My daughter sent me two books for Mother's Day, and Lexie Elliott's The French Girl was one of them. One I got fully into the story, it was a fine read altogether, and I really liked it. My hesitation in the beginning was really just that the main characters are in the high stakes world of corporate England, and the vocabulary and setting are just not too familiar to me. As the story progresses, however, the characters take over and the reader is taken in. Our narrator is Kate Channing, who is starting up her own headhunter's business, and a lot is at stake. Her business success as well as her personal life is at stake when a detective shows up to investigate the 10 year-old case of a disappearance and now confirmed murder... of the enigmatic Severine, the French Girl of the title. Kate and five friends spent a holiday in France a decade ago, and Severine, a neighbor girl who occasionally used their pool, went missing when the friends left France. Her body has just been found at the bottom of a filled-in well. One of the six friends subsequently died while in the service, and the other five, we find out, have very complicated histories with each other. In addition, Kate is haunted, literally, by Severine's ghost, whom she sees accompanying her every move and with whom little by little she becomes familiar and less antagonized. We also have the intriguing character of Alain Modan, the intelligent French detective who just happens to fall in love with Lara, Kate's best friend. I found myself, naturally, wanting the unkind and unlikable Caro to be guilty, but that would be too easy, huh? The two men left from the group, Seb and Tom, each has his own complications and histories with the three women... or four, if you count the French girl! The book builds up to a satisfying ending, and it was a great choice to send to me as a surprise!

on the bench near the entrances