Dead Horsemeat (Eurocrime)

'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'

'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'

'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.'

'Dodgy company takeovers, blazing horses and international drug cartels, Dead Horsemeat is EuroCrime at its best.'

'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.'

'Mean, lean in-your-face depiction of cutting-edge police work...'

'A sophisticated French police procedural, which packs more into 175 pages than some American or British novels twice its length.'

'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'

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.