A little thing happened to me. Which could just as easily have happened to you. Youre on vacation in a hotel with your son in a small village and youre about to go see some friends, but something holds you back, a mysterious reticence that prevents you from going to find them. Here is the novel of this reticence, small and specific, and of the fears that it instigates, little by little. Because not only are your friends not there when you do decide to go find them, but, several days later, you find a dead cat in the harbor, a black cat floating in front of you on the water In Jean-Philippe Toussaints take on the detective novel, we find a man on vacation in a tiny village, where a writer named Biaggi appears to be keeping him under surveillance. To what end? Ah, but its far more pleasant to enjoy the Mediterranean night air than to look for answers, make deductions, or get upsetisnt it?