Meet Thomas. He’s a novelist and a rather popular one at that, but his numerous fans don’t know about the demons he has been fighting since 1992, the secrets he has been hiding. Truth be told, I never really bonded with Thomas, but I found him to be an interesting protagonist nonetheless. In 1992 he had the biggest crush on Vinca, but unfortunately for him, he wasn’t alone in that. And then she disappeared and he’s been wondering what happened to her ever since. Thomas has been away from home for many years, but now he’s back for the reunion, and right away he’s questioning his own sanity for returning home because he’s been there for like 5 seconds and he’s already receiving threats. However, he feels he has no choice but to ride this thing out, all the while trying to keep his secrets safe. Along the way, Thomas finally finds out where Vinca is, but that’s not all he finds out; the man gets a lot more than he’s bargained for and the bigger picture he’s uncovering turns out to be much bigger than he (or I for that matter) ever even suspected. The setting, the plot, the characters have a bit of a Twin Peaks thing going on, with Vinca as a light version of Laura Palmer, and with a whole cast of mysterious, secretive, kind of murderous people in a setting that feels just that little bit off, a tad uncanny.

The Reunion starts out pretty traditionally though, kind of straight-forward, the classic thriller where the main character and the reader alike, are transported from present-day events to the past where something happened that was hidden away at the time and that is threatening to rear its ugly head now and come back to mess up the protagonist’s life. As the blurb mentions: there’s a body in the school, so naturally I was expecting a body to be found and the culprits to do massive damage control and whatever else was needed to stop said body from resurfacing. And so I started The Reunion expecting a secret, albeit a very ugly one, on the brink of exposure. I was wrong. There isn’t just one secret, there are multiple secrets and they are all hideous! The Côte d’Azur is a veritable breeding ground of them or so it seems and quite a lot of people have been keeping secrets for quite a lot of years. And I was not equipped to deal with that! I’m still reeling, I am! Every time I thought, oh okay, now I see what happened, now I understand, another venomous little twist came around and wiped that smug grin right off my face. And that’s all I’m telling you, I’m keeping this little "chat" firmly in the bag