Joel Dicker is a renowned and award-winning writer of which some novels have achieved worldwide fame and have been adapted into television miniseries.
We introduce you 5 works by this writer that are worth reading to meet him and enjoy his fresh and captivating writing.
Joel Dicker
Joel Dicker is a Swiss writer born in 1985 in Geneva, son of a librarian and a French teacher. He would spend his childhood in his hometown although he was not as attracted to the world of studies at school as he was to the world of acting. He would end up studying at the Paris Drama School. After those studies he would finish his law degree at the University of Geneva.
His writing side began to be seen from a very young age. At the age of 6, his literary creations were already beginning. Although the important thing would begin four years later, when he founded the Gazette des Animaux (The Animal Magazine) which dealt with nature at just 10 years of age, a magazine he directed for seven years for which he was named the youngest Editor-in-Chief in Switzerland. At 31 years old he had written three novels and won four important literary and journalism awards.
5 works you should read by him
1.The truth about the Harry Quebert case (La vérité sur l'affair Harry Quebert, 2012)
Of all his works, perhaps the best known is this one, because it was adapted for television in a miniseries with the same name: The truth about the Harry Quebert case (2018). The novel was winner of the Grand Prize for Novels of the French Academy and it became a global bestseller and has been translated into 33 languages. It is part of a trilogy composed of:
- The truth about the Harry Quebert case
- The Baltimore Book
- The Alaskan Sanders case
We are in the year 2006 and the writer Marcus Goldman, having just turned 30, is at the peak of his career. His first novel has been a multimillion-dollar success. The publisher asks for a second novel and the writer has the crisis of the blank page. Given the situation, he turns to his only friend, a sexagenarian who was his university professor who lives in a coastal town. The town will suddenly lose its tranquility when some gardeners discover in their friend's garden the corpse of a young woman who disappeared in 1975 and with whom the professor had a relationship. Everyone will consider him the culprit except Goldman who begins to investigate the case to save his friend.
2.The Baltimore Book
El second book of the trilogy, where we will return to the adventures of the writer Marcus Goldman. In the beginning there were two branches of the Goldman family: the Baltimores and the Montclairs. The latter is part of the Marcus Goldman branch, a middle-class family living in New Jersey. The Baltimores live in a luxurious mansion in Baltimore.
Eight years after the Drama that separated the two branches of the Goldman family, Marcus Goldman looks into the conflict of the family. Among his childhood memories he will remember the Baltimore family until the day the drama arrived that would change everything forever.
3. The Alaska Sanders Case
Third novel in the trilogy by Marcus Goldman. "I know what you've done" is the message found in the pocket of Alaska Sanders, a young woman whose body was found in Mount Pleasant Lake in 1999. Eleven years after having put the alleged culprits of that murder behind bars, that message will be the key to starting a research by Marcus Goldman and Sergeant Perry Gahalowood. They will discover who Alaska is and the ghosts of the past will return, like that of Harry Quebert, Goldman's professor friend.
4. The disappearance of Stephanie Mailer
We are facing another immersive thriller that will trap you in two times: 2014 and 1994. On the night of July 30, 1994, in a quiet town of Orphea (in the Hamptons region, coast of New York State), begins the grand opening of the theater festival. The mayor is late to start the event and meanwhile a man locates his dead wife in front of the mayor's house. Inside, the entire family is murdered.
Jesse Rosenberg and Derek Scott, two New York police officers, will solve that case, however 20 years later at Rosenberg's farewell party, a journalist will assure you that they had the wrong murderer and you have the proof.
5. The enigma of room 622
This is the last novel we recommend by this writer. The plot of this thriller It begins in a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps where a corpse will appear. That event would be forgotten and years later Dicker himself would stay at that hotel to recover emotionally after a breakup and would end up investigating the case with another novelist. The plot will take place in Geneva with a nod to the writer's family.