At the end of the summer of 1963, Christophe Richard overcomes the boredom of long days and sleepless nights during which the last words of a deceased mother constantly come back to him: "I never loved you." Time seems both still and painful. Until the day when a routine delivery of books to the small bookstore he runs near the Thiers jetty makes him the horrified witness to a double murder. Suspected by investigators whose behavior is, to say the least, curious, hunted by even more unusual assassins, harassed by a journalist in search of very specific information, the bookseller becomes the designated culprit as well as a target to be killed. He barely has time to understand that, in an attempt to save his skin, he will have to choose between being game or hunter. Nothing is so simple, however, because the net is closing in, and clearly, Christophe Richard doesn't have the makings of the crime novel heroes who haunt the shelves of his shop. Fortunately, in life as in novels, fate sometimes has strange surprises in store for us...

Patrice Vergès, who knows the Bay like the back of his hand, takes us on a fascinating journey, full of twists and turns, salty with the tides and punctuated by the refrains of the sixties. Carried away by his story, we follow him without hesitation for a single second. Be careful, however: some truly bad weather is forecast for Arcachon.