The Reunion by Guillaume Musso

From Goodreads

French Riviera, winter 1992.
On a freezing night, as her high school campus is engulfed by a snowstorm, 19-year-old Vinca Rockwell runs away with Alexis, her philosophy teacher.
No one will ever see them again.

French Riviera, spring 2017.
Formerly inseparable, Thomas, Maxime and Fanny - Vinca's best friends - have not spoken in twenty-five years. But when they receive a notice from their old school detailing the plans for a new gymnasium and inviting them to a class reunion, they know they must go back one more time.
Because there is a body buried in the gymnasium's walls...
...and they're the ones who put it there.

My thoughts

I gave this read a 4/5 stars or 8/10. My thanks to the Publishers via Tracy Fenton for the opportunity to read this story in exchange for an honest review.

This story has been translated from French and I feel that if I could read French, that I may very well have given this a higher rating, as I feel that some of the tension has been lost in the translation. This is the story of four high school friends. One night one of the friends Vinca Rockwell runs away with her philosophy teacher Alexis.

The story is told as a dual time frame story and flits from the winter of 1992, when they disappeared to the spring of 2017, when three formerly inseparable friends Thomas, Maxime and Fanny are invited to a 25 year school reunion. All three of them are best friends of Vinca's. Over the years these friends that were once inseparable have never spoken, as they are all keeping a secret about a body that they all in their own way, were involved in it being buried in the walls of the gymnasium at the school they all used to go to.

As the story unfolds we the reader are fed lots of different versions of what happened to certain people and we are also given lots of different people that could have been instrumental in what happened. I did have my suspicions over one of the characters and I am happy to say that on this occasion my aroused suspicions were correct. There are some red herrings along the way, but eventually everything becomes as clear as mud even if it's a slightly convoluted way of finding out the answers in a rather rushed way.

This is the first book that I have read by Guillaume Musso and I am tempted to read some of his back catalogue. It was an easy read in the main that kept me engaged from beginning to the end and the fact that I guessed some of it, did not spoil my enjoyment of it at all.