If a history teacher disappears without a trace in the middle of winter after a massive snowstorm, and the last people to see him are two of his students --- one with whom he had an affair and the other her new boyfriend --- does it make a murder? This is the question at the heart of DEAR MR. M, the new psychological thriller from Dutch writer Herman Koch. The answer is not easily ascertained, not by the characters within the narrative or by the reader.

Mr. M is a once-lauded author, now in the twilight of his life, who continues to write and publish books to mediocre reception. He is married to a much, much younger woman; together they have a daughter and live in a lovely apartment in Amsterdam. The book that brought M to prominence is called Payback, a mystery novel written nearly 40 years ago about two high school students, a boy and a girl, who murder their teacher after he has a brief affair with the girl and becomes obsessed with her after it’s over.

"There are some strange things happening in DEAR MR. M, and I’m not referring to the strange things that often happen in a thriller."

Payback is a fictionalized version of events that happened to Herman and Laura --- the real boy and girl --- when they were 17. Their history teacher, Jan Landzaat, shows up at Laura’s family’s country house on Boxing Day, uninvited and unexpected. He is forced to stay the night when a snowstorm prevents him from driving to Paris, where he says he is going to visit friends. The next day, when his car fails to start, Herman and Landzaat set out for the nearest town to find a garage. Herman returns to the house after nightfall, frozen and distraught, while Landzaat has disappeared. “I lost him,” Herman tells Laura. No body is found, and there is no trace of him.

There are some strange things happening in DEAR MR. M, and I’m not referring to the strange things that often happen in a thriller. The book opens with a letter penned by Mr. M’s downstairs neighbor, a man who appears to be stalking the author. The letter comprises the entire first section of the book, and details what the neighbor observes M doing (though one would assume that M knows the places he has gone and the sections of the book he read during a reading). He repeats that he doesn’t need to describe what M’s wife’s face looks like because M already knows. This happens enough that it becomes irritating rather than clever, as the entire letter section does.

An overwhelming sense of relief washed over me as that section ended, but then I discovered that the next section was a narration of M’s experience of the events detailed in the previous section. The book continues this way, telling varying characters’ accounts that don’t usually link back to the disappearance of Landzaat. There is a section told from Laura’s perspective that spends an inordinate amount of time on the death and funeral of a friend’s mother. It has to play back into the story, I told myself. It didn’t, much like a good half of the book seems unnecessary for the inevitable end.

Amongst the occasional red herrings and glimpses of useful plot is the Meta arch of a writer writing about a writer who is talking about writing. Each time the narrative begins to move along the story of what really happened to the history teacher, the chapter or section ends and never picks back up. I wanted to be captivated, for the novel to turn into a can’t-put-it-down thriller, but I never was and sadly it never did.