Aimee is a beautiful young widow - she's also a killer. Driven by a deep-rooted desire for revenge, she sets about uncovering the secrets of the inhabitants of the sleepy rural town of Bleville, before ruthlessly murdering them. Faced with corruption of a kind she had scarcely imagined, she discovers a deeply moral core under her murderous instincts.

Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew--a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with a serious ulcer. Michel hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson pursues. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate.
The craziness is just getting started.
Like Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated "Fatale," "The Mad and the Bad" is a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction.

A New York Review Books Original

Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there's no question that Aimee 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.
Aimee 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.

"His books are all action, unfolding with a laconic efficiency that would make his killers proud."-The Economist Businessman Georges Gerfaut witnesses a murder-and is pursued by the killers. His conventional life knocked off the rails, Gerfaut turns the tables and sets out to track down his pursuers. Along the way, he learns a thing or two about himself. . . . Manchette-masterful stylist, ironist, and social critic-limns the cramped lives of professionals in a neoconservative world. "Manchette has appropriated and subverted the classic thriller [with] descriptions of undiluted action, violence and suspense [and] a perspective on evil, a disenchanted world of manipulation and fury. . . ."-Times Literary Supplement "The petty exigencies of the classic thriller find themselves summarily reduced to cremains by the fiery blue jets of Jean-Patrick Manchette's concision, intelligence, tension, and style."-Jim Nisbet, author of Lethal Injection and Prelude to a Scream "Manchette is a must for the reading lists of all noir fans. . . . Manchette deserves a higher profile among noir fans."-Publishers Weekly "Manchette . . . performs miracles within this simple story. His style is very matter of fact, stark and almost cool like the jazz his hero or anti-hero Gerfaut devours at every opportunity. Yet in this short novel there is no lack of atmosphere, excitement, characters or descriptive writing, it is just the total lack of unnecessary material that makes the story seem so lean and mean."-Norman Price, EuroCrime "A social satire cum suspense equally interested in dissecting everyday banalities and manufacturing thrills. Writing with economy, deadpan irony, and an eye for the devastating detail, Manchette spins pulp fiction into literature."-Kirkus Reviews "While there isn't much that's obviously moral-in the good-versus-evil sense-[this novel] demonstrate[s] why Manchette is hailed as the man who kicked the French crime novel or 'polar' out of the apolitical torpor into which it had fallen by the time he started publishing his 'neo-polars' in the 1970s. . . . Grim and cerebral as they feel, it's remarkable how comic-in an absurdist, laugh-or-you'll-cry way-these books are, as if Manchette had decided that poking fun at the products of the capitalist system were the fittest way to attack the system itself."-Jennifer Howard, Boston Review "The pace is fast, the action sequences are superb, and the effect is just as striking as it must have been when the book was first published in 1976."-Laura Wilson, The Guardian "[T]he novel is brilliantly written, replete with allusions to art, literature, and music, papered with the very texture and furniture of our lives. Manchette is Camus on overdrive, at one and the same time white-hot, ice-cold. He deserves much the same attention."-James Sallis, Review of Contemporary Fiction Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) rescued the French crime novel from the grip of stodgy police procedurals-restoring the noir edge by virtue of his post-1968 leftism. Today, Manchette is a totem to the generation of French mystery writers who came in his wake. Jazz saxophonist, political activist, and screen writer, Manchette was influenced as much by Guy Debord as by Gustave Flaubert. City Lights has published more of his work, including The Gunman.

Martin Terrier is a hired killer who wants out of the game--so he can settle down and marry his childhood sweetheart. After all, that's why he took up this profession But the Organization won't let him go: they have other plans. Once again, the gunman must assume the prone shooting position. A tour de force, this violent tale shatters as many illusions about life and politics as bodies.

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) rescued the French crime novel from the grip of stodgy police procedurals, restoring the noir edge by virtue of his post-1968 leftism. Manchette is a totem to a generation of French mystery writers, and his stories have inspired several films, including Claude Chabrol's "Nada."

Also Available by Jean-Patrick Manchette
"Three to Kill"
TP $11.95, 0-87286-395-6 - CUSA