And in The Enigma of Room 622 - as you'll learn early on, there is no Room 622 - Dicker salutes Agatha Christie even as he drops the reader through one trapdoor into another, so that by the end, we doubt we've ever read another novel quite like it. Only this one is named Joël, and he refers frequently to his beloved publisher, Bernard de Fallois, the name of the real author’s publisher, who shepherded Quebert and died in 2018. On the flipside, this is Dicker’s style, and fans of his work have grown to expect a high level of complexity and detail from his books. I’m still not sure of a couple of things, and I won’t specify what those are because I don’t put spoilers in my reviews.

The Enigma of Room 622 by Joël Dicker | Goodreads

He checks into the Hôtel de Verbier, and is given room 623 -- finding, as he is first led to it: "'That's strange,' I remarked to the porter, 'there's no room 622'".A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people. If you’re not familiar with author Joël Dicker, it’s not surprising as his books are written in French and only a few have been translated to English so far. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival.

The Enigma of Room 622 by Jo l Dicker - Publishers Weekly The Enigma of Room 622 by Jo l Dicker - Publishers Weekly

I had no expectations of liking it, and yes, although I certainly wrongly misjudged the book before even cracking the cover, it just wasn’t what I was expecting to get. With a love for literature reaching across all genres (except romance), he has embarked on the quest to share its wonders with the world by helping people find their way to books which truly speak to them, whether they be modern sensations or relics from a bygone era.

Ni siquiera sé cómo clasificarla: no es exactamente un thriller, tampoco un romance, no es una comedia… es como si el autor hubiera intentado combinar varios géneros y se hubiera olvidado de lo que quería contar. Joel Dicker is a Swiss novelist from Geneva with a Masters of Law from the University of Geneva in 2010. Me pareció original que él decidiera protagonizar su propio libro, pero rápidamente se va viendo que eso es solo en las primeras páginas. Maybe not literally, but if you’ve read any Dicker since ‘Harry Quebert’ before and saw a couple of tired Hollywood blockbuster sequels with disappointing endings, then yes, you’ve read this before.