The French Girl (2018)
A cold case resurfaces after a decade, and suspicion falls on a once close-knit group of friends.
This is a murder mystery where the murder occurred a decade prior. A group of friends went to a holiday house in France, and the next day, the neighbour Severine had vanished. They were the last people to see her alive, until her body is found a decade later, left at the bottom of a well that had been filled in.
The case is reopened, and the six friends are back under suspicion. We follow Kate, a lawyer trying to start a headhunting firm, who finds herself uncovering uncomfortable truths about her friends and what really happened that night in France.
Once I started, I was racing through it. There’s a lot of intrigue and uncertainty, and Kate is a good character to follow, because she’s clearly oblivious to a lot of what happened among her friends. Building it around a murder that happened ten years ago is a clever mechanic, and which we never see in flashback, only in memories of the day.
I also affected the undertone of class and privilege – the friends were six Oxford graduates, but from different backgrounds, and we see how that affected the group dynamic.
I enjoyed this, and I’ve made a note to check out the author’s other books at the library.
Plot summary
There are six friends in the group:
Kate, our narrator, who’s recently started her own legal headhunting firm in London. She grew up in the north and doesn’t come from the traditional Oxbridge background.
Seb was Kate’s boyfriend when they were visiting France, but she hasn’t seen him since they broke up. He moved to New York, married Alina, and they’re expecting their first child. He comes from a more traditional Oxbridge background.
Tom is Seb’s cousin and a city banker. Kate believes he has an unrequited love for Lara, another member of the group.
Lara is Kate’s best friend, a Scandinavian blonde and the head-turner of the group. She and Kate are close confidantes.
Caro is another city lawyer, and Kate’s firm is trying to win a contract with her father’s firm. She also comes from a traditional Oxbridge background, and has always been frosty towards Kate – in part because she loves Seb, and didn’t like the idea of Kate dating him.
Theo was a dear friend of Tom, but unexpectedly signed up for military service and died when he threw himself on a grenade to protect four other men.
At the start of the book, Tom tells Kate that Severine’s bones have been found, which is reopening the case. A new detective, Modan, has travelled from France to investigate and is questioning the group. In a useful stroke of timing, Seb has recently moved back to London, so all five friends are available. This is complicated by Lara, who finds herself infatuated with the detective, in a way that Kate’s never seen before.
Kate starts to see the ghost of Severine – not a vague image, but a well-defined image of the teenager around her life. Listening on conversations, observing her life, frozen in time.
They all discuss the case in different configurations, trying to piece together what happened that night, and whether one of them could be guilty. Kate learns that Seb slept with Severine on their final night – despite still dating her – and starts to worry that she’s going to take the blame for the murder, with this new motive of “jealous lover”.
She also wonders whether to reveal that Caro used Kate as a drug mule, smuggling cocaine into France in Kate’s bags. She’d kept that secret previously to protect Caro, but would Caro do the same for her? (No.)
She also learns more about the love lives of her friends. Caro still harbours feelings for Seb, and still hopes to break him up with Alina. Meanwhile, Tom has unrequited feelings for Kate (not Lara), but Seb went after Kate because he knew Tom was interested, and Tom stayed silent for years.
As the case draws to a close, Kate realises the truth – Caro wanted Seb, was jealous of Severine sleeping with him, and hit her with Theo’s car while under the influence of cocaine. She’s been spreading rumours that Kate is about to be arrested, and poisons her with a rohypnol overdose. Kate calls Tom for help and survives the poisoning, and Alina and Seb leave town to avoid any harm from Caro.
Unfortunately there isn’t enough evidence to pin Caro for either murder, but her father suspends her from the family law firm, and she finds herself cut off from the legal world and her friends. For years Caro was used to getting whatever she wanted, but finally she went too far.
Kate and Tom start dating and build a life together; they have several kids and her law firm grows; she sees Caro once in an airport but refuses to talk to her; the ghost of Severine continues to haunt her silently.
Quotes and highlights
In Chapter 2 (page 10), an early description of Lara’s dating hsitroy:
“Sorry,” she says, yawning. “I’m knackered. Can we do tomorrow instead?”
“Knackered … What were you up to last night?” I couldn’t remember her saying she had a date, but Lara picks up men like the rest of us pick up newspapers. She puts them down in the same way, too. She is and always has been unrelentingly and unashamedly promiscuous, but somehow in her it seems … wholesome.
This sets up a contrast with later in the book, when she’s head over heels for Modan.
In Chapter 3, Kate realises that Modan is the same investigator as a decade prior, and he and Lara have feelings for each other:
When I’ve closed the door on Monsieur Alain Modan, investigateur, I follow Lara to the kitchen and find her already pulling a bottle of white wine from my fridge and studiously avoiding my eye.
“What was that all about?”
She pours two glasses. Very large glasses. She seems to be giving the task more attention than it deserves. “Nothing. What do you mean?”
“Don’t give me that. Did you and he …?”
“No!” She looks up, appalled. “Of course not!” I hold her gaze until she breaks and takes a sip of her wine.
I reach out for my own glass and take a sip, still watching her. She’s avoiding my eyes again. “Lara,” I say warningly.
“Oh, all right!” She folds, like I knew she would, and finally looks up. “Nothing happened, truly. He, um…” She takes another sip of wine, then says in a rush, “He wouldn’t. He said it wouldn’t be proper. Appropriate, I mean. Under the circumstances.” She’s blushing, more furiously than I’ve ever seen before.
“Oh my God,” I say wonderingly, a smile breaking out slowly on my face. “He’s that mythical creature. The one that got away from Lara Petersson.”
“He’s not… It’s not… Oh, fuck off,” she says, screwing up her nose prettily. She takes an unfeasibly long drink from her glass, then looks at me dejectedly. “Only it’s still not appropriate, right? Not until he clears us from the investigation. And then he’ll be back in France.”
“I can’t believe you never told me any of this.” I’m not hurt; I’m just amazed that I missed this.
She ducks her head apologetically. “Well, like I said, nothing happened. And you and Seb had just split up, and you know what a state that left you in. I didn’t want to dump my crap on you …”
For once the mention of Seb slides by almost unnoticed; I’m too thrown by this revelation. What else did I miss when I was licking my Seb-inflicted wounds? She takes in another large slug of wine, and I gaze at her in bemusement. Not only did the rejection matter to her then, it clearly still matters now. This is a Lara I haven’t seen before.
And then I think, Poor Tom.
In Chapter 6 (page 71), when Kate celebrates landing a major contract for the young firm:
“We got it!” I croon. “We got it, we got it, we got it!”
“Haft & Weil?” he asks urgently. “Really?”
I nod, beaming at him. “Awesome!” he roars. “Haft & fucking Weil! Fucking awesome!” Then he’s slinging an arm round each of our shoulders and all three of us are jumping together and grinning inanely, and I think: I should remember times like this, remember perfectly. I should bottle them somehow. You don’t know how many of these moments you might have in your life.
In Chapter 13 (page 147), Kate watches Lara fall asleep after an evening spent discussing Seb and the case:
I have a spare bedroom, but Lara crawls into bed with me like days of old, and turns on her side, resting her head on her bent arm. In the warm glow of the bedside light I can see her eyeliner is smudged and her eyelids are heavy with the wine; she looks blowsy and sloppy and decadently sexy. Modan wakes up to this, I think. Does the effect ever wear off? One day will he look at her and move on without lingering, his brain ticking over his to-do list for the day? Or will he always stop for a moment, arrested by the sight, and perhaps touch the back of his hand to her cheek? And Tom, does he remember what she looked like in his bed all those years ago? Does he yearn to see her there now? I cut off that train of thought quickly and turn on my back to look at the ceiling instead. There were times at Oxford, and in the years after, when I had stabs of jealousy toward Lara: for her effortless magnetism, her easygoing take-it-or-leave-it flirting, for how her very presence dimmed mine in the eyes of the male population. Then I would reason those feelings away; I would console myself that I appealed to the more discerning gentleman … I thought I had grown up, cast off my insecurities, but here we are a decade on: it’s so demeaning to realize that actually nothing has changed.
In Chapter 21 (page 294), the book ends with Severine still accompanying Kate:
And so the lovely ribbon of time keeps slipping through my fingers, and through it all, a walnut brown girl with impossibly slender limbs saunters by, her dark, unreflective eyes taking everything in but revealing nothing. I never do see her smile.