The Bleeding
Quebec detective Maxine Grant, exhausted with both a new baby and a defiant teenager in the house, is called from maternity leave to the scene of a grisly murder. Pauline Caron, a beloved former schoolteacher, stands accused of brutally murdering her husband, a charismatic professor of medieval history. As the silent Pauline is taken from the scene, Maxine makes an even more gruesome discovery in the house, one that raises more questions about who these two pillars of the community were. Answers lie in the past, in the stories of a bullied teenage girl in postwar Quebec and a grieving mother in Belle Epoque Paris, offering clues into Pauline, her husband’s murder, and the sinister secrets that their quiet home hid.
The Bleeding begins as a mystery, but unfurls as something deeper, less a novel about solving a murder and more a novel about how decades of secrets can lead to murder. The solution to the mystery of who Pauline is and what she hides is hinted at early in the book, making the reveal at the end of the case unsurprising but still engrossing in how it unfolds through the book’s three timelines. This is a novel of women, power, and the lengths that they go to keep that power. Gustawsson offers a few shocking and unexpected twists at the end, ones that might prompt a reader to page back through earlier chapters looking for clues. A word of warning: these twists may be disturbing to some readers, especially coming, as they do, in a contemporary story line. A dark and unabashedly creepy Gothic mystery.
