THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

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.