On the heels of 2020’s Rien N’est Noir, an award-winning biographical novel about the life of Frida Kahlo, Claire Berest’s eighth book Artifice is a glowing, cinematic thriller, propelled throughout by zippy, electric writing, which builds in pace and intensity until reaching an ingenious, twisting finale.

Set in a magnificently depicted Paris, and taking every opportunity to revel in the French capital’s allure (with no fear of being seen to embrace cliché – a scene depicting a mass shooting on Bastille Day, for instance, is one of gloriously hammed-up and specifically French ultraviolence) Artifice follows a suspended police officer named Abel. “To each his own ghosts,” notes Berest in the novel, and Abel is certainly so laden, haunted in particular by a vision of a white horse: a Lusitano, the breed most prized by Louis XIV.

As the horse besets the officer, “as if from another life”, the story takes further shape. Museums across Paris experience a variety of apparently inexplicable phenomena and Artifice gallops towards a thrilling showdown between the displaced policeman and a mysterious artist, Mila, who appears to be pulling the strings behind these weird acts.