The Quiet Tenant

by Clémence Michallon

You flip through the books he brought you, taken to the shed in no particular order. Stephen King’s It. A tired paperback of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Mary Higgins Clark’s Loves Music, Loves to Dance.

All the books mentioned in The Quiet Tenant are Easter eggs of sorts. With this being my debut thriller, and my debut novel in English, it felt important—and fun—to pay tribute to some of the books that have shaped my life as a reader. Loves Music, Loves to Dance is one of the first thrillers that ignited my passion for crime novels. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of those books I hadn't heard of before moving to the US, after which I realized it's an absolute classic over here. As for Stephen King's It, well—later in the novel, "Rachel" uses the book as a weight to regain her strength. In another King novel, Misery, the captive character uses a typewriter as a weight for the same purpose. Thus: Easter egg. Later in the book, I mention The Andromeda Strain, a pandemic novel by Michael Crichton. The first draft of The Quiet Tenant was written in large part in 2020. Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell is a serial killer novel—and was Cornwell's debut. Do we have any fans in the house?