My nephew Ade is in serious trouble. I send him to the cliff village of Brackenmere-on-Sea, which looks like the perfect place to ride out a storm. The town is hosting its annual Lantern Walk in honor of local essayist Elinor Marsh; coaches of readers arrive with thermoses and dog-eared paperbacks. On the first night, something unsettling happens. On the fog road above Gull Teeth Cove, a pale hitchhiker stands in the same lay-by after dusk and halts each slow-moving car. He leaves behind a scorched shard of lantern glass in the cup holders, each piece marked with a single name.
By morning, the guests take part in the Margins Hunt, a sprawling orienteering game based on marginalia and false trails. The make-believe crime collapses when a real one surfaces. Jonas Pike, a volunteer, is found dead in the reed beds with a tin lighthouse badge pinned backward through his coat. I begin a private inquiry, part confession and part ledger of what I failed to stop. I am joined, warily, by prosecutor Mateo Arfe and Sergeant Freya Dalrymple of the Brackenmere constabulary. Dalrymple grew up here, and more than one door in this town seems to know her name.
In Calder Gate, far inland, Inspector Ivo Stanic hunts for a kidnapped boy last seen at a bus shelter lit by a failing streetlamp. Investigative journalist Ola Bacewicz answers the message of a novice vlogger, Rhea Bell, who has unsealed a bricked-off room in a Victorian terrace on Silvertree Row. Inside they find a chair, a thermos still warm, and a portable lantern that will not go out. They are not alone on that floor.
How do the hitchhiker, the reed-bed badge, and the impossible light bind Brackenmere to Calder Gate? Who is next when the Walk reaches the cliff path? Told in fragments of case notes, taped interviews, and memories that warp like heat over a flame, Lantern: A Memoir in Parts threads coastal noir, classic detection, and psychological fracture. In these pages, the past bargains, the present misleads, and every lantern shows only what it wants you to see.
Ravi Kouassi was born in Abidjan in 1984 and grew up between Côte d'Ivoire and Lyon. After studying criminology and comparative literature at Université Lumière Lyon 2, he worked as a court interpreter in Marseille and later as a crime reporter in Bordeaux, covering missing-person cases, police reform, and migrant routes along the Atlantic coast.
He is the author of the noir novels Red Clay, Blue Siren (2019) and The Ninth Turning (2022), both praised for their lyrical edge and procedural detail. His reporting and fiction have been shortlisted for the Prix du Masque Noir and the Carta Nera Fellowship. When not writing, Ravi Kouassi mentors first-generation journalists and hikes forgotten towpaths for story material. He divides his time between Nantes and Abidjan.
Lanterns, un autoestopista pálido que deja vidrio chamuscado con nombres y un pueblo que respira niebla: atmósfera brillante, investigación irregular.
For readers who like coastal noir with experimental bones and a memoir's ache.
Worldbuilding lens: Brackenmere-on-Sea is a study in fog and folklore, a place where a Lantern Walk can host both make-believe and murder without feeling contrived. The lay-by above Gull Teeth Cove, the reed-choked edges, the cliff path that suddenly tilts the horizon — the setting keeps threatening to swallow the plot, which is half the point.
The tie to Calder Gate through a failing streetlamp and an impossible portable lantern introduces just enough weird to raise the stakes without tipping into the supernatural. I liked living in these damp corners more than I liked navigating the maze, but the map is memorable.
Character work here is prismatic and prickly. The narrator's double role as confessor and investigator makes every admission suspect, which is compelling even when it slows the actual sleuthing.
Freya Dalrymple's home-field wariness adds friction in the best way, and Mateo Arfe's measured prosecutor cadence sharpens several interrogations. Ade is mostly a hinge for other people's choices, which left me wanting more of his own interior light. Mixed bag, but the voices linger.
Craft note: the collage format promises nervous energy; the throughline keeps slipping. The switchbacks between taped interviews, marginalia trails, and the narrator's confessions create texture, but the pacing lurches whenever the Calder Gate material arrives, and momentum drains from the Brackenmere inquiry.
There are sharp lines and clever structural rhymes, especially the way the lantern motif reframes each document, yet the casebook voice grows samey and undercuts tension. A few clearer anchors or timestamps might have steadied the beam.
I wanted a crime novel to hold in both hands. What I got felt like being blinded, then told to admire the light.
The fragments keep insisting on meaning. Case notes mutter, tapes hiss, memories warp. I kept waiting for a throughline that did not arrive, only more lantern talk and more guilt tallied like a ledger I never agreed to audit.
The pale hitchhiker with the scorched glass is a great chill, once. By the fourth shard and the fifth coy hint, I felt toyed with rather than haunted. The same with the tin lighthouse badge and the impossible lamp on Silvertree Row. Symbols stack up, clarity thins out.
The narrator keeps circling responsibility, then steps sideways. The book even tells me that "every lantern shows only what it wants you to see". That starts to sound like permission to avoid showing me what I need to see.
I finished angry. Not stirred, not shaken, just tired of the fog machine. One star for atmosphere, zero for follow-through.
