A long way off /

At the dinner party that opens this disturbing Simenonesque novella from Garnier (The Panda Theory), Marc Lecas loudly announces in response to a stray remark "I know Agen, too!" even though he spent only a few hours a decade ago in this town in southwest France. Marc doesn't say another word until he and his second wife, Chloé, who doesn't understand why he's always so distant from people, go home. Later, Marc buys a fat lazy cat he names Boudu, and he visits his grown daughter from his failed first marriage, Anne, who's a patient in a mental hospital, even though it's not her birthday, the one time a year he normally sees her. Without telling Chloé, Marc decides to go somewhere "far, far away," and he takes Boudu and Anne on a car trip that stretches into several weeks. Along the way, Marc's finger gets seriously infected, and a Hungarian hitchhiker they meet winds up dead. The trio end up parked in a dump outside Agen, where worse befalls them in the shattering climax. Dark humor and assured prose lift this melancholy portrait of a depressed personality. Readers new to Garnier will want to check out the earlier work of this gifted author, who died in 2010. (Mar.)