Beneath the Surface
French title : Sous la surface
You can be no more than a witness to your own existence, but sometimes the things you do bring you back, years later, to where it all started. And when you’ve lost everything, even the name of the one you loved can sound strange. Life is no fairy tale, but let me tell you a story…
Thus begins a thriller of exceptional power and virtuosity. Martin Michaud takes us to Massachusetts. It’s the day before Super Tuesday, the biggest day in the US presidential primaries. Writer and model Leah Hammett comes to the city of Lowell with her husband Patrick Adams, who’s favoured to win the Democratic nomination. Twenty-five years after leaving her hometown and swearing never to return, Leah sees her past reappear with violence – a violence as powerful as the hopes it inspires.
Thus begins a looking-glass game in which appearances form a complex web hiding a dark, oppressive truth. Killings, tragic loves and betrayals become the swirling eye of a hurricane that will devastate the characters’ lives and provoke upheavals beneath the surface in Washington’s corridors of power.
Tenebris Award, (2014)
Reviews
“We find ourselves plunged into a maelstrom of deceptive appearances, conspiracies, machinations, murders and passionate love affairs, all orchestrated by Quebec’s leading crime writer, whose razor-sharp prose makes him the equal of the top crime novelists in the English-speaking world! *****”
- NORBERT SPEHNER, LA PRESSE
“His superbly lucid style leads me to think that his novel could easily be translated into a dozen languages and sold across the globe.”
- MICHEL BÉLAIR, LE DEVOIR
“The best thriller ever written by a Quebec novelist.”
- DANIEL MAROIS, HUFFINGTON POST