out of kilter in unexpected ways.
What follows is a crime novel where the crimes are not the point. Rather, these are an examination of what makes us who we are. Burnet is writing in a European tradition, and references to Zola, and previously Sartre, are apposite. Are we shaped by circumstance and our past, or are we condemned to be free? As always with Burnet, the devil really is in the detail. There are few better at painting a picture of an individual through the objects that surround them. The key incident in the novel comes from Gorski’s past, in the form of a memory of a broken mustard spoon, and it is in no small part at the centre of the policeman’s existential crisis.
It’s a shame that A Case of Matricide is the last hurrah for Georges Gorski, but it confirms Graeme Macrae Burnet as a writer of style and substance. Don’t make the mistake of overlooking the Georges Gorski trilogy. These are novels to treasure.
A Case of Matricide is published on the Contraband imprint of Saraband