A Case of Matricide

From the Booker-nominated author of Case Study and His Bloody Project comes the next adventure of Inspector Gorski. In the unremarkable French town of Saint-Louis, the troubled Inspector Georges Gorski takes the case of a local woman who has called the to report that she suspects her son, a novelist named Robert, of plotting her death. Between the suspicious death of their dog, Robert’s callous disregard for his mother’s accusations, and her unreliable state of mind, Gorski decides to keep a close eye on their house. He visits with increasing frequency, trying to understand why—and how—a man might murder his mother. As Gorski’s closeness to the Duymanns swiftly slips from curious to dangerous, his grip on the case—and reality—irreversibly loosens. In his unmistakably Nabokovian style, in which the line between fiction and reality blurs and narration and truth are questioned at every turn, Burnet constructs an elegant, bizarre, and destabilizing account of the ways guilt moves between mind and body, suspect and investigator, and writer and reader.