The Moment Before Drowning — Akashic Books

December 1959: a furious anticolonial war rages in Algeria. Captain Jacques le Garrec, a former detective and French resistance hero, returns to France in disgrace, traumatized after two years working in the army intelligence services and accused of a brutal crime. In the tiny Breton town where le Garrec grew up, as he awaits trial, he is told of, and asked to look into, a disturbing and unsolved murder committed the previous winter. A local teenage girl was killed and her bizarrely mutilated body was left on display on the heathland in a way that no one could understand. Le Garrec's investigations draw him into the dark past of the town, still haunted by memories of the German Occupation. As he tries to reconstruct the events of the girl's murder, the violence and guilt intertwine with his own recollections of Algeria and threaten to submerge him.