A dark, grave, beautifully controlled novel about a town marked by war, murder, grief, and moral rot.

Set in a small French village during the First World War, By a Slow River circles the death of a young girl, the uneasy authority of the local prosecutor, and the buried violence of people who have learned how to live beside horror. This is literary crime rather than genre crime: slow, bleak, psychologically watchful, with the feeling of a confession arriving much too late. It has shades of Simenon at his most existential, Bernanos, Patrick Modiano, and those postwar moral novels where landscape becomes an accomplice. A good one for readers who like mysteries with no clean absolution, historical fiction without pageantry, and novels where the village is less a community than a machine for keeping secrets.

Anchor Books paperback, first Anchor Books edition, June 2007. Originally published in French as Les Âmes grises by Stock, Paris, 2003; translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers. Winner of the Prix Renaudot. Good second-hand condition with visible cover rubbing, light creasing/edgewear, and general handling.