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How do incompetent authors like Kathy Reichs, Dan Brown, Pieter Aspe, whatever, manage to sell so many books? It always baffled me, but now I get it. If Guilluame Musso represents the competition, the aforementioned are geniuses when compared. Just listen to the story, I'll talk about style later.

Alice, a French police inspector, wakes up in Central Park in New York and finds herself attached to an unknown man who claims to be a jazz pianist, and who, like her, doesn't know how they got into the situation. Instead of going to the police and having things cleared out, they steal a cell phone and a car and go on the run. Why? Some crazy idea that beccause she has blood stains on her, and fears that she might have killed someone. I kid you not. We get some flashbacks, the police officer has once chased a serial killer in Paris and went to his apartment when she was pregnant, only to get herself stabbed in the belly and losing the unborn child - and the love of her life, because when her husband hears about the stabbing, he dies in a fatal car crash on the way to the hospital. It's all very dramatic. Since she's never seen the killer's face, she starts to suspect that it might be the jazz pianist, and when she obtains a finger print from him and has it analyzed by her colleagues in France, she turns out to be right.

Now ** spoiler alert ** (though it would be hard to spoil this one) let's skip to the conclusion. The pianist is not the serial killer. He is a psychiatrist, and the girl has alzheimer. But she is not his patient, no. She was being treated by a friend of his, escaped from the hospital, fled to New York and was last seen near Central Park. The friend asks our psychiatrist if he, being in New York, can't go over there and pick her up. Reluctantly, he accepts. When he sees the girl sleeping on a bench, he suddenly and totally out of the blue, conceives of a scheme to get her cured. He has read her file and thinks that the best thing to do is to chain himself to her with handcuffs, turn the date on her watch back one week and claim to be a concert pianist. He will then allow her to slowly suspect that he is actually the killer that traumatized her in the past. To succeed in that, he must have the cooperation of his friends in New York, of the FBI, of the girl's colleagues in Paris and of all her friends and family. If that won't shake her up! Everything is a ruse and designed to get them both in a car and back up north, in the direction of the hospital.

Now I am not a doctor nor a psychologist, but I have some doubts about whether it is the best treatment for demented patients to make them believe that it is last week and that you are a serial killer, to whom they are attached with handcuffs. Just my two cents.

Anyway, the ruse works and it kickstarts her memory, she now remembers that she was being treated in the hospital and how she got there. It doesn't cure the alzheimer however, but that would have been too weird. During the epilogue in the hospital garden, the fake pianist explains the whole set up to her. She is, of course, disgruntled. And then, when you're about to close the book and say to yourself: "My god, this must be the most awfully stupid denouement I have read and will ever read," the psychiatrist asks her to mary him! He says, I wasn't interested, but the moment I saw you lying on that bench I knew you were the one for me, even though we differ in age and you have the disease. But I knew I wanted to be with you for the rest of my life and fight this thing together.

I closed the book, took the corner of its cover between thumb and index and dropped it a safe distance.

The style is pretty boring, with bad sounding sentences and weird comparisons that do not work. Musso knows that he has to alternate his subject to avoid repetition, but does it so clumsily that it gets annoying by itself. In order not to write 'Alice' all the time, he switches to 'the young woman' every other sentence. Whole pages of the novel read like 'Alice / the young woman / Alice / the young woman / Alice /...' etcetera. Other weird choices include lengthy descriptions that totally do not fit into the action of the moment. Consider this one. She has just obtained his finger print from a glass, photographed it and sent it to Paris to be examined. They are still on the run for the police, have to hurry to get into their car. She empties her glass. Musso writes: "the rye had a thoroughly smoked taste, with a slight touch of fresh wheat, nutmeg and a hint of clove". Were we running from the police here, or have we suddenly arrived at a whisky tasting?

Anyway, an interesting book but only in the sense that it can show aspiring authors what not to do!