After La Faussaire, finalist for the Elle Crime Readers’ prize in 2022, Patricia Delahaie delivers an intimate, powerful and sensitive reinterpretation of a tragic crime that took place in 1974, seen through the prism of a mother-son relationship of rare delicacy and of rare cruelty.

Loïc knows it: an ogre inhabits his thoughts.

Attracted by children, the twenty-year-old young man thinks he knows how to contain the beast that lives within him. But on Pentecost Monday 1974, the beast escaped. A little 8 yearold girl passes into his field of vision, wearing a white dress with a cherry pattern.

Her body was found two days later. Loïc risks getting the death penalty.

For his mother, Louise, his indictment is a terrible mistake. How could her son, her sweet boy that she raised on her own, be the monster they say he is?

As the blade of the guillotine weighs on Loïc’s trial, mother and son will weave together a story that is difficult to believe. But by wanting to exonerate Loïc, doesn’t Louise risk leading him to the scaffold?

A graduate in cinema and human sciences, Patricia Delahaie has notably been a journalist specializing in marital and family relations. Author of about twenty works on this theme, she has now launched into fiction with novels inspired by true crime stories. After La Faussaire (Belfond, 2022), finalist for a number of literary prizes, Un lundi de Pentecôte is her second novel.