Page Updated: 09/09/02
Antoine Bello
themissingpiecep.jpg
The Missing PieceThe Missing Piece
Buy New Books at Amazon by Antoine BelloBuy at Amazon.co.uk
click here
Buy Used Books at abe.com 
About the Author
Bibliography


British Pbk Original - Serpents Tail (2002)
Buy at Amazon.co.uk The Missing Piece
Translated by Helen Stevenson
In the late 1990s US billionaire and media mogul Charles Wallerstein revives the fortunes of the jigsaw puzzle by setting up the `International Speed Puzzle Circuit’. Players compete to solve a puzzle in record time, while millions watch on the stadium screens or on TV at home. Its success is phenomenal, and the craze sweeps the nation.
Simultaneously, a serial killer targets key players on the circuit, each of whom is discovered minus a limb but with a polaroid of the corresponding body part in its place. The killer’s habit of removing one of each at the victim’s limbs suggests he is putting together a macabre puzzle of his own. The police need to find the vital missing piece, that philosophical element without which the whole of the rest of the puzzle has no meaning.
Given 48 ‘Pieces’ - newspaper articles, meeting minutes, media interviews, letters - it is ultimately the reader who holds the solution to this bizarre enigma and the novel’s gripping conclusion.
`An astonishing work of obsessive imagination, filled with the vigour of true monomania and increasingly complex layers of deadpan humour, fictitious fact and sociopathic glee. I have rarely entered an imagined world so original, so fascinating and so downright peculiar. Antoine Bello’s vision combines the crystalline intelligence and sadism of Borges with the glorious, twisted fantasy of Calvino’ A.L. Kennedy
`Who knew jigsaw puzzles could be so exciting? This dazzling novel combines intellectual game-playing, narrative teases and psychological suspense in a story that is constant fun to re-construct. Bello has fashioned a fiendishly enjoyable novel. Combining an investigation into the motives and modus operandi of the ‘Polaroid Killer’ with a fascinating examination of the limits of puzzle games, The Missing Piece is like the very best board game, guaranteed to provide hours, of entertainment’ Matt Thorne
top
About The Author
Antoine Bello was born in 1970 in Boston to French parents. He currently lives in Paris where he runs an Internet company that takes minutes of meetings for large corporations. The Missing Piece, runner up to Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised for the Prix Novembre, is his first novel.

top

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

  • The Missing Piece (Serpents Tail Pbk, 2002)

    • top