Femme
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Femme fatale. French for "deadly woman."
You hear the term a lot these days, usually in connection with noir fiction and film noir. But they're not just products of literature or film, the folklore of nearly every culture. They exist in modern society, too. The genuine femme fatales you hear about now and then are every bit as evil as the fictional variety. Yet what sets them apart is that they're the failures, the ones who for one reason or another got caught. For every one of those, there must be several times as many who get away with their destructive crimes...
In the thirty years the Nameless Detective has been a private investigator, he has never once had the misfortune to cross paths with this type of seductress... but in Femme he'll meet Cory Beckett, a deadly woman who has brought some new angles to the species. New—and terrible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this hard-edged novella from MWA Grand Master Pronzini, the unnamed PI hero of his long-running series (Hellbox, etc.) muses on femme fatales. After more than 40 years of detecting, Nameless never expected to cross paths with one, until his bail bondsman friend, Abe Melikian, introduces him to 28-year-old Cory Beckett ("A deadly woman who brought a couple of new twists to the species"). Melikian wants Nameless to track down Beckett's younger brother, Kenneth, who has jumped bail on a charge of stealing a diamond necklace worth $20,000. The jewelry belonged to the alcoholic wife of San Francisco union leader and power broker Andrew Vorhees, who employed Kenneth to tend to his yacht. The devious Beckett's scheme and persona aren't unusual enough to make her that memorable a villainess, but few will be able to forget the image of her revealed on the last page.
