Fatale

Starred review from March 7, 2011
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 Bléville, the young woman had chosen to call herself Aimée 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.

April 1, 2011
The late Manchette (194295) is credited with reinventing the French roman noir in 10 hard-edged short novels published in the 1970s and 1980s. Known for spare prose and unrelentingly dark story lines, he ups the ante an extra notch in the third of his works to appear in the U.S. This 91-page novella about a femme fatale and hired killer reads like a blend of Jim Thompsons sensibility and Camus style. In a kind of narrative monotone, Manchette describes a young woman insinuating herself into a provincial town, making friends with the city fathers, determining who holds grudges against whom, and then offering to solve their problems by killing the odd man out. This time, though, the plan backfires when she finds herself sympathizing with the intended victim and decides to settle scores with all the men who hired her. Readers who look for sympathetic figures wont find any here. The appeal lies, as it does with Thompson, in the starkness of the story and, like Camus, in the utter lack of sentimentality with which horrific deeds are detailed and the razor-sharp succinctness of the prose.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)