Joel Dicker: The Mystery of Number 622

The writer goes to rest in a luxurious mountain hotel, but instead of rest, he unravels a mysterious crime committed there many years ago. This crazy story has it all - a corpse on the front page, a love triangle, a bluff and theatrical effects involving wealthy financiers and heirs of a Russian noble family. Who is the killer? Certainly not the one (not that, not those) whom the most thoughtful reader will appoint to this role. The intrigue winds like a serpentine in the Swiss Alps, the 600-page novel keeps you in suspense from the first to the last line. It's no surprise that the novel is one of the top ten most successful books written in French in 2020, and its circulation is rapidly approaching a million.