Ivory Pearl
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist.
Out of the wreckage of World War II swaggers Ivory Pearl, so named (rhymes with girl) by some British soldiers who made her their mascot, a mere kid, orphaned, survivor of God knows what, but fluent in French, English, smoking, and drinking. In Berlin, Ivy meets Samuel Farakhan, a rich closeted intelligence officer. Farakhan proposes to adopt her and help her to become the photographer she wants to be; his relationship to her will provide a certain cover for him. And she is an asset. The deal is struck...
1956: Ivy has seen every conflict the postwar world has on offer, from Vietnam to East Berlin, and has published her photographs in slick periodicals, but she is sick to death of death and bored with life and love. It’s time for a break. Ivy heads to Cuba, the Sierra Maestra.
History, however, doesn’t take vacations.
Ivory Pearl was Jean-Patrick Manchette’s last book, representing a new turn in his writing. It was to be the first of a series of ambitious historical thrillers about the “wrong times” we live in. Though left unfinished when Manchette died, the book, whose full plot has been filled in here from the author’s notes, is a masterpiece of bold suspense and black comedy: chilling, caustic, and perfectly choreographed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in France in 1996, this unfinished novel from Manchette (1942 1995) was supposed to be the start of his magnum opus, a series following famed war photographer Ivory Pearl from 1945, when she is a refugee child in postwar Berlin, through geopolitical hot spots of the next 40 years. The opening chapter in particular is as sharp and brutal as anything Manchette wrote, including his masterpiece, The Prone Gunman. The obsessive details ("a semi-automatic Sauer Model 38 chambered in .380 ACP and fitted with a silencer") might make even Ian Fleming feel uninformed. Though the spy-versus-spy scenario circles the globe, most of the plot concerns Ivory taking a sabbatical in Cuba's Sierra Maestra range in 1956, as Castro emerges on the revolutionary stage. There she meets the bullet-scarred Victor Maurer and a seven-year-old girl who may be the missing niece of an international arms trafficker. Then a helicopter carrying an elite hit squad arrives. The included author notes suggest how it all might have ended. Noir fans won't want to miss this one.
