Everything bad happens at night. Fatality finds its best combination of time and space for the sinister among the chiaroscuro of the moon.
If we add a strong blizzard that isolates a French boarding school, we end up composing the perfect setting for a modern thriller genius such as Guillaume Musso (one year younger than the other current great Frenchman of the Noir, Franck thilliez) guides us in a disturbing novel from which we can expect anything, based on the background of an author who soon fills his plots with supernatural aspects or slides a romance that offsets the weight of the tragic and the enigmatic.
This time everything happens with a feeling of claustrophobia extended from 1992 to the present. In that past we meet the young Vinca, of exultant youth capable of contemplating life with that perspective of maximum authenticity of what has been lived around love in its version of the noblest desires and ideals. This is how, due to that fatal tendency to subdue all faith in love, poor Vinca disappears into that world folded in on itself between the darkness and the raging storm.
Back in the present day, we find ourselves on the radiant French Riviera, where once young boarding school students come together to celebrate the silver anniversary of their training at that center. We recover our friends Thomas, Maxime and Fanny, all Vinca's companions and adapted to their current reality, rocked in that breath of time that buries dark pasts in consciousness in order to continue living.
In those 25 years, little has changed in the prestigious preparatory school for wealthy young people, except for some extension work that suddenly exposes them to the crudest of his lies. The old gym is preparing for its demolition, giving way to a new building that offers better service for the institution.
Except that those walls wall something more than the gymnasium itself and the three friends will soon have to face that the truth of their darkest decision is a short time from being revealed. And that's when Thomas, Maxime and Fanny must recover that past to face their deepest fears and guilt.
You can now buy the novel The Footprint of the Night, the new book by Guillaume Musso, here: