Rough Trade

This fast-moving story traces the dark, sinuous paths of sinister events that are unfolding in Le Sentier, the heart of the Parisian rag-trade. One spring morning a Thai girl is found dead in a fashion workshop, inciting a tangle of illicit events involving illegal immigration, oppressed sweatshop workers, prostitution rings, and a gay police officer and his Turkish lover. Other mysterious secrets lie hidden in the upper registers of Parisian society, including heroin trafficking and a sex club where patrons are secretly filmed, all serving as tantalizing fodder for this gripping morality tale of late-20th-century Paris.

Dominique Manotti is the winner of the best crime story of its year by the Franch Crime Writers Association for her novel Rough Trade.