Manfred Baumann is a loner. He has always lived in the nondescript French town of Saint-Louis. Shy and awkward, a man of habit, he spends his days working in the local bank and his evenings in the drab Restaurant de la Cloche where he can surreptitiously observe Ad le Bedeau, its sullen but alluring waitress. Until, one day, Ad le vanishes.

Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, is called in to investigate. Manfred is rattled, and the careful routine of his life starts to crumble around him. And that's when he meets Alice Tarrou.

Graeme Macrae Burnet's spellbinding debut novel The Disappearance of Ad le Bedeau is an intimate portrayal of an outsider in a small community, of a man who cannot shake the feeling he is always being watched, whose every moment is determined by the catastrophic secrets of his past.