RAYMOND CHANDLER AWARD 2021
Guillaume Musso

In Paris, on a foggy, pre-Christmas night, a young woman is fished out of the Seine, alive, naked, but minus her memory. The mysterious woman is taken to the emergency room, but she slips through the fingers of the staff and disappears. The DNA testing, however, establishes her identity: she is the pianist Milena Bergman. But she can’t be: the famous musician died in a plane crash over a year ago. This is a job for the unconventional affairs office of the Paris police – the occasion that captain Roxane, kept on a short leash by her superiors, has been long awaiting. When her investigation leads her to the writer Raphaël Batailley, Milena’s ex-boyfriend, the two are catapulted into an unsettling enigma: can a person be dead and alive at the same time?