21st century

The 21st century is the book’s contemporary setting and the period whose media habits, legal records, and social expectations shape the treatment of Alice Espanet’s case. It is marked by a sharp contrast: the crime attracts intense attention because it falls outside the pattern people have come to expect, yet the available evidence cannot fill every gap in the lives behind it.

Crime and Media Attention

The book describes murder in the second decade of the 21st century as rare, and says that public attention tends to settle on killings that do not fit the familiar pattern of men killing current or former partners. Alice Espanet’s case becomes a striking exception. The news arrives too late for that evening’s broadcasts, but by the next day, in the height of summer, the media have made it the dominant subject of public discussion, pursuing it for clicks and ratings. The case’s prominence thus reflects not only its human consequences but also its deviation from the pattern the public recognizes.

The Narrator initially tries to avoid the coverage: changing channels, turning pages, closing windows, and steering conversations elsewhere. The effort fails in ordinary public places, where someone may bring up the case in a butcher’s shop, a hair salon, or at a wedding. The contemporary media environment makes the crime difficult to keep at a distance; the story is not confined to the courtroom or the news, but follows the Narrator into daily life.

Records and the Limits of Reconstruction

The period’s documentary abundance gives the case a particularly clear beginning. The first days are well documented, as a properly conducted judicial process requires. The Narrator consults newspaper archives, lawyers’ social media, criminal codes in current and earlier versions, legal-advice forums, and accounts of police and forensic procedure. These sources make the early sequence and standard official actions comparatively easy to reconstruct, including Ritxi’s response to bereavement as it is described in psychology manuals.

But the abundance of records does not produce a complete account. Once the investigation turns from the documented aftermath toward what changed in Ritxi and why he sought to keep Alice out of prison, the Narrator finds no manual or official document that can supply an answer. The case exposes a limit of contemporary evidence-gathering: procedural actions can be recorded and compared, while private motives and imagined futures may remain inaccessible.

A Biographical Gap in the Present

The same unevenness appears in Alice’s biography. Through Léa, the Narrator learns something of the life Alice led up to about age twenty-one or twenty-two. The trial examines her marriage, fertility treatment, and troubled experience of motherhood, but leaves a gap of three or four years in between, during which she disappears from view and changes her name: Jade dies, and Alice begins. Léa offers possible explanations, including that Jade seemed unsuitable for the social class Alice aspired to or that the change defied her mother, but treats the question as unimportant. Alice retains her mother’s surname, Espanet, without making the change’s meaning any clearer.

This gap contrasts with the carefully documented first days after the crime. The book’s contemporary setting can furnish archives, judicial records, and public commentary in abundance, yet it cannot guarantee access to a person’s earlier life or explain the significance of a changed name. The 21st century is therefore not simply a date for the case: it is the world in which intense public attention and extensive documentation coexist with unresolved personal histories.