Customer Reviews

The lady in the car with glasses and a gun,

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A beautiful, neurotic blonde impulsively takes her employer's white Thunderbird for a joy ride from Paris to the sea. Along the way, she keeps meeting people who insist they saw her just a few days before. The situation rapidly changes from amusing to sinister to life-threatening as she seeks to determine just who it is she's being mistaken for.

Full of the charismatic characters and complex plot development so characteristic of Japrisot.

If you are tired of the same formulaic kitsch that seems to dominate the mystery reading lists in the US, then you definitely will want to give Japrisot a try.

Sebastien Japrisot specializes in mysteries that are far more complex than the traditional, formulaic thrillers that dominate our local bookstores. In the Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, he delivers another winner.

The Lady concerns a young Frenchwoman (Dany) who drives her boss to the airport; afterward, Dany decides to take the boss' car on a joyride to see the Mediterranean for the first time. Several people tell Dany during her drive that they have already seen her driving through their towns in the boss' car. As the novel progresses, Dany increasingly suspects that she may be connected to a murder.

In The Lady, Dany attempts both to come to grips with her past and to unravel what she did - or did not - do while driving through France. At one point, she remarks "God, how I have searched, only to find myself" (p. 127). Not surprisingly, she begins to wonder if she is losing her mind. This is familiar territory for Japrisot; in several of his books, characters struggle with issues of identity. The fact that the reader often cannot tell what is real and what is delusion gives The Lady a dreamlike, hallucinatory quality.

There are many other things to like about Japrisot's writing. His descriptions are very sensual, in the literal sense of the word, in that he calls on his readers' five senses when describing a setting. The vivid, often-frightening France that Dany inhabits will intrigue readers. Also, Japrisot cleverly uses the title to divide the book into four sections: 1) The Lady, 2) The Car, 3) The Glasses, and 4) The Gun.

While I enjoyed The Lady, it might not be the right book for all readers. It takes a lot of mental effort to read it; the plot is byzantine and it is easy to miss key details on the first reading. Also, though Japrisot mainly tells the story from Dany's perspective, he shifts the point of view a few times and lets other characters tell the story; this is jarring and it makes the book unnecessarily difficult to follow. Finally, I think that Japrisot's conclusion relies a bit too much on coincidence.

While not perfect, The Lady is a compelling book. If you are interested in reading a complex mystery that forces you to think, The Lady would be a great book for you.