GLEN AFFRIC

The American debut from French writer Giebel is a solid if straight-ahead suspense novel about two brothers whom gross injustice seeks out again and again.

Léonard (his name a wink to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men) is a large, powerful, sweet-tempered teen who’s relentlessly bullied and taken advantage of because of certain intellectual disabilities. Léonard was a foundling, discovered battered and bruised in a ditch and taken in at age 5 by kind, heartbroken Mona. The boy’s favorite keepsake is a postcard from Glen Affric, Scotland, where he’s been led to believe his brother, Jorge, Mona’s beloved elder son, lives. But Glen Affric is a cover story. Jorge has been convicted of two murders he didn’t commit, and for 16 years he’s been in prison, a status that has cemented the family’s status as shunned and despised outsiders in their town. On the day when Jorge is paroled, Léonard lands in prison himself, briefly but disastrously, after—not knowing his strength—he defends himself too vigorously and injures his tormentors. Léonard emerges from lockup psychologically and physically wounded, and he’s bewildered and upset to learn where Jorge has been. But the vulnerable brothers soon grow close, and as the horrors and injustices continue to mount, they grow ever closer. Jorge is on parole, under constant threat of being returned to prison if he loses his job or responds to the townspeople’s taunts, abuses, provocations. Framed for theft and fired once, he takes on lucrative illicit work and acquires, just in case, a bug-out bag, which he and Léonard bury in the backyard. The reader knows it cannot stay buried for long. Sure enough, Jorge is framed for another murder—of the woman he loves, a restaurateur he felt forced to break up with in order to spare her business and her reputation. The novel, a bit slow to launch, picks up major momentum around its midpoint, when the brothers kidnap a somewhat sympathetic cop and go on the run. The book, and the brothers, are headed to a destination and a denouement that seem predetermined, but Giebel delivers them and us to the rendezvous with some panache.

Not twisty or unexpected, but tense—and with a surprising sweetness in the relationship between the brothers.