THE Accident on the A35 is the follow-up to Graeme Macrae Burnet’s first novel, The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau, and the second entry in a planned trilogy set in a small French town called Saint-Louis. His previous novel, His Bloody Project, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year but his latest is underwhelming by comparison. It struggles to rise above the level of tartan noir on tour and Burnet’s trademark encasement of literary intrigue looks more like tomb by the end.

Chief Inspector Georges Gorski — his name and occupation are nods to Burnet’s admiration for the work of Georges Simenon — is once again on the scene. The book opens with Gorski examining a car crash that has killed Bertrand Barthelme, a successful local lawyer, but there is nothing to suggest his death was more than a tragic accident. On behalf of the attractive but emotionally detached widow Gorski nonetheless agrees to informally investigate Barthelme’s whereabouts before the crash. Gorski’s own wife has recently left him, an outcome probably related to his slide into the half-truth borderlands of early alcoholism, and this joins the various circumstances that explain why he devotes so much time to the accident. Barthelme’s school-age son, Raymond, starts an investigation of his own after finding an address while going through his father’s desk. Working independently, son and inspector quickly establish that Barthelme was at the centre of a longstanding deception but it is some time before the precise nature of his secret is revealed. The book divides its attention between these inquiries and it is Raymond, a fantasist drawn to a scene from Sartre in which a character cuts their own hand with a knife, who emerges as the more interesting.

One of the distinguishing features of His Bloody Project was Burnet’s control of narrative voice: words seemed to have grown from the page as if wheat in a field, such was the natural effect of his authority. The style was highly formal, with adjustments made for class and form, but it always felt bracingly authentic to the setting. In The Accident On The A35, the narrative voice is stilted, stuffy and alienating. Paying a bill, for example, should never be described as a “reckoning”; the less said about “disreputable drinking dens” and “fisticuffs” the better. Eyes dart and cheeks puff. If cliché is a problem then so too is elegant variation, which should always be treated like alcohol: too much can be intoxicating and result in a nasty hangover. But Burnet knows all this. The style is a deliberate affectation at the service of his preference for casting shadows on authorship. It is a pastiche, an affectionate exercise in mimicry, but why affect style with the potential to make your readers’ minds itch?

Gorski allows his inquiries to become attached to a murder investigation in Strasbourg. The arrival in Saint-Louis of the investigating officer from the city prompts Gorski to reflect on the nature of the town: “as in all provincial backwaters, the inhabitants are most comfortable with failure. Success serves only to remind the citizenry of their own shortcomings”. A casual greeting as the pair enter a pub has the effect of “recklessly laying waste to the code of silence” that exists between the regulars. This stretch, complete with comments about “the local ideology of mediocrity” and “the modest nature of his dominion”, is the most unbearable in the book. By this point, however, Burnet starts to draw the plot strands together and there is a certain confidence about the way the book meanders in its subplots as the end approaches. The closest thing to a climactic scene is darkly-comic in nature. Driven to a pathetic frenzy after discovering his father’s secret, Raymond fails to outdo his favourite moment from Sartre. “Raymond imagined a great arc of blood spraying across the floor, but in reality only a small glug emerged from the wound.” He collapses to floor but is alert enough to note details about the shoes worn by people who come to his aid.

The Accident On The A35 is the small glug to the great arc of His Bloody Project which was an accomplished book capable of standing on its own merits quite apart from the hide-and-seek game Burnet was playing. There are enough bad writers out there already without our good ones writing below themselves for the sake of a little literary conceit.

The Accident On The A35 by Graeme Macrae Burnet is published by Saraband, priced £12.99