French Crime Fiction

Richard Ainsworth moved to rural France to escape the world, so being voted mayor of the small town of Saint-Sauver comes as a terrible shock. Fortunately bureaucracy has its benefits and he is shipped off to a health spa to recuperate. The Esprit de l'Air is a world famous venue on a deserted island fort off the west coast of France, and was chosen specifically by his business partner and bounty hunter of international repute, Valérie d'Orçay.

Richard should have been prepared then. After a dramatic first night where a bizarre and unfriendly group of guests are pitched against each other to win ownership of the resort, Richard's film-historian mind wanders. Has he seen this all before?

And when the first body turns up, he knows he has...

Murder isn’t always ugly. Aimée is drop-dead gorgeous, razor-sharp, and lethally efficient. A killer with a cool head and a taste for chaos, she arrives in the backwater town of Bléville – a festering stew of grudges, corruption, and small-town rot – ready to make a killing.

It's a game she’s played before: stir up trouble, pit the locals against one another, then disappear with blood on her hands and money in her pocket. But this time, something breaks and the game turns on her. Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the crime novel into a weapon of satire and stylish mayhem.

Fatale is his bloodiest, funniest, and most brilliantly unhinged work: a riot of revenge, farce, and gleeful destruction.

Mathilde has always been a headstrong woman. A member of the French resistance when she was just eighteen years old, she both impressed and horrified everyone with her cool capacity for violence. Now it is 1985 and Mathilde is in her sixties.

She is not as glamorous as she once was, but she continues to take great pride in all that she does. Recently, however, the sixty-three-year-old has been affected by loss of memory and erratic changes in mood that even her exasperated dog Ludo has noticed. This is a potentially dangerous situation, since Mathilde now makes her living as a contract killer...

In Paul Halter’s The Fourth Door, the impossible becomes reality. A haunted room. An unbroken seal. A murder victim whose very identity is an enigma. And then, a second death in a house surrounded by untrodden snow. Both crimes defy reason—but master detective Dr. Alan Twist reveals that even the most baffling mysteries have rational explanations.

This locked-room mystery, Paul Halter's debut, won the Prix de Cognac in 1988.

When the manuscript of a debut crime novel arrives at a Parisian publishing house, everyone in the readers' room is convinced it's something special. Editor Violaine Lepage snaps it up - who cares that the author's identity is a mystery? And when the book is shortlisted for France's highest literary honour, she shares in the glory.

Then a series of murders takes place in circumstances strangely reminiscent of those in the book. With the prize announcement approaching, the police are asking questions - and Violaine is more than a little worried about her own secrets coming to light...