It’s a long time since I read a police procedural (more or less) that was so gripping and intelligent.’ I read straight through its small-printed chapters of a defeated, mildly miserable detective and an even more defeated, miserable teenage boy; wandered through the bleak compromised labyrinth Burnet had built for them; and then… Well, there is no then. There's only a translator's afterword that is even funnier than the foreword. The two adults - both in their 30s - were also taken to hospital but their injuries are not believed to be serious.

Don't expect your average, run-of-the-mill detective/mystery story here -- this book is something that transcends the mundane and the ordinary. It's so refreshing these days to find an author who rises well out of the mainstream and moves his work into literary territory, and that is precisely why I'm so drawn to his work. It's also why I'll keep buying and reading Burnet's books as long as he continues to write them. If you want an average crime drama, well, this is definitely not that. One more thing: the metafictional nods in the introduction and epilogue work very nicely this time; I was less keen on them with the previous novel but this time they add an entirely new dimension to the reading of this book. I can't and won't say why, but all becomes very clear. The victims, aged 34, 25 and 38, died of their injuries at scene while a further two people were rushed to hospital, where they remain with serious injuries. Gorski, led on by the dead man's wife, who does not believe that her husband's death was an accident, travels to a neighboring town to try and find answers about the actual cause of Barthelme's death. It appears that Barthelme had lied about his whereabouts on the night of his death. If this closure impacts on your planned route, please allow extra journey time. Plan ahead, you may wish to re-route or even delay your journey.The metafiction element of this book turns it into a work of art, and opens up a discussion about fiction and literature in general, and the way it may or may not be intertwined with the lives of the writers who wrote it. After reading this you may question other books, and which parts of them are real or fiction. It’s very poetic. Macrae Burnet becomes a character himself, that comments on and critiques the work, which to some extent, absolves him of the responsibility for any of it’s flaws. He says exactly what you are thinking at the end of the book. If it was overused it would be a cop-out, but it isn’t (to me at least, in fact I think it’s the first time I’ve seen this), so it feels very original. We’ll leave it at that before we spoil it for anyone. But it is a very interesting device which is beginning to characterise and define Macrae Burnet’s work. The Accident on the A35 is the second book in the Georges Gorski series by award-winning Scottish author, Graeme Macrae Burnet. It looked pretty straightforward: Bertrand Bethelme’s Mercedes had run off the A35 into a tree, sometime after 9pm on Tuesday night. He probably fell asleep at the wheel. But after confirming his identity the following morning, his widow, Lucette raised a query: where had her husband been that night? His usual Tuesday night dinner with his club would not put him anywhere near the A35. This novel is situated in Saint-Louis in France. It is is structured in two parts. The first part is the plot about how the death of Bertrand Barthelme during a car crash affects the lives of the two main protagonists. The first protagonist is Georges Gorski, a senior officer in the St Louis police force who is investigating the crash. The second is Raymond Barthelme, the son of Bertrand Barthelme. A spokesperson for Devon and Cornwall police said the crash happened happened at 11.10am, involves a Peugeot 207 and a Honda Civic and that two people have sustained minor injuries. Once again Graeme Macrae Burnet adds a foreword and afterword which explain how the story is a rediscovered lost manuscript by the book's actual author, Raymond Brunet (who also wrote The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau). It all adds another layer of playfulness to a very satisfying read.

Police and ambulance are at the scene of a two-car collision on the A35 at Offwell, Honiton, police have now confirmed. A word of warning – don’t expect a thriller with a few curve balls or twists with this book, it’s more of a leisurely paced character-driven journey in which the setting also plays a prominent part. Also, if you’re the sort of person that likes a crime or mystery solved and don’t like things left open-ended then this book may not be for you. Set in Saint-Louis, France, very close to the Tripoint, where France, Germany and Switzerland meet, the main characters are the Chief of Police Georges Gorski, and the Barthelme family – husband and wife Bertrand and Lucette and their 17yo son Raymond. Accident on the A35 is the 2nd in a series, but can definitely be read as a stand-alone. I haven’t read The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau yet and look forward to doing so. In conclusion I was impressed by Graeme Macrea Burnet's skills as a writer and reading this novel has reinforced the high opinion I formed of him when reading His Bloody Project; he has intrigued and inspired me to read The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau.The road was closed to allow emergency services to deal with the incident. It was fully reopened shortly after 8pm. There were 1,390 reported road deaths in Britain from June 2020 to June 2020, data from the Ministry of Transport shows.

A spokesperson for Cambridgeshire Police said: "Three people have died following a three-vehicle crash near Stamford. Both protagonists, on a similar quest - to find answers about Barthelme's life - spend a lot of time getting soused. They approach things from odd angles, making this book funny, sad, and even silly at times. According to the afterward, written by the translator, Graeme Macrae Burnet, much of the narrative is a reflection of the author's own life. However, while much of the book may have had a basis in reality, it strikes me as a definite work of fiction. As Sartre said, a novel is "neither true nor false".The incident happened at just before 1am on Sunday morning (16 January) on the A1 Northbound near Wothorpe." Neither Barthelme’s widow Lucette – younger than Gorski expects – nor his 16-year-old son Raymond seem moved by the news, which Gorski delivers in person on account of the man’s social standing. Lucette even seems to be flirting, discussing her sleeping arrangements – Gorski’s eyes straying here, his wife having walked out on him with their teenage daughter. The deceased’s seventeen-year-old son, Raymond (the same name as the “author’s”), appears relieved by his father’s death. “…a certain lightness; a feeling similar to that which he experienced when the school year ended for summer, or when spring arrived and it became possible to leave the house without a winter coat.” Gorski had no time for the idea of human nature. It was a meaningless idea people used to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own actions…

A spokeswoman for the South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) said: “We were called at 2.17pm to an incident near Puddletown and sent three double-crewed land ambulances, a critical care car, an operations officer, a rapid response vehicle and an air ambulance." Police are appealing for witnesses and would like to hear from anyone who saw either vehicle prior to the incident or witnessed the collision itself. There is an introduction and an afterword, and it's essential to read them both. The book is presented as a manuscript come to light years after the author's death, and translated by Burnet from the original French. This device is crucial in getting the full impact of what follows, but I'll go no further than that since the journey is best taken without a roadmap. This is actually the second book featuring Inspector Gorski. I haven't read the first one, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, but didn't find that presented a problem – this one works entirely as a standalone. UK Traffic Delays is a reliable source of updated travel information, obtained under licence from official data providers. London travel information is used under license from TfL: Powered by TfL Open Data. Macrae Burnet’s ventriloquism of a sub-Maigret novel set in 1970 pleasantly recreates a France of francs and call boxes. The one glaring anachronism is Gorski feeling guilt about drinking wine with his lunch, which would surely have been de rigueur for a provincial detective of that time. Neatly, in a plot already resting on old books, what people are reading – Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola and Sartre – enjoyably inflects both prose and plot. The main presiding literary spirit, Simenon, would surely have approved of a tense, strange funeral scene, and the successive expectation reversals three chapters from the end.There’s something a bit Wes Anderson about Graeme Macrae Burnet. There’s a dry humour to his characters. It’s hard not to love. He skilfully portrays absurdity and contradictions of characters that have a very strong sense of self. Because of the death of the editor Pires, a trainee who subsequently received the manuscripts had put them to one side, not realising that they linked up with a previously published novel of Brunet called The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau. The link was recognised later by another editor at the publishers, who then published a second novel from the manuscripts as The Accident on the A35. Graeme Burnet uses this as a clever structural device to add mystery and intrigue to what otherwise would be a straightforward police mystery novel. The reader sees the novel as being a smaller thing within a larger publishing world. Nothing was mentioned as to the fate of the second manuscript.