Time Is A Killer

This looks like being another big seller for Michel Bussi. It has most of the elements of a beach read, including large sections actually set on a beach. Corsica is the background for a tortuous tale set across several generations and two time-frames.

Back in 1989 15-year Clotilde is on holiday on that rugged island with her parents and older brother. Her father is part of a powerful local family, her mother an ‘outsider’ from northern France. A gawky solitary adolescent, Clotilde spends her time writing her diary in which she observes the antics of her teenage circle and the tensions between her parents. Everything comes to a tragic end when the car in which the whole family is travelling plunges off a coastal road and tumbles down a cliffside. Clotilde, thrown clear, is the only survivor.

Twenty-seven years later Clotilde returns to the island with her own family, husband Franck and daughter Valou. She wants to make peace with her troubled past, taking her family to the crash site and staying at the upmarket campsite where she stayed all those years before.

Soon things turn peculiar and sinister. A series of odd incidents remind her of her mother and then she receives a letter which seems to be from the dead woman herself. Impossible, surely, since she saw her mother’s corpse.

Meanwhile she rekindles an old romance with a boatman, who may or may not have been involved with her mother too. A retired policeman reveals his suspicions to her that the cliff top accident all those years might not have been an accident after all. Clotilde starts hunting for a murderer and a motive, and there are several more deaths, twists and revelations before the tale comes to satisfactory close.

Bussi recreates not just the heat of summer and the rugged, sometimes hostile landscape of a remote part of Corsica, but also the enclosed and very traditional life of the islanders, wary of outsiders, preferring their form of retribution to official justice, and above all fiercely devoted to the family.

I thought that Time Is A Killer would have benefited from a bit of slimming down: some of Clotilde’s 1989 diary entries ramble on in moody teenage style, and the present-day section meanders a bit at first. But it’s an ambitious crime novel, in an unusual setting and with complex characters.