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    The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau: A Historical Thriller
    The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau: A Historical Thriller
    The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau: A Historical Thriller
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau: A Historical Thriller

    Written by Graeme MaCrae Burnet

    Narrated by David de Vries

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Manfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adèle Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis. One day, she simply vanishes into thin air and Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, is called in to investigate the girl’s disappearance. He sets his sights on Manfred.

    As Manfred cowers beneath Gorski’s watchful eye, the murderous secrets of his past begin to catch up with him and his carefully crafted veneer of normalcy falters. His booze-soaked unraveling carries him from Saint-Louis to the back alleys of Strasbourg.

    Graeme Macrae Burnet’s masterful play on literary form featuring an unreliable narrator makes for a grimly entertaining psychological thriller that questions if it is possible—or even desirable—to know another man’s mind.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateOct 24, 2017
    ISBN9781543665864
    The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau: A Historical Thriller
    Author

    Graeme MaCrae Burnet

    Graeme Macrae Burnet has established a reputation for smart and literary mystery writing with his highly praised novel, His Bloody Project, which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He was born and brought up in Kilmarnock and has lived in Prague, Bordeaux, Porto, and London. He now lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

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    Reviews for The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau

    4/5

    86 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau is a well-written and precise novel that is ostensibly a mystery, but is really a study of the flawed, repressed and not entirely likeable character of Manfred Baumann. The story is set in a small town on the French-Swiss border and we soon realise that Manfred, a manager in the financial sector, is a creature of habit who quickly becomes upset whenever there's any change to the usual way of things. So when the waitress in the restaurant he regularly frequents goes missing, everything changes for Manfred. While the story seems to focus on Adèle's disappearance, we also discover through flashbacks and through the POV of another character, Inspector Gorski, that Manfred's own backstory is not entirely what it seems. It's hard to say more without giving too much away, but I really enjoyed this novel. The characters are excellently drawn, and Burnet is incredibly deft at using small details to set a scene or portray emotion. Even though Manfred isn't the most affable character, I really liked the way that I was drawn into his head - it reminded me a bit of Rose Tremain's excellent novel Restoration.I didn't realise that Burnet's most recent book is a follow-up to this one, so I will certainly seek it out soon!
    • 4/5
      Amazing how the author managed to get into the minds of his two main characters, the loner Manfred and the policeman, Gorski. According to the translator's comments the town and restaurant along with its customers were portrayed accurately although events were fictitious.
    • 4/5
      Reading this book after "His Bloody Project" lets me see how "The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau" was a sort of dry run for the later book. The trick Burnet has perfected is a sort of variation on the limited third person omniscient narrative structure. We live inside the head of the protagonist just enough to see how flawed he is, but not enough to let us see the bigger picture. At some point I became very fatigued walking around in Manfred Baumann's shoes, the protagonist. Baumann is constantly evaluating what others think of him, always worried about the impression he will convey. There is literally nothing to admire about Baumann, nor to identify with. Couple this antipathy with Brunet's deliberately artless style of writing and you have very little to focus on other than the interiority of of a social misfit. But not only Bauman .. Inspector Gorski's self-doubts and his awareness of his effect on others also shows his unease with what other must think. Too much thinking, too much dwelling on thinking. It wears you out.At some point during the last quarter I started skim reading - always a bad sign - and discovered that I really was not missing anything, plot wise. By the end it's all guessing, self-doubt, and repetitive expressions of insecurity. The ending, when it comes, is nothing much.I'm giving this 4 stars instead of 3 because the book is cleverly done. But it is mostly a technical achievement, an affair of the head, but not the heart.
    • 5/5
      Adele, a waitress in the Restaurant de la Cloche, disappears. Manfred, a regular at the restaurant lies to the police about the last time he saw her. The novel focusses mostly on Manfred, a friendless bank manager who lives a life of routine, obsessed with what others must be thinking of him. Other chapters are from the perspective of the police chief Gorski, an unassuming man with a bit of an inferiority complex himself, who is haunted by a murder case he failed to solve 20 years ago.The writing was excellent, although unremittingly downbeat, and the picture of the town of Saint-Louis well-drawn. Manfred's character was excellent and believable, even at his most self-conscious and paranoid. Adele's fate was surely inevitable. I did not feel that the conceit that the text was in fact written by the French-sounding Raymond Brunet and only translated by Burnet really added anything. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      3.5 incredibly dark and insidiously creepy. Manfred, such an unlikable character, a man who is immersed in his routines, socially awkward, and well, extremely dull. When a young woman, a waitress at a restaurant Manfred visits daily, goes missing, he finds himself subject to police scrutiny. Gorsky, whose first case as a young policeman, was never solved to his satisfaction, relentlessly pursues Manfred. A very thought provoking, though slowly paced, psychological study of a man whose tightly controlled life begins to unravel. It was interesting to see how many reacts to this new pressure brought to bear on his life. As I said none of these characters are particularly likable, but in this story that didn't seem to matter, though usually I do have a harder time connecting to a story when there is not a character in which I can relate. Here though it made the story even more interesting. Seeing inside the thoughts of this man as well as those of the policeman give the reader a first hand look at the destruction of a person's psyche. The ending, well let's just say I didn't expect it, but as in the novel, a truisms because regardless of the trauma suffered by some, for others life goes on as normal..ARC by Edelweiss.
    • 5/5
      A smart, stylish story dissecting the life of one Manfred Baumann a strangely introverted man who works at the bank in Saint-Louis and dines most lunchtimes and evenings at The Restaurant De La Cloche. He regards, in an almost salacious way, a young waitress called Adele Bedeau and when she disappears Manfred becomes the chief suspect and is pursued relentlessly by Inspector Gorski of the Saint-Louis police. This delicious novel is really the study of human behaviour, in all its quirks and oddities, and you the reader have a front row seat to observe and judge. Manfred is a wonderful character, socially inept, reserved, withdrawn, indeed some of his working and socializing colleagues are of the opinion that his preference may be towards a male rather than a female partner. He is fastidious almost a perfectionist in his approach to daily tasks... "He dressed, combed his hair and put on his watch. Back in the kitchen he laid out two croissants in a basket, butter and jam, a plate and a knife. He poured coffee into a large bowl and sat down at the table."..... Inspector Gorski has a troubled marriage. His wife Celine, who manages and runs a fashion boutique in town, views Gorski as socially inferior but still insists that he attends social gatherings in order to "establish the Gorskis as part of the Good Society of the town." The Inspector therefore preferred to spend his day policing, and the pursuit of Manfred Baumann proves a welcome distraction. I loved the unhurried telling of this story the unravelling of the everyday orderliness of Manfred and by doing so expose a dark secret. Can a wise and wily Gorski utilize this secret to expose the truth of Adele's disappearance and by so doing will this set in process a chain of events that may end in disaster? With a very neat and unexpected ending I was delighted, amused and thoroughly entertained by this literary work form a great writer.
    • 4/5
      Obviously this is a work of fiction, but it goes further than you’d think at first glance. The translator’s afterword states that Brunet (how close to Burnet that is!) wrote the book in 1982 and it became a cult hit and later, a film. Brunet’s life is given in short form. But this is illusion; there was never any Brunet. He is as fictitious as Adele Bedeau and the others in the story. Adele is on the stage very little in this short novel. The two main characters are Manfred Baumann, a banker, and Inspector Gorski, of the local PD. Baumann is a regular customer at the café where Adele works. When she disappears, Gorski at first does not suspect Baumann. But Baumann, an introvert with no social aptitude, no love life, no hobbies, and no friends, lies about having seen her the night she was last seen. It’s a harmless lie; he has nothing to do with her vanishing. But once he’s lied, he finds himself getting deeper and deeper into a web of falsehood, until his nerves give way. Inspector Gorski, meanwhile, discovers information about a case that’s haunted him for 20 years. The ending has a couple of twists. It’s a bleak story, set in a small town that’s not doing well. No one is happy. It’s an interesting story, but one that gave me a bad feeling. It’s not a fun read, but it is a well done one. What’s weird is that I had the feeling that I’d read some version of this before- many years before. No idea where that idea came from! Four stars out of five.