Notes
Rough Trade by Dominique Manotti was her first novel. She wrote it in a “now or never” moment when she had just turned fifty.
The setting is a strike by illegal immigrants working in the Parisienne clothing industry. Manotti participated in the strike when she was a trade unionist.
Publisher’s Synopsis
This fast-moving story takes the reader rapidly along dark paths of sinister events in Le Sentier, the heart of Paris’s rag trade. One spring morning a Thai girl is found dead in a fashion workshop. Another unlucky prostitute, or something more sinister? A club is uncovered where people secretly get filmed having sex – including some very distinguished men. This is the seedy underworld of Paris – the traffic in heroin, illegal immigrants without work permits, police officers’ secret lives. A Turkish man – a police informer and leader of exploited immigrants rag-trader workers – is also Police Inspector Danquin’s lover. This is a gripping morality tale of twentieth-century Paris.
Dominique Manotti teaches nineteenth-century Economic History. “Rough Trade”, her first novel, was awarded the top prize for the best thriller of the year by the French Crime Writers Association.
Read a full review of Rough Trade by Dominique Manotti at EuroCrime.
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