A would-be French detective, lost in California, sets out to find the secret daughter of a powerful business tycoon.
A funny, humanist novel, somewhere between crime fiction, social chronicle and love story.
Tom Lafeuille, a Frenchman living in California, is hired by Phineas Taylor Gates, wealthy heir to the Barbelés Gates dynasty, to find his illegitimate daughter, Missy, born of a long-ago affair, whom he wants to see before he dies.
A deeply anxious, clumsy, hypochondriac anti-hero, obsessed with his lack of destiny, Tom carries out this mission from the Golden Creek, a roadside diner open day and night that has become his refuge, his canteen and his confessional.
The investigation plunges Tom into the California of the margins and the left-behind. The Golden Creek, the abandoned zoo, the motel, the trailers, the poorly fed animals and the precarious residents form a fragile, wacky community, threatened by a huge real-estate development called New Centaur. Battered, poor, eccentric characters, attached to their “uselessness” as to a form of dignity.
It is thanks to his feelings for Kelly that Tom will transform into a hero in spite of himself. At first out of reach, she becomes his ally when he proposes that she pose as the Gates’s hidden daughter, to buy time, save the community and perhaps gain leverage against New Centaur. Kelly agrees in exchange for a promise: to save the zoo’s last manatee. To save something tiny but symbolic. And perhaps to save love as well?