Shortlisted for the CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger

An urban thriller full of rage and raw emotion

“A sublime noir novel. Perfectly mastered writing, serving magnificent characters. A real revelation. Don’t miss it.”
—RTL

“[Cloé Mehdi] showcases a brutal talent, shocking her reader with a harsh and uncompromising narrative style.”
—Culture Chronique

“Poignant, disturbing, sensitive, chilling", a novel Edvard Munch could have written had he not been a painter.”
—Le Rayon Polar

In a small town just like any other, a police identity check goes wrong. The victim, Saïd, was fifteen years old. And now he is dead.

Mattia is just eleven years old, and witnesses the hatred and sadness felt by those around him. While he didn’t know Saïd, his face can be seen all over the neighbourhood, graffitied on walls in red paint, demanding “Justice”. Mattia decides to pull together the pieces of the puzzle, to try to understand what happened. Because even the dead don’t stay buried forever, and nothing is lost, ever.

Cloé Mehdi
Cloé Mehdi was born in 1992. She started writing in college to make the time pass faster. There followed Monstres en cavale, her first novel, which received the 2014 Beaune prize. Nothing Is Lost was awarded the 2016 Polar Student prize, the 2017 Dora Suarez prize, the 2017 Mystère de la critique prize, the Blues & Polar prize, the Thousand and One Black Leaves prize.