Book Review: Blood Wedding

BLOOD WEDDING | Pierre Lemaitre
07.07.2016 | Quercus, MacLehose Press (imprint)
Rating: 5/5 stars

Sophie Duguet is living a picturesque life. She has a successful career and a happy marriage. Sophie thought it was just a case of her becoming absentminded when she first started forgetting where she placed things or parked her car. These instances start becoming more frequent and soon her husband and colleagues are growing increasingly frustrated with her behavior. Despite seeking counseling and trying to keep her life documented in a journal, Sophie soon finds herself in police custody for shoplifting and suffering from blackouts. Her marriage is starting to crumble and she can’t seem to get her mind to focus.

This morning, like so many others, she woke with tears streaking her face and a hard lump in her throat though she had no particular reason to be upset. Tears are an everyday occurrence in her life: she has wept every night sine she went mad.

Sophie is finally starting to feel a small semblance of normalcy in her new position as a nanny to a sweet young boy until one morning she finds him dead in his room. She should have been watching him, she should have known he wasn’t okay. Did she harm him? All of these are thoughts that flash through Sophie’s mind as she enters a state of panic. Knowing that the police will certainly blame her for this boy’s death, Sophie goes on the run from the law. She finds herself living a life in the margins of society, far away from the wealthy existence she used to enjoy. Can she figure out what is happening to her and if she is guilty before the police catch up to her?

I am afraid. The dead are surfacing. In the darkness. I can count them one by one. In the darkness, I see them sitting at a table, side by side by side. In the darkness.

Pierre Lemaitre presents a whirlwind of deception in BLOOD WEDDING. The novel starts off just like any other with narration about Sophie and the events surrounding the last few years of her life. After a third of the book, Lemaitre switches to a journal, where you get straight in to the mind so a sinister human being. As the last third of the book unfolds, the reader is tossed back in to Sophie’s present day life and taken on a rollercoaster journey as she hunts for the truth behind her nightmarish life. The character of Sophie is both tragic and yet heroic. The reader desperately wants to believe she has not committed the heinous crime she is on the run from, but how can you really believe a woman who can’t remember day-to-day events? This novel is an intoxicating, fast-paced ride into the mind of evil and good and the struggle between which one will win.