Petite Mort

First published in the U.K. in 2013 and adapted as a BBC Radio 4 serial starring Honor Blackman, Hitchman’s dazzling debut, a thriller that spans seven decades, offers insights into early Parisian film making and the amoral glitterati who brought it to dizzying life. Adèle Roux starred in Petite Mort, a 1914 silent film that was believed destroyed in a fire at the Pathé factory before it could be distributed. Adèle’s involvement in a murder case later that year ensured that the film was not reshot. Provocative snippets of the actress’s titillating memoirs, told in her old age to journalist Juliette Blanc, chronicle her passionate affairs with seductive special-effects inventor André Durand and his ravishing and sinister actress wife, Luce. The memoir’s chilling glimpses of the leading characters’ precociously lethal early lives counterpoint the 1967 rediscovery of the lost film—with one crucial scene missing. Hitchman juxtaposes love and lust, unquenchable desire and pangs of self-revulsion, in this scorching exposé of ambition so ferocious it drives souls into hells of their own making. (Nov.)