“Gorski was used to being lied to. People lied as a matter of course and even when their lies were shown to be implausible, they were stubborn … What interested him was not so much the fact that someone lied, but how they behaved when they did so. Often people would reach for their cigarettes or become suddenly distracted by some irrelevant activity. They became incapable of maintaining eye contact. Women toyed with their hair. Men fingered their beards or moustaches.”

The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau is the first book in the Georges Gorski series by award-winning Scottish author, Graeme Macrae Burnet. Nineteen-year-old Adele Bedeau works as a waitress in the Restaurant de la Cloche in the Alsace border town of Saint-Louis. At the end of her Wednesday shift she changes her clothes before heading off. All the regulars notice when she repeats this the next night. But on Friday, she doesn’t turn up for work.

The regulars also noticed that Manfred Baumann, their socially awkward bank manager, complimented her on her appearance, something most out of character for him. Baumann soon realises that he could be a suspect, and is not quite sure why he lies to Chief Inspector Georges Gorski about the last time he saw Adele.

As Gorski investigates, he is, for reasons he can’t quite fathom, reminded of his first case as a detective, twenty years earlier: a case that saw an old tramp convicted of the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl. Gorski had never been fully convinced the right man was jailed. Meanwhile, Baumann starts acting a little strangely…

Macrae Burnet gives the reader a crime novel that is much more about the characters than about the crime being solved. The players are intimately drawn, their actions closely described, the mood of the town almost palpable and the setting thoroughly evoked, while the reader is left to reach their own conclusions on some aspects of the story.

Macrae Burnet paints Gorski as a cop with virtually no ambition and a distrust of intuition, but a Columbo-like doggedness and more perceptiveness than first impressions allow. Baumann’s escalating paranoia is depicted with consummate ease, and is, at times, darkly funny. Readers will also notice parallels between certain phases of the lives of Baumann, Gorski and author Brunet himself.

Readers in the habit of skipping the Translator’s Afterword are strongly advised not to do so in this case, as this oft-ignored incidental constitutes an essential (if tongue-in-cheek) part of the novel, providing a potted history of the French author (Raymond Brunet)’s life. This is literary crime at its best.