Alain Delambre is a 57-year-old former HR executive drained by four years of hopeless unemployment.

All he is offered are small, demoralising jobs. He has reached his very lowest ebb and can see no way out.

So when a major company finally invites him to an interview, Alain Delambre is ready to do anything – borrow money, shame his wife and his daughters and even participate in the ultimate recruitment test: a role-playing game that involves hostage taking.

Alain Delambre commits body and soul in this struggle to regain his dignity.

But if he suddenly realised that the dice had been loaded against him from the start, his fury would be limitless.

And what began as a role-play game could quickly become a bloodbath.

Antoine is 12 years old. His parents are divorced, and he lives with his mother in Beauval, a small backwater town surrounded by forests, where everyone knows everyone’s business and nothing much ever happens. But in the last days of 1999, a series of events unfolds, culminating in the shocking vanishing without trace of a young child. The adults of the town are at a loss to explain the disappearance, but for Antoine, it all begins with the violent death of his neighbour’s dog. From that one brutal act, his fate and the fate of his neighbour’s six-year-old son are bound forever.

In the years following Rémi’s disappearance, Antoine wrestles with the role his actions played. As a seemingly inescapable net begins to tighten, breaking free from the suffocating environs of Beauval becomes a gnawing obsession. But how far does he have to run, and how long will it take before his past catches up with him again?

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne. 

https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Pierre_Lemaitre_Rosy_and_John?id=AQAAAIAbxEBESM&hl=en_US&gl=US

Rosy and John