Blog Tour: The Reunion by Guillaume Musso tr. Frank Wynne #bookreview #TheReunion @wnbooks @Tr4cyF3nt0n

Welcome to a school reunion you won’t forget
FRENCH RIVIERA, WINTER 1992
On a freezing night, as her high school campus is engulfed by a snowstorm, 19-year-old Vinca Rockwell runs away with Alexis, her philosophy teacher.
No one will ever see them again.
FRENCH RIVIERA, SPRING 2017
Formerly inseparable, Thomas, Maxime and Fanny – Vinca’s best friends – have not spoken in twenty-five years. But when they receive an invitation to their school reunion, they know they must go back one final time.
Because there is a body buried in that school…
… and they’re the ones who put it there.

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Hi and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for The Reunion! As always, thanks to Tracy Fenton for having me on board and to Orion / W&N for the review copy via NetGalley.

Meet Thomas. He’s a novelist and a rather popular one at that, but his numerous fans don’t know about the demons he has been fighting since 1992, the secrets he has been hiding. Truth be told, I never really bonded with Thomas, but I found him to be an interesting protagonist nonetheless. In 1992 he had the biggest crush on Vinca, but unfortunately for him, he wasn’t alone in that. And then she disappeared and he’s been wondering what happened to her ever since. Thomas has been away from home for many years, but now he’s back for the reunion, and right away he’s questioning his own sanity for returning home because he’s been there for like 5 seconds and he’s already receiving threats. However, he feels he has no choice but to ride this thing out, all the while trying to keep his secrets safe. Along the way, Thomas finally finds out where Vinca is, but that’s not all he finds out; the man gets a lot more than he’s bargained for and the bigger picture he’s uncovering turns out to be much bigger than he (or I for that matter) ever even suspected. The setting, the plot, the characters have a bit of a Twin Peaks thing going on, with Vinca as a light version of Laura Palmer, and with a whole cast of mysterious, secretive, kind of murderous people in a setting that feels just that little bit off, a tad uncanny.

The Reunion starts out pretty traditionally though, kind of straight-forward, the classic thriller where the main character and the reader alike, are transported from present-day events to the past where something happened that was hidden away at the time and that is threatening to rear its ugly head now and come back to mess up the protagonist’s life. As the blurb mentions: there’s a body in the school, so naturally I was expecting a body to be found and the culprits to do massive damage control and whatever else was needed to stop said body from resurfacing. And so I started The Reunion expecting a secret, albeit a very ugly one, on the brink of exposure. I was wrong. There isn’t just one secret, there are multiple secrets and they are all hideous! The Côte d’Azur is a veritable breeding ground of them or so it seems and quite a lot of people have been keeping secrets for quite a lot of years. And I was not equipped to deal with that! I’m still reeling, I am! Every time I thought, oh okay, now I see what happened, now I understand, another venomous little twist came around and wiped that smug grin right off my face. And that’s all I’m telling you, I’m keeping this little chat firmly in the bag ?

In his distinctive style, Musso takes us back and forth in time until all secrets and lies have been uncovered. If you’re looking for an entertaining thriller that’s a little different, I’d happily recommend you check out The Reunion!

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