An investigation is underway into this collision and I am appealing to anyone who witnessed what happened to please come forward. The Accident on the A35: An Inspector Gorski Investigation” by Graeme Macrae Burnet deservedly earned accolades as a Guardian Best Crime and Thriller Book for 2017, and was long-listed for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award for 2018. This highly compelling historical thriller — one of my fave genres — is beautifully described in the Publisher’s Note, which I’ll share here while awarding it 5/5! A spokeswoman for the South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) said: “We were called at 2.17pm to an incident near Puddletown and sent three double-crewed land ambulances, a critical care car, an operations officer, a rapid response vehicle and an air ambulance." I have still yet to read His Bloody Project (2015), Graeme Macrae Burnet's other book, which many people have told me is marvellous. I'll be putting that right very soon.

In conclusion I was impressed by Graeme Macrea Burnet's skills as a writer and reading this novel has reinforced the high opinion I formed of him when reading His Bloody Project; he has intrigued and inspired me to read The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau. A collision involving a tractor and a van took place on the westbound carriage way near Puddletown. Thanks to #SkyhorsePublishing, NetGalley, and the terrific Graeme Macrae Burnet for the opportunity to read the ARC. A spokesperson for Dorset Police said: "The road has been closed between the Symondsbury and Crown roundabouts and these closures are expected to remain in place for some time. We would advise motorists to seek alternative routes while these closures are in place. The front and endpapers claim that The Accident on the A35 turned up in a bundle with another unpublished Brunet manuscript. The Scottish middleman will presumably translate and annotate the third work in due course. As Macrae Burnet is careful not to specify the genre of this final text, it may turn out to be a departure – a Brunet memoir or biography of Simenon, perhaps even a guidebook to Saint-Louis – that would, presumably, further compromise the reliability of The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau and The Accident on the A35.Now the whole novel is seen as a real life description linked in to the memory of Raymond Brunet who is narrating his own experiences through the character of Raymond Barthelme. As the reader we are considering the macrocosm of Graeme Macrae Burnet, the overall author, manipulating the characters of Raymond Brunet, the sub author, and the smaller characters of George Gorski and Raymond Brunet. I find this an extremely intelligent device to add depth and emotion to the novel. Notice the spelling of the real author Burnet and the spelling of the fictitious author Brunet. When I first glanced at my copy of the book I thought that there had been a typographical error at the editing stage, until it was pointed out by my husband that there was a spelling differentiation and that the similarity was intentional. Here the reality and the fiction is blurred. All the other characters we meet along the way are just as well-drawn, building up a complete picture of the two neighbouring societies at the heart of the story. Despite the relative brevity of the book, the secondary characters are allowed to develop over time, making them feel rounded and true. Short sketches of people who appear only for moments in a café or on the street all add to the understanding of the culture, which in turn adds to our understanding of how it has formed and shaped our main characters, Raymond and Gorski. Not a word is wasted – with the briefest of descriptions, Burnet can create a person who feels real, solid, entire, as if they might be a neighbour we've known all our life. Police are appealing for witnesses and would like to hear from anyone who saw either vehicle prior to the incident or witnessed the collision itself. Macrae Burnet’s ventriloquism of a sub-Maigret novel set in 1970 pleasantly recreates a France of francs and call boxes. The one glaring anachronism is Gorski feeling guilt about drinking wine with his lunch, which would surely have been de rigueur for a provincial detective of that time. Neatly, in a plot already resting on old books, what people are reading – Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola and Sartre – enjoyably inflects both prose and plot. The main presiding literary spirit, Simenon, would surely have approved of a tense, strange funeral scene, and the successive expectation reversals three chapters from the end. Boris 'got caught' while others didn't but PM must STAY as he has done 'best of a bad job' [INSIGHT]

Devon and Cornwall Police said it was called to the busy road - a key route into Dorset - at about 1.40pm between the Axminster and Musbury turn-offs. Fans of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels will find and enjoy familiar ground in The Accident on the A35 , the second in a trilogy of French detective novels by Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet.’ Don't expect your average, run-of-the-mill detective/mystery story here -- this book is something that transcends the mundane and the ordinary. It's so refreshing these days to find an author who rises well out of the mainstream and moves his work into literary territory, and that is precisely why I'm so drawn to his work. It's also why I'll keep buying and reading Burnet's books as long as he continues to write them. If you want an average crime drama, well, this is definitely not that. The narration has the simple momentum of classic crime writing, heavy on lit cigarettes, light on subordinate clauses. Irresponsibly drawn to Lucette – he knows he’s a fool – Gorski digs for dirt on Bertrand, who at the time of his death was not (as his wife believed) returning from a traditional midweek supper with colleagues. That was Bertrand’s cover story – but for what? Why did he secretly withdraw a large wad of cash every Tuesday morning? And isn’t it odd that the damage to his Mercedes doesn’t seem consistent with hitting a tree?

The BMW driver and a female passenger, both in their thirties and from the same family, and the Land Rover driver, in her fifties, have been treated for their non-life-threatening injuries. This novel is situated in Saint-Louis in France. It is is structured in two parts. The first part is the plot about how the death of Bertrand Barthelme during a car crash affects the lives of the two main protagonists. The first protagonist is Georges Gorski, a senior officer in the St Louis police force who is investigating the crash. The second is Raymond Barthelme, the son of Bertrand Barthelme. The narrative is told from two perspectives, that of Detective Gorski and that of Raymond, the teenaged son of the deceased. Gorski is still in the town of St, Louis, a small city in France where "the inhabitants are most comfortable with failure. Success serves only to remind the citizenry of their own shortcomings and is thus enthusiastically resented". Gorski's wife has left him and he spends his time drinking heavily at Le Pot. While he misses his wife, he enjoys solitude and the ability to do as he wishes when he wishes. UK Traffic Delays is a reliable source of updated travel information, obtained under licence from official data providers. London travel information is used under license from TfL: Powered by TfL Open Data. The Accident on the A35 (2017), like The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014), is another engrossing low key classic.

I did love the first Gorski and this one took some more than strange detours leaving me as an uninterested observer in the end. Sad to anticipate reading a book with such glee and then have the balloon popped. This is on the face of it a crime novel, but the quality of the writing, the depth of the characterisation, the creation of place and time and the intelligence of the game the author plays with the reader all raise it so that it sits easily into the literary fiction category, in my opinion at the highest level. Finally, I would like to thank the public for their patience while the road closures were in place. These were absolutely necessary to allow us to carry out a thorough examination of the scene." Accident on the A35 is a literary mystery. Not like other crime mysteries that are plot-driven with many twists and turns. It’s important to step into this novel realizing you are about to read an easy flowing mystery that is character-driven. Traffic monitoring service Inrix first reported the crash on the A35, near the The Grazing Cow Cafe, between Honiton and Axminster, at 11.39am.The metafiction element of this book turns it into a work of art, and opens up a discussion about fiction and literature in general, and the way it may or may not be intertwined with the lives of the writers who wrote it. After reading this you may question other books, and which parts of them are real or fiction. It’s very poetic. Macrae Burnet becomes a character himself, that comments on and critiques the work, which to some extent, absolves him of the responsibility for any of it’s flaws. He says exactly what you are thinking at the end of the book. If it was overused it would be a cop-out, but it isn’t (to me at least, in fact I think it’s the first time I’ve seen this), so it feels very original. We’ll leave it at that before we spoil it for anyone. But it is a very interesting device which is beginning to characterise and define Macrae Burnet’s work. The Accident on the A35 is a darkly humorous, subtle, and sophisticated novel that burrows into the psyches of its characters and explores the dark corners of life in a sleepy town.” The Accident on the A35 is the second book in the Georges Gorski series by award-winning Scottish author, Graeme Macrae Burnet. It looked pretty straightforward: Bertrand Bethelme’s Mercedes had run off the A35 into a tree, sometime after 9pm on Tuesday night. He probably fell asleep at the wheel. But after confirming his identity the following morning, his widow, Lucette raised a query: where had her husband been that night? His usual Tuesday night dinner with his club would not put him anywhere near the A35. There’s something a bit Wes Anderson about Graeme Macrae Burnet. There’s a dry humour to his characters. It’s hard not to love. He skilfully portrays absurdity and contradictions of characters that have a very strong sense of self. I can't envision another Gorski as he will likely be found dead of alcoholism with only his mother to care since he is minus his wife and home.

So, games within games – and names within names. Attributed to Brunet, an anagram of Burnet, The Accident on the A35 features a protagonist, teenager Raymond Barthelme, who shares the forename and both the initials of the alleged novelist, plus, surely not by chance, the surname of the American, French-influenced postmodern fiction writer, Donald Barthelme. Gorski had no time for the idea of human nature. It was a meaningless idea people used to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own actions… The reader comes away with the impression that the author is deeply knowledgeable about the topics encountered in the situations, and not that he has just shallowly researched them for the purposes of the book. This is no more apparent than when Gorski is interviewing people. Also GMB has a very good grasp on social dynamics. The way the characters interact with, and react to each other is absolutely pitch perfect. Example:On the same day, three people were killed in a car crash on a busy dual-carriageway on the A1 near Stamford, Lincolnshire. Road users travelling eastbound are advised to follow the Solid Diamond diversion symbol on road signs via the B3162 through Bridport and re-join the A35 at the roundabout with the A35/B3162/A3066.