The novel is a literary mystery in the classic French style of Georges Simenon, creator of fictional French detective Jules Maigret. I was disappointed to find this quite formulaic, it occurred to me half way through that it reminded me of a standard crime novel where you are aware that a slightly dodgy narrator and a set of coincidences are leading up to a Bad Thing happening. After reading "The Accident on the A35", I decided to throw literary conceit to the wind by admitting I sure as hell don't understand what Graeme Macrae Burnet is trying to do here, and just judge the book by its literary merits. A much-used word, karma is loosely understood as a system of checks and balances in our lives, of good actions and bad deeds, of good thoughts and bad intentions.

Brunet killed himself after publishing the previous book and left word that the follow-up would only be released after his mother’s death.One night, he's informed about a one-car accident outside of town where a local solicitor has been killed.

But one question dogs Inspector Georges Gorski: where has the victim, an outwardly austere lawyer, been on the night of his death? The characters’ pretensions are mercilessly exposed in frill-free prose… What matters, of course, is whether a novel’s characters seem to the reader to be alive. The book’s framework consists of small stones that gather bits of moss as they roll on, page after page. This blankness is reflected at the end by a less than satisfactory ending that does not conclude properly the questions raised during the exposition of the plot. There are many references to meal times and the food eaten, the types and frequency of alcohol drunk, the bars visited and what went on in them and descriptions of the inhabitants.

His novels have been translated into more than 20 languages and achieved bestseller status in several countries. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money. As the narrative moves forward, the reader witnesses a solid sense of isolation between characters, and even between characters and their immediate environment.