So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood

Published in France in 2014, this novel is billed as suspense, though it's suspense of a very different order from that of your standard cloak-and-daggers thriller. Jean Daragane, a novelist who prizes his solitude, receives a call from a stranger who says he has found Daragane's address book. When he goes to retrieve it, Daragane starts worrying that the shady Gilles Ottolini means to blackmail him (even Ottolini's companion, Chantal, warns him later that Ottolini is dangerous). But what Ottolini really wants is information about Guy Torstel, whose name is in the address book. At first, Daragane doesn't recall Torstel, but the name—and a dossier given him by Chantal—slowly awakens memories of a house where he stayed as a child in Saint-Leu-la-Fôret and the young woman named Annie who cared for him. Daragane still aches for Annie, yet it's also clear that she's associated with some sort of crime in his young life, a crime Modiano reveals in the end not with a bang but in his typically delicate and elliptical way.