Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Trade Review"'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 '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 complexity and the uncompromising tone have drawn comparisons with American writers such as James Ellroy. But Manotti's ability to convey the unique rhythms of a French police investigation distinguishes Rough Trade' - Daily Telegraph 'Tightly written, undoubtedly realistic and often exciting' - The Times"
