There is a finality to airplane crashes. You rarely hear of survivors among those souls who draw the wrong cosmic card and find themselves spending their final few moments succumbing to the inevitable pull of gravity and the result of a force meeting an immovable object. The foregoing is starkly illustrated --- to a great, but not total, degree --- in the first few pages of Michel Bussi’s novel. Already a bestseller in Europe (where it was published in 2012), AFTER THE CRASH is full of puzzles, twists and turns, forbidden romance and unforgettable characters. It’s a long book that reads quickly and sticks to the sides of your memory like glue.

Bussi has written several crime novels that have yet to see the light of day in the United States, but AFTER THE CRASH, his American debut (thanks to the capable translation of Sam Taylor), makes for a remarkable first impression. Following the aforementioned plane crash, which takes place a few days before Christmas in 1980, rescue workers make a shocking discovery: a healthy three-month-old girl. She has no identification of any sort, which creates a problem, given that there were two infants of similar age on the flight manifest.

"AFTER THE CRASH is simply amazing, an old school mystery dressed up in brand new clothes and quite unlike anything I can remember reading. One can never tell, but this has classic written all over it, though in dark and disturbing letters."

What follows is a custody battle between two pairs of surviving grandparents --- one pair is extremely wealthy; the other is working class and barely getting by. Shared custody is out of the question; after a contentious trial, custody is granted. The losing pair of grandparents refuse to give up, though, and quietly continue the quest to gain back the granddaughter who they know to be their own.

The narrative jumps back and forth in time --- between 1998 (the book’s present) and 1980. In the present, the little survivor has just turned 18 and is seemingly involved in an illicit romance that is alluded to generally but is only gradually teased out. She gives her older brother a report from a private investigator who has been retained to determine, once and for all, who the young woman truly is. DNA testing should clear it up, but Bussi has an answer for that as well as the ultimate solution, which has been in front of us (and everyone, for that matter) practically from the day on which the infant was found. However, it takes 18 years for the principals involved to figure it all out.

AFTER THE CRASH is simply amazing, an old school mystery dressed up in brand new clothes and quite unlike anything I can remember reading. One can never tell, but this has classic written all over it, though in dark and disturbing letters. It’s the perfect book for mystery aficionados to start the new year with, and, when read with a certain mindset, might tickle that touch of paranoia that has been sitting undisturbed in the recesses of one’s mind.