The Double Mother

Starred review from March 4, 2019
Why would precocious preschooler Malone Moulin insist that his parents weren’t his parents? School psychologist Vasily Dragonman brings that conundrum to the attention of Capt. Marianne Augresse, a Le Havre police officer, in this brilliantly twisty mystery from French author Bussi (Don’t Let Go). When Dragonman first met Malone, the boy claimed that he remembers a life before living with Dimitri and Amanda Moulin. These vague memories, which include pirates and a rocket, strike Augresse as nothing more than childish fantasies, however. Dragonman’s belief that Malone is being truthful when the three-year-old says his stuffed animal, Gouti, tells him stories about his past doesn’t help the psychologist’s effort to get the police to investigate, especially in the absence of any evidence that Malone was being mistreated. While the single captain finds the psychologist personally appealing, she prioritizes the search for a wounded bank robber, until she gets a dramatic indication that Dragonman was on the right track. Fans of Fred Vargas’s bizarre yet logical plots and complicated leads will be eager to seek out more of Bussi’s work.

June 15, 2021
A daring robbery in Normandy gets tangled with a mystery of a much more unlikely kind. Malone Moulin is only 3 1/2, but he tells everyone who'll listen that his mother, Amanda Moulin, isn't really his mother. One of the people who listens is school psychologist Vasily Dragonman, who brings the clues Malone keeps saying he hears from Gouti, his beloved stuffed agouti, to the attention of Capt. Marianne Augresse of the Le Havre police. The story is nonsense, of course--Amanda and Dimitri Moulin have extensive documentation going back to a birth certificate proving that Malone is their son--and at any rate Marianne is already preoccupied with the high-stakes robberies of four exclusive boutiques evidently planned down to the smallest detail by four thieves working together. Two of the presumed robbers, local lowlifes Cyril and Ilona Lukowik, soon turn up dead, and a third, Timo Soler, has gone to ground somewhere with a police officer's bullet in his chest. But who is the fourth? Marianne suspects wanted killer Alexis Zerda, but her officers can't find him. As the search widens and the trail grows bloodier, Marianne, whose downtime from her job is fueled by her addiction to the interactive website www.want-to-kill.com, finds her questions multiplying until at length she realizes that the two cases she's been struggling to juggle are one case after all. Bussi piles on the twists with a sovereign indifference to plausibility, though savvy readers will see many of them coming. What they won't see in advance is the nuanced compassion for almost everyone involved in the mind-boggling fraud at the heart of the mystery. Brainy, exciting, and humane.

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