Dead Horsemeat (Eurocrime Series) - Softcover

'Manotti has Ellroy's gift for complex plotting, but she has a grip on the economics, politics and social history which marks her as special... good generic crime fiction, with le flair in abundance' * TLS * 'A sophisticated French police procedural, which packs more into 175 pages than some American or British novels twice its length.' * The Sunday Telegraph * 'Mean, lean in-your-face depiction of cutting-edge police work...' -- Peter Millar * The Times * 'Manotti effortlessly handles a fiendishly complicated plot. Her characters are fully rounded and believable. And she is funny, accurately reflecting the gallows humour that people who frequently encounter horror often resort to as a defence.' * The Daily Telegraph * 'Dodgy company takeovers, blazing horses and international drug cartels, Dead Horsemeat is EuroCrime at its best.' -- Pete Ayrton, Serpent's Tail MD 'By turns bleak, transgressive, sexy and quite literally unputdownable. They're so seedy, very, very French (in a good way), often very funny and so tightly plotted that you can read them in an evening. And Arcadia's translations have been brilliant. It's a joy, for me at least, to enjoy the luxury of devouring such exuberant, taut and engrossing crime writing.' -- Anne Beech, Pluto Press MD * Reading for Pleasure, The Bookseller * 'A splendid neo-realistic tale of everyday bleakness and transgression set in the seedy underworld of Paris. You can smell the Gitanes and pastis fumes of the real France' -- Maxim Jakubowski * Guardian * 'The novel I liked most this year. Set in Le Sentier, the district of Paris where expensive clothes are made in sweatshops, it uses real events - the struggle by foreign workers in 1980 to get legal status - as the setting for an extraordinarily vivid crime novel' -- Joan Smith * Books of the Year, Independent *

Another exhilarating crime novel by the best-selling author of "Rough Trade", chosen Book of the Year in the "Independent" by Amanda Hopkinson and Joan Smith. 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.