Fatale
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Beschreibung des Verlags
A New York Review Books Original
Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there’s no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better, as always, to make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.
Aimée has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In Fatale he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in 1977, this masterful hit man narrative from Manchette (1942 1995) strips down and flips expectations, anticipating La Femme Nikita by several years. "For her stay in Bl ville, the young woman had chosen to call herself Aim e Joubert, and that is what I shall call her from now on," Manchette says of his female assassin, who "aside from her husband," as French author Jean Echenoz mentions in the afterword, "has already killed seven men, among them a factory owner, a stock breeder, and a doctor." Told in tight behaviorist language and laced with deadly black humor, this compact neo-noir follows Joubert as she steps much too far into her self-made career toward a showdown worthy of any action film. Written between Three to Kill and The Prone Gunman, Manchette's two books previously translated into English, this tense thriller should only add to his growing reputation in America.
