Grasp Rough Trade Curated By Dominique Manotti Kindle

one might surmise from the title, this French procedural starts with the discovery of a young Thai girl who has been raped and tortured to death.
Set in, this murder sets in motion a stunningly complicated investigation by Inspector Dacquin and his team, which winds its way through immigrant worker politics, the international heroin trade, FrenchIranian relations, child prostitution, Turkish domestic politics, police and government corruption, a private club, blackmail, the CIA, front companies, and most of all, the grimy Sentier district in Paris.


The somewhat choppy narrative takes place over a month, with lots of cutting between different locations and perspectives.
It's a bit offputting at first, but by the second half of the story, there have been enough new murders and complications so that one isn't so distracted.
There book does suffer from a lack of distinction amongst all the cops, Other than the lead inspector Dacquin, the other cops are interchangeable and unmemorable, which is a bit of a problem since there are at least four of them running around at any one point.
Manotti treats them more as Dacquin's pawns than real characters, which is a bit of a shame, Similarly, there are a huge number of people interviewed and interrogated, and they too, tend to run together, To keep everything straight, I recommend readers keep a running list of whom everybody is as they read,

It should be said that the book is unrelentingly grim and cynical, which some may not care for.
The French cops don't mess around, beating suspects, blackmailing informers, and generally operating by whatever means necessary, It has one of the better climaxes I've come across recently though, very realistic I felt, And there's a fun little epilogue which really ends thing on just the right note, Manotti has written at least two other Dacquin books, but they've not been translated into English,
FYI, this book is also known as "Dark Path", which is the more literal translation of the original French title.
Also, Manotti is a pseudonym, "ROUGH TRADE" was a thoroughly engrossing thriller rich with the elements of murder, prostitution, drug trafficking, money laundering for the purposes of sending arms to Iran and bolstering an internal heroin market, Turkish extremist groups, politics, corruption in high places, and the various other aspects of the Parisian underworld in.


Reader, should you decide to take up this book, be advised that you'll be in for quite a ride.
Wenn Ellroy leiwand wäre, oder so, Sehr spannender Plot über SansPapiers im Paris des Jahres, Einzig die vielen verschiedenen Namen verwirren von Zeit zu Zeit, Trotzdem sehr beeindruckend, wie Manotti die komplexe Geschichte auf rundSeiten eindampft, Der gesamte Roman liest sich wie ein Artikel in einem linken Nachrichtenmagazin, Große Gefühle sollte man sich also nicht erwarten, Stattdessen gibt es Sätze wie aus einer AK, Wie immer ein komplexer, politischer Plot bei Manotti: Arbeitskampf türkischer Illegaler in Paris, Prostitution, Drogen, Waffen, Korruption, diplomatische Verwicklungen.
Noir, natürlich. Extrem realistisch, fast dokumentarischer Stil, Starker Debütroman aus dem Jahrder Autorin, manotti's passion shines through in this as in her other books, complex and interesting hero who challenges the reader's social mores, but who works the system, This is the first French detective novel I have read, The flow of the book is completely different than I am accustomed, This did not make it bad, just different, I actually enjoyed this on a great deal, Una scrittura asciutta, immediata, diretta: tutta dialoghi e descrizione di gesti e azioni, Unindagine nel mondo schifoso della pedopornografia condotta da poliziotti stupratori, violenti, bugiardi, E poi il traffico di droga dallAfghanistan e dallIran, la regolarizzazione dei lavoratori turchi a Parigi e il primo tentativo di Alì Agca di uccidere il Papa.
Una primavera deldifficile da dimenticare, Rough Trade Sublime amp Gritty

Rough Trade by Dominique Manotti is a fantastic euro crime thriller that hits the mark on all levels.
There are no wasted words no paragraphs to pad out the story, like a surgeon with a scalpel she is incisive with her story telling and gets right down to business.
Written inabout the seedy underworld immigrant Paris of the earlys this has all the grit you would expect.


Superintendent Daquin is head of the Drugs Squad and is based in theth arrondissement for the duration of his investigations.
This is the area of Le Sentier where there are many clothing workshops owned and worked in by Turks mostly illegal workers.
They have their own action committee campaigning to get the legal work papers which also lead to various clashes,

Daquin and his squad have been called out to a murder where a young Thai prostitute has been found along with a quantity of drugs.
The work room where the dead body has been found was a clothing workshop but all the workers and machines had been spirited away.


While investigating the murder of the Thai prostitute and the Turkish drugs connections Daquin discovers a world of intrigue police corruption and some of the targets protected at the highest levels.
This does not put Daquin off the scent but makes him

more determined to find the truth and at the same time root out the corruption.


There is a stark bleakness that pervades throughout Rough Trade, the mixture of illegal workers, where death is cheap and drugs a plenty.
Where the Turks are fighting the battles of their homeland on French soil where the extreme right and left face each other off.
Where police investigations can be interfered with by a protective establishment and still somehow manage to get the job done in spite of those higher up the food chain.


Through the excellent translation from the French this is writing at its best the prose gives off the imagery of a seedy underworld that is so vivid.
You can smell the strong coffee and the raki mixed with the smell of Gauloises, you can hear the sewing machines and the clatter of small workrooms and the sounds on the streets.


This may be a short crime thriller but it hits the mark and is so enjoyable and through the skill of the writing you feel at the heart of the book and the investigation.
This is a wonderful example of EuroCrime at its best,

Dominique Manotti is my new favorite crime writer, Rough Trade, her first novel, is good so damn good that halfway through, I hopped on Amazon and ordered her other two books available in English.
This is a grim, dense novel, a clenchedjawed procedural set in the garment district of Paris in, and it features a crunchy cast of originals including the aristocratic detective Daquin and his Turkish lover, an informer and labor organizer that Daquin's literally got by the balls.
Manotti's cool style covers sex, rape, violence and international crime without breaking a sweat, There's no drama just the facts, Fantastique! A completely different kind of writer from Fred Vargas, but equally satisfying,
American crime fiction, despite its many addictive attractions, always seems to be caught up in replicating the libertarian laissez faire of the  American Old West.
 With writers such as sitelinkElmore Leonard there was an easy transition as he stopped writing Westerns, continued to utilize  the same archetypes, and wrote contemporary crime fiction instead.


The man who could write such stand out Western yarns as Hombre and ThreeTen to Yuma, later found a comfortable niche creating Mr.
Majestyk and Get Shorty from the same stuff, The ethos was more or less the same,

But elsewhere on the planet that  template has been broken or simply, by passed,  European crime fiction  today is also much richer and more variious than the exploits  John Rebus, Maigret or Kurt Wallander.
And within that capacity to remake the crime novel, is  Dominique Manotti,

Rough Trade is the first of her novels to be translated from its original French originally published in,.
This is as far  from a neatly orchestrated  whodunit as you can  get, Most of the time you aren't  sure  who is supposed to be the hero as there is so much activity driven by cynical street politics that  there are no self evident good guys to latch onto.
While this is a police procedural  , the gendarmes are not to be trusted, Nothing is what it seems in this tale  set   in the Sentier district of Paris just after theIranian Revolution,  and prior to a major shift in the  international drug trade that followed.


How these events relate to the brutal murder of very young Thai girl is uncovered by Inspector Daquin who has to watch his back as much as he investigates the murder.
But nothing is even that simple as the Sentier is not only the centre of the Parisian rag trade, but those who  mostly work in the district's sweatshops are Turkish, and many members of the workforce  are illegal immigrants.
So the take home pay and working conditions  of   illegal  immigrants has a lot to do with the many layers of corruption that infect the industry.
While the Turkish workers are trying to organise a trade union to  secure base rates of pay, others are seeking a return from more nefarious pursuits  and among those so engaged are some leading politicians, mandarins.
. . and coppers.

Manotti's novel has been called neorealist  and it certainly has a pervasive grubbiness that is very palpabe, even shocking at times.
 Because it unfolds consecutatively day by day, even hour by hour, it has a stark  immediacy that meanders through a complex web of interrelationships and competing self interests.
But for all that, Manotti writes as a detached observer leaving events to speak for themselves as even the many incidences of violence and corruption and merge with a much broader, even international political reality.


How she has managed to reference her work on  such an epic scale, make political sense of it  and still create bona fide crime fiction at the level of  a  few neighboring Parisian blocks is a major achievement.

Set against the backdrop of the seedy districts of Paris, this mystery unfolds alongside actual events of as garment workers' struggle.
In the neighborhood of Le Sentier, where sweatshops turn out the haute couture of the wellheeled, foreign workers keep inhuman hours under repressive management and the constant threat of police brutality.
When a young, Thai worker is found dead in a factory and an erotic video club's membership is threatened with exposure, investigators are lead into the immigrant slums, the heroin trade, and a morally ambiguous world of informers, prostitutes, and laborers.
A friend knew of my penchant for grim Scandinavian mysteries and recommended this book by the French author Manotti, A copy was relatively hard to find: I ended up buying one from a used book dealer online, In this first in a series, a set of Paris detectives search for the source of an international drug ring.
The blasé tone may be unique, but in my mind, this is more similar to Steig Larsson, the Swedish journalistturnedbestsellingauthor, than any of the other authors so touted.
Manotti calmly, quickly, journalistically recites the most appalling crimes in commission,

She has created a completely original set of characters about a police precinct in theth arrondissement of Paris.
The authentic feel leads one to hope it is not too realistic, The policemen are mostly cads, barely better men than those they police, but I guess that is the point, There are certainly some outliers when it comes to depravation, but the behavior of most of us falls pretty close to a meangiven the right circumstances, who among us wouldnt try their luck even if it were “the wrong thing to do”

Manotti has also created the sexiest gay man alive, Daquin, and I dont think she even told us what he actually looks like.
We got a catalog of his clothes, once, but mostly we just hear his thinking which can be pretty scary sometimes, and raw at others.
Daquin is cool, distant, and if not intellectual exactly, he is sharp, like a forgewelded stiletto,

The language is flat, but this is intentional, It is also extremely muscular and hardhitting, There is so much going on that we dont need histrionics: international drug rings, child porn, murder, production and sale of highend knockoffs in the fabric trade, influxes of illegal international labor, snuff films, illegal international sale of armsand its all connected.
The shite just keeps gets deeper, Daquin spends long weeks trying to link all the crime but is hampered by the daytime onstreet slaying of witnesses and the involvement of government ministers and other policemen.


This is real mean stuff and the feel is totally masculine and tough, It is written with such depth of knowledge it almost seems like it could be written by a policeman, The mix of realism and fatalism as well as mentions of food and clothes makes it completely French,

The book was originally published in France inby Editions de Seuil, It was translated from the French by Margaret Crosland and Elfreda Powell and published in London by Arcadia Books under the imprint EuroCrime series in.

Good in many ways though some nasty parts to the book rather a lot of rapes and other very unpleasant crimes, though thankfully not dwelt on.


If you've heard that French police techniques are or perhaps were somewhat rough this novel would illustrate it perfectly.
Casual violence and in one case a rape being a natural part of a search or interrogation seemingly,

However, the story is interesting and the pace good, Some unusual elements a main character who happens to be gay, stories of life for illegals in the Paris sweatshops of the lates.


Perhaps unfairly I was surprised the author was female, It's as hard boiled as any American police novel, .