Central Park by Guillaume Musso

First published in France in 2014; published in translation by Little, Brown and Company/Back Bay Books on March 16, 2021

Alice Schaefer is a 38-year-old police detective in Paris. Feeling sorry for herself, she goes out with the girls and gets toasted. The next thing she knows, she’s waking up in Central Park, handcuffed to a stranger. According to her watch, several hours have passed, but how could she have possibly made it to Central Park without being aware of passing through customs or immigration? She doesn’t have identification or money, but she does have blood on her blouse. The guy to whom she is handcuffed tells her that he was playing jazz in a bar in Dublin the night before and has no idea how he ended up in her company. The guy has something carved into his arm and Alice has some numbers written on her hand.

The idea behind Central Park — waking up in an unfamiliar place with no memory of arriving there — is a familiar basis for a thriller plot. To make a novel like this work, the author must create an original explanation for the gap in the protagonist’s memory. Then the author needs to sell the reader on the plausibility of that explanation. Guillaume Musso deserves credit for concocting an explanation I didn’t expect but fails to make the explanation remotely credible.

The story is entertaining if the reader doesn’t stop to think about it. Alice embarks on a series of adventures to (1) free herself from the handcuffs and (2) figure out why she was handcuffed to a guy in Central Park in the first place. She doesn’t go to the police because, being a cop, she believes that involving the police without knowing why she has blood on her blouse will only make her life worse. She eventually gets some investigative help from her best friend in Paris, Seymour Lombart, leading to predictable confusion about the identity of the jazz pianist to whom she is joined at the wrist. To add to the confusion, she finds a GPS tracker in her shoes. She also finds a small object implanted under her skin and does not understand how or when it got there. That’s a lot of unlikeliness for Musso to explain.

Alice’s backstory includes the usual tragic events that shape thriller heroes. She was estranged from her imprisoned father. She had a whirlwind romance with a man who died. She was tracking a killer named Erik Vaughn when she had an unexpected opportunity to arrest him. She took the initiative to make the arrest without calling for backup because that’s what thriller heroes do. Vaughn got the jump on her and stabbed her in the abdomen, changing her life in predictably tragic ways. Vaughn’s fate after that crime is uncertain, as it must be to make the plot work. Alice’s dismal life is supposed to earn the reader’s sympathy, but it features the same package of woes that are common to thriller characters. The package fails to generate real emotion, and the ending is such an obvious attempt to manipulate the reader’s emotions that I rejected it entirely.

Alice is remarkably slow-witted for a police detective, given her failure to ask a couple of obvious questions that would shed light on her situation. The story moves in unexpected directions but rarely follows a credible path. As the explanation of Alice’s plight slowly unfolds, my reaction was, “Really?” That’s not a positive reaction. The plot depends on a remarkable breach of professional ethics that, to avoid spoilers, I won’t explain. Suffice it to say that rational people don’t behave in the way that the book’s characters behave.

Suspension of disbelief is critical to a plot like this. My disbelief heightened with every new chapter. The story has the merit of being interesting — the plot kept me turning pages — but my disappointment at the reveal keeps me from giving Central Park an unqualified recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS