His Bloody Project was presented as a collection of documents unearthed by Burnet as he traced his family tree. This time he’s the translator of a French writer named Raymond Brunet, who after publishing The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau killed himself in 1992. Two decades later, on the death of his mother, lawyers acting for Raymond (mark the name) sent his publisher a parcel containing the manuscript of L’Accident sur l’A35. Police were called at around 1:40pm today following reports of a road traffic collision on the A35, Kilmington, Axminster between a car and a lorry," a spokesperson for Devon and Cornwall Police said. Three stars though I disliked events because this author writes compelling, unpredictable and very off-center plots. Readers who are looking for an explosive “whodunit” plot twist will not find it here. Rather, The Accident on A35 carefully crafts a story of a man who is living a hidden life and who may or may not have been a victim of foul play. Accident on the A35 is the 2nd in a series, but can definitely be read as a stand-alone. I haven’t read The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau yet and look forward to doing so.

One more thing: the metafictional nods in the introduction and epilogue work very nicely this time; I was less keen on them with the previous novel but this time they add an entirely new dimension to the reading of this book. I can't and won't say why, but all becomes very clear. Police and ambulance are at the scene of a two-car collision on the A35 at Offwell, Honiton, police have now confirmed. In a statement released today (January 17), police said a family from Cornwall were travelling in the BMW involved at the time of the crash. The rider of the motorcycle – a man aged in his 50s – sadly died at the scene. His family has been informed.

Graeme Macrae Burnet has written a book purported to be a translation of a manuscript (one of two) sent to a publisher by fictional writer, Raymond Burnet after he committed suicide. The novel is a literary mystery in the classic French style of Georges Simenon, creator of fictional French detective Jules Maigret. Although, I haven't read any of Simenon's books I have seen the TV series Maigret based on the books and can see that the this novel captures the shadowy detective and the dark, smoky scenes in cafes and nightclubs of Maigret's world.

I really enjoyed The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014) and so was keen to read this 2017 follow up. Macrae Burnet’s ventriloquism of a sub-Maigret novel set in 1970 pleasantly recreates a France of francs and call boxes. The one glaring anachronism is Gorski feeling guilt about drinking wine with his lunch, which would surely have been de rigueur for a provincial detective of that time. Neatly, in a plot already resting on old books, what people are reading – Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola and Sartre – enjoyably inflects both prose and plot. The main presiding literary spirit, Simenon, would surely have approved of a tense, strange funeral scene, and the successive expectation reversals three chapters from the end. The second part of the structure of the novel is that it is not narrated by the author Graeme Macrae Burnet. This is where the mystery and confusion of the novel starts. The book's Foreword reveals that this story comes from the two manuscripts of a writer called Raymond Brunet, sent following the author's instruction by his solicitor, to the publishers Editions Gaspard-Moreau in 2014 after the death of Marie Brunet, Raymond Brunet's mother. This manuscripts were meant for the attention of the editor George Pires, but he had previously died. Brunet had died in 1992 after committing suicide underneath a train, and the manuscripts were only sent by the solicitor after the death of Marie Brunet.A collision involving a tractor and a van took place on the westbound carriage way near Puddletown.