Martha works in a very highly skilled job as a social worker. Her French husband equally highly skilled job in a powerful firm. His sudden death in a hit and run accident leaves Martha bereft. Further investigation shows that he had actually taken a day off, unknown to Martha and only known to a trusted coworker of his. Casual clothes including a hoodie, never worn by Thierry found bundled in a briefcase adds to the mystery.

The story unravels with Martha not knowing what she should do next. Vulnerable and susceptible, she falls prey to the smooth talking Pascal while on a break in France, visiting her closest friend Erin. Falling in love with a decrepit, abandoned house was not on the cards but Martha feels that it will give her focus. Apart from Pascal, who is a scammer, Martha discovers that Pascal has a nineteen year old son, whom he was on his way to meet, on the fateful day he died.

The story dealing with how people manage or rather don’t manage grief, how feelings fluctuate between knowing what should be done and the irrational. The loneliness of the bereaved and the isolation when one has no family, no children to act as a support or envelope you in some warmth as was Martha’s case. That Martha had Erin was a godsend. The importance of friends is a highlight as well.

Martha's life as an intelligent, highly successful social worker is shattered when her husband is killed suddenly in a hit and run accident.

Although the police are initially interested because of Thierry's government connections, the case is quickly closed and Martha is left dealing with grief, a disturbing loss of certainty and a nagging thought that she needs to know what happened on that fateful day.

As she tries to move on, more questions than answers arise and Martha begins to unravel. Will a move to France help or make things worse?

Loved it. Full of intrigue. Will recommend to others

A really enjoyable read from Robert Verity. French Leave is about loss and growth. Deception and acceptance. It is also a bit of a whodunnit with a surprising reveal in the last chapters of the book. A very satisfying entertaining read.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy. All opinions are my own.

I'm not sure what this novel wants to be or to tell. It's not uninteresting, but there's not really a red thread. There's grief, there's deception, there's friendship and the search for a new start, the past that's revealing things never known, the suspicion of crime.

Secrets abound in Robert Verity's absorbing story of a London woman, Martha, who decamps to France, where she and her husband, Thierry, enjoyed good times, after he is killed in an apparent auto accident.
A random event, just one of those things, it appears at first blush, albeit made worse for looking to have been a hit-and-run, though subsequent revelations, including a meeting it seems he had set up with someone in a part of the city he didn't usually frequent, suggest something possibly more nefarious.
Then there's a secret from the past of an old school friend whom Martha hooks up with in France, a childhood secret of the sort from Martha’s own past which she keeps trying to learn more about from her dementia-afflicted mother who is maddeningly elusive about any details. Who, for one thing, was “Poppy,” whom her mother keeps referring to, and what were the exact circumstances of a vague childhood memory Martha has of being in a van. And related or not to anything else, what is going on with the van Martha keeps seeing outside her adult home.
A trove of secrets, as I say, indeed perhaps one too many to be comfortably contained in a novel from which I was perhaps unwarrantedly expecting more of a philosophical tilt, given its venue – France, that bedrock of philosophical fiction! – and the man named Pascal with whom Martha ill-advisedly becomes involved.
But in the end, except for a possible nod to the famous Pascalian Wager, given Martha and Thierry’s dismissal of God and the challenge of “confronting death without an easy faith” (and here I’m reaching), the novel sticks pretty much to stock terrain as it veers between domestic drama and thriller. Still, an absorbing meditation on memory and grief made particularly compelling by straightforward and easily digestible prose.

a really good exploration of grief. especially when then there comes the grief that is only added to by uncertainty of what happened and the suddenness of it.
i thought it was delicate
and tender in the telling of those awful feelings but it never stopped at knowing when to pack those punches so you as the reader are taken along and in to those waves of emotions.
the setting especially in France is laid out so well.
Robert manages to help you be just as invested in the need to know what happened and helps you feel what that frustration must feel like. and how that then mingles with what you do in the moment of grief but also then going forward.
this is a really great read. even better than i expected because of how well done it turned out to be.

I just finished a great mystery. French Leave by Robert Verity was such a good book. Pick it up this summer.