Fatale

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.

She’s played this game 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. Aimée lets someone in – and the game turns personal.

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.

PRAISE FOR JEAN-PARICK MANCHETTE

‘Manchette was Le Homme… We must revere him now and rediscover him this very instant. ’ James Ellroy

‘A comic genius… I read and reread him, stunned, appalled, and laughing out loud’ Rachel Kushner

‘Manchette is Camus on overdrive… He deserves much the same attention’ James Sallis

‘Manchette is legend among all of the crime writers I know, and with good reason: his novels never fail to stun and thrill from page one’ Duane Swierczynski

Author Biography

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995) was a crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. In 1971 he published his first novel and went on to establish a new genre of French novel, the neo-polar. Vintage Classics publishes his Fatale, Nada, No Room at the Morgue and Skeletons in the Closet.