Framed
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Praise for Holy Smoke, the first in the Antoine series:
“A terrific black comedy …both a blasphemously funny satire of provincial Italian chicanery and a wry acknowledgment of the ambivalence that ambitious immigrants feel about their roots.”—The New York Times
“Unexpected deadly demands made in the name of friendship inspire the plot of this quirky mystery novel. Irreverently inveighs against romantic love, cancer and the Paris suburbs.”—The Washington Post
“An iconoclastic chronicle of small-time crooks and desperate capers, with added Gallic and Italian flair. Wonderful fun.”—Guardian
Antoine, a fanatic billiards player, is asked to watch over a Paris art gallery. When he scuffles with a thief a statue falls and severs his right hand. His maverick investigation leads to the discovery of a series of gruesome killings. Soon Antoine finds himself the prime suspect in the murder of a gallery owner. A game of billiards decides the outcome of this satirical tale which brilliantly captures the world of modern art and the parasites that infest it.
After being, in turn, a museum night-watchman, and a train guard on the Paris-Rome line, Tonino Benacquista is now a highly successful author of fiction and film scripts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French author Benacquista (Holy Smoke) delivers another darkly comic crime novel. His eccentric narrator, Antoine, supports his love of playing billiards with a day job hanging paintings at a Paris art gallery. When Antoine interrupts an intruder in the midst of vandalizing an abstract work by an obscure painter, Etienne Morand, the man topples a heavy sculpture on Antoine, crushing his right hand. The loss of his hand further warps Antoine's already idiosyncratic personality and leads him on a quest for his assailant that involves several corpses and suspicions that there may not have been a real artist named Morand. The author's familiarity with the European art world lends plausibility to the fraud plot, while the unusual main character makes a refreshing change from the stock hero of so much genre fiction.
