The birthday party

Mauvignier (The Wound) spins a mesmerizing psychological horror set in the seemingly humdrum French hamlet of Three Lone Girls. Farmer Patrice Bergogne readies festivities for his wife, Marion's 40th birthday party while seeing to their young daughter, Ida. Nearby, their neighbor Christine, a solitary painter and practically a member of the family, labors on a canvas depicting a nude woman. Then a series of frightening episodes intrude on the bucolic scenes. First, threatening letters arrive on their doorstep, unsigned and prompting enough alarm for the couple to show them to the police. Then three brothers show up and hold everybody captive. Both Patrice and Marion harbor secrets that come to the forefront during the crisis, and, by the end, everyone is transformed by the mayhem, including Ida, who initially appears as innocence incarnate. The omniscient narration moves elegantly from exterior descriptions to the recesses of the characters' thoughts, and Becker's translation lends menace and grace. Recalling art-shock movies like Funny Games, this is pleasurably cinematic even as it penetrates deep psychological mysteries. Readers will be riveted. (Jan.)

A woman's 40th birthday soiree doesn't go as planned in this psychological thriller. The first sentence begins "She watches him through the window" and continues till the end of the page, some 275 words. It carries the observations, visual and thoughtful, of Christine, a 69-year-old artist living in a rural French hamlet. The man she is watching, 47-year-old Patrice, is her neighbor and the father in a family of three. He has driven Christine to a police station, but it will be eight pages before Mauvignier, a French writer born in 1967, reveals why--so she can report a threatening anonymous letter--and almost 100 pages before a palpable threat descends upon the hamlet, when a stranger appears and a dog is stabbed. Over a period of just 36 hours, Christine, Patrice, his wife, Marion, and their daughter, Ida, take turns as the center of deep third-person narratives that range from childhood fears to marital friction, financial woes, job problems, and, crucially, secrets rearing up from the near and distant past. Mauvignier weaves lines of typical tension among family members and neighbors but makes it clear that some larger problem is looming. Those lines tighten and turn atypical when Patrice hires a prostitute while running errands for Marion's birthday party, and they start to tauten when a flat tire delays his return home. The amount of detail and digression that Mauvignier explores in his slow, finely drawn (and smoothly translated) dissection of these lives is remarkable and goes far to sustaining interest amid minimal action. Readers whose tastes run to the pacey thrillers of James Patterson may find their patience frayed by the glacial progress of this quasi-Proustian noir. But if the beer god had meant everyone to drink Miller Light, he wouldn't have given the Belgian Trappists all those rich recipes. A compelling blend of mystery, horror, and suspense. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"She, crazy to the core, had chosen to settle in La Bassée and hadn't even wanted to buy or visit any of the three handsome houses in the center of town, which looked like surprisingly decent large-scale imitation puppet castles, with turrets, exposed beams, timber frames and dovecotes, outbuildings. No, she had wanted to live in the middle of nowhere, saying repeatedly that for her nothing was better than this nowhere, can you imagine, in the middle of nowhere, in the sticks, a place no one ever talks about and where there's nothing to see or to do but which she loved, she said, to the point that she finally left behind her old life, the Parisian life of painting galleries and all the frenzy, the hysteria, the money and the parties they imagined surrounding her life, to come and really get to work, she claimed, to grapple at last with her art in a place where she would be left the hell alone." Excerpted from The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.