More on the AIEP/IACW Practical Guides to European Crime Fiction (France)

Jean-Christophe Grangé
Born in 1961. He was a journalist before he set up his own press agency. His second novel Blood-red Rivers , has been made into a hugely successful film - with the titleThe Crimson Riversdirected by Mathieu Kassovitz.
Empire of the Wolves - Vintage
Anna Heymes, the wife of a senior government official, is suffering from .amnesia and terrifying hallucinations. In Paris 10th arrondissement - the Turkish district - two police officers are trying to solve the mystery of the atrocious torture and subsequent killing of three clandestine Turkish women workers. As they investigate they discover that the "Grey Wolves", a ruthless group of far-right Turkish mafia members, might be responsible for these murders. Simultaneously, Anna finds out that she had highly complicated facial surgery and looks nothing like she did before. The link between her and the three victims becomes increasingly obvious and her past is revealed. She has no choice but to face an astonishing and horrible truth.

The Stone Council - Vintage
As a child Diane Thiberge was the victim of an assault. Now
30, an ethnologist specialising in the study of predatory
animals, and a woman adept in the martial arts, she believes
she has at last found a meaning and purpose to her life when
she decides to adopt a five-year-old Thai boy, Liu-San, whom
she christens Lucien. A nightmare ensues: on her return to
France, Lucien has an accident and is declared to be
brain-dead. A series of murders, however, makes Diane
realise that her son is no ordinary child, but the prey of
sinister and paranormal forces.

 The Flight of the Stork - Harvill 0099448998 -03
Every year the storks would set off on their astounding 12,000-mile migration from Northern Europe to the remote Central African Republic. One year, inexplicably, puzzling numbers of them fail to return. At the invitation of a Swiss ornithologist, Louis Antioch agrees to investigate the mystery of the birds' disappearance. Before he can set off on his quest, however, his patron is found dead in bizarre circumstances. Jean-Christophe Grange's uncompromising narrative develops at a nightmare pace from a Bulgarian gypsy encampment to a kibbutz in the Occupied Territories, to the African jungle, to Calcutta, where an appalling and gruesome truth emerges: the end of a mission that began with the Flight of the Storks...
Blood-Red Rivers - Harvill
In a world of knife-edge glaciers a hideous crime leads two maverick detectives to confront the limits of human evil A corpse is discovered wedged in an isolated crevice. It has been horribly mutilated. The brilliant but violent ex-commando Pierre Niemans is sent from Paris to the French Alps to lead the investigation. Meanwhile, in a town in south-west France, Karim Abdouf, a young Arab policeman, is trying to find out why the tomb
of a young child has been desecrated. When a
second baby is found, high up in a glacier, the paths of the two policemen are joined in the search for their killers, a trail that embroils them in the mysterious cult of the blood-red rivers... 		 


Brigitte Aubert
 Widely considered to be one of France's most talented authors of suspense fiction. She lives in Cannes.
Death From The Woods NEL
Elise Andioli had the perfect life: She was managing a popular
movie theatre, engaged to be married and surrounded by friends. But her world was turned upside down when a terrorist bomb causes her to lose her voice, sight and flancd as well as making her quadriplegic.
At first Elise is trapped by her suffering, but she is intrigued when an odd little girl called Virginie befriends her outside the local supermarket. The girl seems to have strange knowledge of a series of grisly murders that have been haunting the town, and she blames 'Death from the Woods' for snatching a missing boy
called Michael. Only hours later, his death is confirmed on the
local news. Shortly after, Virginie informs Elise that she is the
next target.
Translated By David L. Koral 		Death from the Snows  NEL
Elise Andrioli is back on the case. Having solved the mystery of the child serial killings outside Paris, Elise has become sort of a minor celebrity, selling the rights to her story to a mystery writer named Brigitte Aubert.

 

Jean Claude Izzo
Achieved immediate success with his Marseilles Trilogy (Total Chaos, Chourmo, Solea). In addition to this trilogy, his two novels The Lost Sailors, The Sun of the Dying, and one collection of short stories, Living Tires, enjoyed great critical and popular acclaim. Izzo died in 2000 at the age of fifty-five.
One Helluva Mess Arcadia House
‘Hero’ Inspector Fabio Montale, has a fondness for the company of women, loves chilled Cassis and Thelonius Monk, Lagavulin and Joseph Conrad. Working mainly in the high-rise suburbs of Marseilles, he’s sometimes conscious that “"it was easier to be a policeman than a criminal”" and is continually aware, like his creator, of the local political realities that will always leave him at the sharp end of the stick.
Vivienne Menkes-Ivry (Translator)
Reviwe - Bob Cornwell 		Chourmo Europa Editions
In this second installment of Jean-Claude Izzo's legendary Marseilles Trilogy-which includes Total Chaos,Chourmo, and Solea-Fabio Montale has left a police force riddled with corruption, racism, and greed to follow the ancient rhythms of his native town: the sea, fishing, the local bar, hotly contested games of belote. But his cousin's son has gone missing, and Montale is dragged back onto the mean streets of a violent, crime-infested Marseilles.

Howard Curtis (Translator)

 

Daniel Pennac
Born in Casablanca in 1944. He travelled widely in his youth and has been employed in a number of capacities, including woodcutter, Paris cab driver, illustrator and, principally, schoolteacher. His 'Belleville Quintet, written around the character of Benjamin Malausséne, has been published in many languages.

Write to Kill Harvill
Bernard Malausséne is a downtrodden employee at Vendetta Press. Used as her
scapegoat by Queen Zabo, the redoubtable doyenne of Paris publishing, he has finally had enough. After one debacle too many he resigns, only for Zabo to offer him a starring role. All he has to do is impersonate the world's bestselling author, the
hitherto anonymous J. L. B. Soon he is up to his neck in it: the theft of a manuscript,
frenzied readers, intrusive media, a packed interview and a very public assassination
attempt - Malausséne loses the plot.
Translated by Ian Monk

Passion Fruit Harvill
The Malaussène family regret to announce the marriage of Thérèse Malaussène to Count Marie-Colbert de Roberval ...
The wedding took place in front of the television cameras before the happy couple
flew off to Zurich for their wedding night. Two days later, however, a frosty and tight-lipped Thérèse was back in Belleville, and her spouse, also back in Paris, was found dead at the foot of his stairwell, and a bag full of dollars had gone walkabout. Added to which, Thérèse's fairground caravan, in which she had practiced her trade of astrologer, had been torched, the work of a homicidal arsonist.
Benjamin Malaussène, elder brother to the widow and a professional scapegoat, has
packed his bags and is waiting for the police to pull him in on suspicion - but it is
Thérèse whom they arrest. The tribe and their Apache friends slip smartly into gear
to scour Paris in search of bona fide culprits and get their beloved sister out of gaol.
Translated by Ian Monk

Fairy Gudmother Harvill
Maybe the worst indignity for a Paris cop is to be shot dead by an old granny he is trying to help across the street in Paris on a frosty morning. An old lady needs protection with so many druggies around these days. Dressed as an elderly Vietnamese woman, Inspector Van Thian goes to investigate.
Monsieur Malausséne Harvill
Benjamin Malausséne, the Belleville scapegoat, and his family of half sisters and brothers are once again the target for a series of increasingly catastrophic mishaps
which culminate in his imprisonment on twenty-one counts of murder.
Meanwhile, the real serial killer remains at large.
In this sprawling novel, which brings his series of novels set in Belleville to a close, Pennac has allowed his unique imagination to run riot. The result is an increasingly
huge cast of unforgettable characters and a series of inter-related plot lines which curl around one another before finally unraveling. From the art of the tattoo to
cinema history, from the intricacies of cutting-edge surgery to the wonders of the wines of the Jura, there is something for everyone in this extraordinary tale.
Ian Monk (Translator)

The Dictator and the Hammock Vintage 0099470233 -07
Manuel Pereira da Ponte Martins, beloved dictator of Teresina, in the Brazilian sertao, becomes agoraphobic the day a fortune-teller predicts he will die torn to pieces by an angry mob. From then on, his life turns out to be so unbearable that he decides to hire a double to replace him while he will be enjoying himself in Europe. A few years later, the barber turned dictator also grows tired of running the country and uses the same trick as his predecessor to leave for Hollywood. On the boat there, he introduces himself as Charlie Chaplin but everyone is convinced that he is none other than Rudolph Valentino disguised as Chaplin. When he arrives in New York, the two real actors are waiting for him...Back in Teresina, the doubles follow one another, easily fooling the people until Pereira comes back. He is astonished to discover that his stand-in doesn't look like him at all and reacts in a way that can only precipitate his meeting with Fate. Pennac's new novel is witty, wildly original and extremely funny.
Patricia Clancy (Translator)

The Scapegoat Harvill
Benjamin is a scapegoat. Under the official title of Quality Controller, he works for the complaints department of a large Parisian department store where he bears the brunt of customer complaints. When a bomb goes off in the toy department, he finds himself the prime suspect.

Dominique Manotti
Dominique Manotti teaches nineteenth-century Economic History. "Rough Trade", her first novel, was awarded the top prize for the best thriller of the year by the French Crime Writers Association.
Lorraine Connection Eurocrime
When a cathode ray tube factory in a small French town is hit first by a strike and then by a suspicious fire, the battle for the take-over of the plant's beleaguered parent company heats up. The Lorraine factory is at the centre of a strategic battle being played out in Paris, Brussels, and Asia for the take-over of the ailing state-owned electronics giant Thomson. Accusations of foul play fly, and rival contender Alcatel calls in its intrepid head of security Charles Montoya to investigate. He soon uncovers explosive revelations and a trail of murders, dirty tricks, blackmail, and corporate malfeasance.
Amanda Hopkinson , Ros Schwartz (Translators)
Review - Bob Cornwell
Dead Horsemeat Arcadia Books
A group of school friends who campaigned together at Rennes in the heydey of 1968: Agathe Renourd and her protege Nicolas Berger are in charge of the communications network of a major insurance consortium; Christian Deluc has become a council member at the Elysee Palace; Amelie raises thoroughbreds. Now, in 1989, the paths of these former students are due to cross in an entirely unexpected fashion as they start playing with fire, carried along by the euphoria born of power. Events begin to take off: race horses die under mysterious circumstances; unimaginable quantities of cocaine appear at Parisian parties and dashing Nicolas Berger meets a violent end when a bomb explodes in his car.
Amanda Hopkinson , Ros Schwartz (Translators)
Review - Bob Cornwell
Rough Trade  Arcadia Books
This fast-moving story takes the reader rapidly along dark paths of sinister events in Le Sentier, the heart of Paris's rag trade. One spring morning a Thai girl is found dead in a fashion workshop. Another unlucky prostitute, or something more sinister? A club is uncovered where people secretly get filmed having sex - including some very distinguished men. This is the seedy underworld of Paris - the traffic in heroin, illegal immigrants without work permits, police officers' secret lives. A Turkish man - a police informer and leader of exploited immigrants rag-trader workers - is also Police Inspector Danquin's lover. This is a gripping morality tale of twentieth-century Paris. Dominique Manotti teaches nineteenth-century Economic History. "Rough Trade", her first novel, was awarded the top prize for the best thriller of the year by the French Crime Writers Association.
Margaret Crosland (Translator)
Review - Bob Cornwell 		Cop Arcadia Books
In an unexplained meeting between Police Inspector Romero and Nadine Speck, drug addict and dealer, both are shot dead in the streets of Levallois by a group of killers on motorbikes. It seems that their target was the young lady. Her brother Eric is the manager of the football stadium of Lisle-sur-Seine, whose club, after a lightening rise, is about to become champion in France. The president of the club, Jean-Pierre Reynaud, knows that it's not a safe bet. He is about to transfer one of his star players for an astronomical amount of money. But where does the money come from? Who financed the murders? And, what was Romero doing with that troubled girl, outside an official enquiry? Police chief Daquin believes his inspector to be innocent, and while tracing the murderers' lead, he opens the door behind which corruption - and several dead bodies - are hidden.

Antoine Bello
Antoine Bello was born in 1970 in Boston to French parents. He currently lives in Paris where he runs an Internet company that takes minutes of meetings for large corporations. The Missing Piece, runner up to Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised for the Prix Novembre, is his first novel.
The Missing Piece  Serpent's Tail
In the late 1990s US billionaire and media mogul Charles Wallerstein revives the fortunes of the jigsaw puzzle by setting up the `International Speed Puzzle Circuit’. Players compete to solve a puzzle in record time, while millions watch on the stadium screens or on TV at home. Its success is phenomenal, and the craze sweeps the nation.
Simultaneously, a serial killer targets key players on the circuit, each of whom is discovered minus a limb but with a polaroid of the corresponding body part in its place. The killer’s habit of removing one of each at the victim’s limbs suggests he is putting together a macabre puzzle of his own. The police need to find the vital missing piece, that philosophical element without which the whole of the rest of the puzzle has no meaning.
Given 48 ‘Pieces’ - newspaper articles, meeting minutes, media interviews, letters - it is ultimately the reader who holds the solution to this bizarre enigma and the novel’s gripping conclusion.
Translated by Helen Stevenson

Michel Crespy
Michel Crespy is professor of sociology at the University of Montpellier. Head Hunters won the Grand Prix de literature polici-re on its publication in France.
Head Hunters Harvill
"Your career profile could be of interest to us. Would you please get in touch?" Jerome Carceville finds it impossible to resist such an e-mail, especially when the invitation comes from De Wavre International, one of the top head-hunting organizations in the world. He applies, and after undergoing a variety of searching interviews and high-level tests, he is eventually selected for a decisive final examination. The fifteen talented and driven finalists arrive at a hotel on an island in the middle of an Alpine lake. Only two of them have any realistic chance of the job, and when Del Rieco, the "games-master", informs them that the nature of the contest is simulated economic warfare, that their only weapons will be a computer and some strategic information, and that their competitors must be eliminated, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary recruitment drive...Frenetic, ingenious and totally up-to-the-minute, Michel Crespy has written the first thriller to prize open the competitive jungle of the corporate world.
Review - Bob Cornwell

Fred Vargas
Vargas was born in Paris in 1957. As well as being a best-selling author in France, she is a historian and archaeologist by training.
Have Mercy on Us All Virgin 0099453649 -04
Joss le Guern is a town crier in Paris's 14th arrondissement. He calls out the local news three times a day to all who will listen. Over the course of a few days, however, a number of enigmatic and disturbing messages are slipped in to the daily news, and he becomes increasingly alarmed. Superintendent Adamsberg is visited by an extremely troubled woman who has found strange marks on the door of her building: upside down 4s marked out in black paint. This, and the appearance of the frightening messages, are exactly the kind of mysteries Adamsberg loves. In the course of his inquiries he begins to sense a sinister and often grotesque menace. And when a charred corpse is found, Adamsberg knows he's dealing with a particularly serious and chilling case. "Have Mercy on us All" is Fred Vargas's masterpiece so far. She is exceptional at building mood and tension, and, as Henning Mankell portrays the social realities of contemporary Sweden in his Inspector Wallander mysteries, so Vargas does the same for Paris and France.
Review - Bob Cornwell 		Seeking Whom He May Devour Harvill

In this frightening and surprising novel, the eccentric, wayward genius of Commissaire Adamsberg is pitted against the deep-rooted mysteries of one Alpine village's history and a very present problem: wolves. Disturbing things have been happening up in the French mountains; more and more sheep are being found with their throats torn out. The evidence points to a wolf of unnatural size and strength. However Suzanne Rosselin thinks it is the work of a werewolf. Then Suzanne is found slaughtered in the same manner. Her friend Camille attempts, with Suzanne's son Soliman and her shepherd, Watchee, to find out who, or what, is responsible and they call on Commissaire Adamsberg for help. 		The Three Evangelists Vintage
Sophia Simeonidis, a Greek opera singer, wakes up one morning to discover that a tree has appeared overnight in the garden of her Paris house. Intrigued and unnerved, she turns to her neighbours: Vandoosler, an ex-cop fired from the police for having helped a murderer to escape, and three impecunious historians, Mathias, Marc and Lucien - the three evangelists. They agree - both because they need the money and out of sheer curiosity - to dig around the tree and see if something has been buried there. They find nothing but soil. A few weeks later, Sophia disappears and nobody worries too much until her body is found burned to ashes in a car. Who killed the opera singer? Her husband, her ex-lover, her best friend? Or could it be her lovely niece recently moved to the capital? They all seem to have a motive. Vandoosler and the three evangelists set out to find the truth.
Sian Reynolds (Translator)
Review - Ian Morson
Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand Vintage
Between 1943 and 2003 nine people have been stabbed to death with a most unusual weapon: a trident. In each case, arrests were made, suspects confessed their crimes and were sentenced to life in prison. One slightly worrying detail: each presumed murderer lost consciousness during the night of the crime and has no recollection of it. Commissaire Adamsberg is convinced all the murders are the work of one person, the terrifying Judge Fulgence. Years before, Adamsberg's own brother had been the principal suspect in a similar case and avoided prison only thanks to Adamsberg's help. History repeats itself when Adamsberg, who is temporarily based in Quebec for a training mission, is accused of having savagely murdered a young woman he had met. In order to prove his innocence, Adamsberg must go on the run from the Canadian police and find Judge Fulgence. 		This Night's Foul Work  Harvill
On the outskirts of Paris, two men have been found with their throats cut. It is assumed that this is a drug-related incident of the kind so often uncovered in that area of town. But Adamsberg is convinced that there is more to it. Anxious to keep control of the case, he must call in a favour from the pathologist Ariane Lagarde, someone he had come up against twenty-three years previously. The trail also leads Adamsberg to a cemetery, where a grave has been disturbed with no apparent motive. Could this be the work of the elderly nurse - a serial killer caught by Adamsberg two years ago and recently escaped from prison? Meanwhile a new lieutenant has been assigned to the team. There is something disquieting about him, not least when it emerges that he is from a neighbouring village in the Pyrenees, known for its feuds with Adamsberg's own childhood home. "This Night's Foul Work" is another riveting case for that most engaging of contemporary detectives, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, and another triumph from the redoubtable Fred Vargas.
Sian Reynolds (Translator) 		The Chalk Circle Man Harvill
Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is not like other policemen. His methods appear unorthodox in the extreme: he doesn't search for clues; he ignores obvious suspects and arrests people with cast-iron alibis; he appears permanently distracted. In spite of all this his colleagues are forced to admit that he is highly successful - a born cop.When strange blue chalk circles start appearing overnight on the pavements of Paris, the press take up the story with amusement and psychiatrists trot out their theories. Adamsberg is alone in thinking this is not a game and far from amusing. He insists on being kept informed of new circles and the increasingly bizarre objects which they contain: a pigeon's foot, four cigarette lighters, a badge proclaiming 'I Love Elvis', a hat, a doll's head. Adamsberg senses the cruelty that lies behind these seemingly random occurrences. Soon a circle with decidedly less banal contents is discovered: the body of a woman with her throat savagely cut. Adamsberg knows that other murders will follow.
Sian Reynolds (Translator)

Tonino Benacquista
Tonino Benacquista, born in France of Italian immigrants, dropped out of film studies to finance his writing career. After being, in turn, a museum night-watchman, a train guard on the Paris-Rome line...
Holy Smoke Bitter Lemon Press 190473801X
Some favours simply cannot be refused. Tonio agrees to write a love letter for Dario, a low-rent Paris gigolo. When Dario is murdered, a single bullet to the head, Tonio finds his friend has left him a small vineyard somewhere east of Naples. The wine is undrinkable but an elaborate scam has been set up. The smell of easy money attracts the unwanted attentions of the Mafia and the Vatican, and the unbridled hatred of the locals. Mafiosi aren't choir boys, and monsignors can be very much like Mafiosi. A darkly comic, iconoclastic tale.
Adriana Hunter (Translator)
Reviws - Cath Staincliff & Bob Cornwell 		Someone Else Bitter Lemon Press 1904738125
Who hasn't wanted to become 'someone else'? The person you've always wanted to be...the person who hadn't given up half way to your dreams and desires? One evening at a bar two men who have just met at their tennis club in Paris conclude that it is time to change their lives and decide to meet again in three years time to see whose transformation is the more radical. Thierry is a picture framer with a steady clientele, but he has always wanted to be a private investigator. Nicolas is a shy teetotal executive trying not to fall off the corporate ladder. But becoming another is not without risk; at the very least the risk of finding yourself. A helter-skelter tale of humour and suspense.
Adriana Hunter (Translator)
Review - Bob Cornwell

Framed Bitter Lemon Press
Antoine's life is good. During the day, he hangs pictures for the most fashionable art galleries in Paris. Evenings, he dedicates to the silky moves and subtle tactics of billiards, his true passion. But when Antoine is attacked by an art thief in a gallery his world begins to fall apart. His maverick investigation triggers two murders - he finds himself the prime suspect for one of them - as he uncovers a cesspool of art fraud. A game of billiards decides the outcome of this violently funny tale, laced with brilliant riffs about the world of modern art and the parasites that infest it. "You know, you can see parallels in the histories of crime and painting. At first, men painted as they kill, with bare hands. Raw art, you could say...Instinct before technique. Then came instruments, the stick, the brush. One fine day, painting with knives began. Look at the work of Jack the Ripper...And then the gun was invented. Painting with a gun brought something final and radical. And today, in the age of terrorism, they paint with bombs, in cities, in the metros. Anonymous graffiti that explode on street corners..."
Adriana Hunter (Translator)
Review - Bob Cornwell

Chantal Pelletier
Chantal Pelletier, born in Lyon in 1949, studied psychology then began her career as a theatre actor. She co-founded the theatre company 'Trois Jeannes' in Paris and is a successful author of novels, essays, plays and film scripts.
Goat Song Bitter Lemon Press
The star male dancer of the Moulin Rouge and a beautiful young woman have been murdered. Their naked bodies are found entwined in a blood splattered dressing room. A squatter is killed in a nearby flat, his throat chewed open, the teeth marks human. Seemingly unconnected deaths that reveal a sinister pattern of Montmartre property scams fuelled by crack dealing and prostitution. Inspector Maurice Laice is plagued by a lesbian boss who bombards him with tales of her sexual adventures. Yet they make a good team, each obsessed for different reasons by the crimes at hand. The investigation takes Maurice from murky dealings at the cabaret to the world of organized crime in Corsica and back.
Ian Monk (Translator)
Reviews - Bob Cornwell & Martin Edwards

Thierry Jonquet
Thierry Jonquet (born Paris, 1954) is a French writer who specialises in crime novels with political themes. Tarantula is currently being adapted for the cinema by acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.
Tarantula Serpent's Tail
Richard Lafargue is an eminent plastic surgeon haunted by dirty secrets. He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau and keeps his partner Eve imprisoned in her bedroom, a room he has equipped with an intercom and 300-watt speakers through which he bellows orders. Eve is only allowed out to be paraded at cocktail parties and on the last Sunday of each month, when the couple visit a young woman in a mental asylum. Following these outings, Lafargue humiliates Eve by forcing her to perform lewd sexual acts with strangers while he watches through a one-way mirror. In alternating chapters, Jonquet introduces seemingly unrelated characters - a criminal on the run after murdering a policeman, and an abducted young man who finds himself chained naked in a dark chamber, forced to endure all manner of physical torture at the hands of a mysterious stranger, whom he calls 'Mygale', after a type of tropical spider. All of these characters are caught in a deceitful web, doomed to meet their fate.
Translator - Donald Nicholson-Smith
Reviews - Cath Staincliff & Ian Morson

Jean-Patrick Manchette
Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the seventies and early eighties.
Prone Gunman Serpent's Tail
A deadly professional assassin prized for his aim and reflexes, Martin Terrier returns to Paris after his latest job determined to get out of the game. Ten years ago he made a promise to return to his childhood sweetheart in the south of France, and he wants to get married and settle down. But his employers have other plans. A key target - an Arab oil magnate - is flying in to Paris, and there is only one man fit for the task of eliminating him. As Martin is tailed southwards, it appears his employers will stop at nothing to regain his service. In a style ruthlessly stripped of all sentiment, Jean-Patrick Manchette delivers a masterclass in lean, muscular storytelling. Each moment in the suspense plot is described in forensic detail, and violent shocks are executed with unflinching accuracy. Perhaps most compelling are the tantalising glimpses - betrayed by the barest physical ticks - that Manchette offers us into the otherwise inscrutable inner life of his protagonist, the prone gunman.
Review - Bob Cornwell 		Three To Kill  Serpent's Tail
Late one night in Paris, travelling salesman Georges Gerfaut stops to help an injured motorist to hospital. Three days later, while Gerfaut is on holiday with his wife and daughters, he is attacked by two men. Quickly realising the duo's murderous intent, but perplexed as to their motives, Gerfaut goes on the run, communicating with his family by telegram. Terrified, yet exhilarated by this release from his humdrum life, Gerfaut resolves to turn the tables and track down his pursuers. Jean-Patrick Manchette presents a clash between two opposing worlds: a conventional, middle-class existence cluttered by possessions and responsibilities, and a violent criminal underworld. In Georges Gerfaut we find an unlikely hero, an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances and forced to fight for his life. "Three to Kill" is another riveting slice of '70s noir by a masterful stylist, ironist, and social critic.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (Translator)
Review - Ian Morson

Jean-Francois Parot
Jean-François Parot is a diplomat and historian who lives in the Loire. The Châtelet Apprentice is his first novel, and the first in a series of Nicolas Le Floch mysteries which have been published to much acclaim in French.
The Chatelet Apprentice Gallic Books
Paris, February 1761. A police officer disappears and Nicolas Le Floch, a young Breton police recruit, is instructed to find him. When unidentified human remains are found it becomes a murder investigation. As Paris descends into Carnival debauchery it is Le Floch's skill, courage and integrity that will help him unravel a mystery which threatens to implicate the highest in the land.
Michael Glencross (Translator) 		The Man with the Lead Stomach Gallic Books
Paris, February 1761. A police officer disappears and Nicolas Le Floch, a young Breton police recruit, is instructed to find him. When unidentified human remains are found it becomes a murder investigation. As Paris descends into Carnival debauchery it is Le Floch's skill, courage and integrity that will help him unravel a mystery which threatens to implicate the highest in the land.
Michael Glencross (Translator)

Claude Izner
Claude Izner is the pseudonym of two sisters, both booksellers on the banks of the Seine, who are experts on nineteenth-century Paris.
Murder on the Eiffel Tower Gallic Books
The brand-new Eiffel Tower is the glory of the 1889 Universal Exposition. But one day a woman collapses and dies on its second floor. Can a bee-sting really be the cause of death? Enter young bookseller, Victor Legris, who is determined to find out what really happened. This is the first of a best-selling series of French murder mysteries now available in English for the first time. The series is a colourful evocation of late nineteenth-century Paris. Murder on the Eiffel Tower was the winner of the prestigious 2003 Michel Lebrun French Thriller Prize. 		The Père-Lachaise Mystery Gallic Books
In Paris 1890, Lady's maid Denise le Louarn fears the worst when her mistress, Odette de Valois, vanishes from the Pere-Lachaise cemetery during a visit to her husband's grave. All alone in the great metropolis, Denise knows just one person she can go to for help: Odette's former lover, Victor Legris. When the frightened girl turns up at his bookshop and tells him her story, Victor feels there must be a simple explanation for Odette's disappearance. But as he begins to look into the matter, it soon becomes clear that something sinister lies behind events at the Pere-Lachaise. 		The Montmartre Investigation Gallic Books
Its November, 1891. The body of a young woman is discovered at a crossroads on Boulevard Montmartre. Barefoot and dressed in red, she has been strangled and her face disfigured. That same day a single red shoe is delivered to Victor Legris' Parisian bookshop. Suspecting more that just coincidence, the bookseller sleuth and his assistant Jojo are soon engaged in seeking out the identity of both victim and murderer.
In this third investigation set in belle-epoque Paris, we are drawn with Victor into the city's nightlife and the legendary Moulin Rouge immortalised by Toulouse-Lautrec, who features in the story. By the author of the best-selling Murder on the Eiffel Tower.

Andrea H. Japp
Andrea H Japp trained as a toxicologist. She is the author of about twenty novels, and is considered one of the queens of crime writing in France
The Season of the Beast  Gallic Books
The season of the beast was near
1304. The King of France and the Church are locked in a battle for power that will also decide the fate of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller. Meanwhile in the Normandy countryside, young widow Agnes de Souarcy, the beautiful lady of the manor, is fighting to retain her independent way of life, aware that her spiteful half-brother will do anything to destroy her.
These two different worlds collide in the forest near Souarcy, where a terrifying creature begins to kill and mutilate a succession of monks on their way to deliver a secret message of momentous importance.
In the first Agnes de Souarcy Chronicle, Andrea Japp offers the reader a fast-paced, multi-layered mystery within a richly imagined portrait of medieval France.
The Season of the Beast was previously published in France as ‘Les chemins de la bête’ (Calmann-Lévy, 2006)
(Translated by Lorenza Garcia)

Septermber 2008