Recently, on his way back from Orlando, storms there held Adam up, which meant an unexpected overnight in LA, and a quick trip to Small World Books in Venice Beach - lucky me scored some great Bitter Lemon and SOHO Crime titles. The first of these I read was Goat Song by Chantal Pelletier. Opening paragraph:
"A cold stench of sweat, tobacco, saltpetre, whiffs of bleach and ammonia. Elsa crossed the entrance hall of the Moulin Rouge without greeting the cleaning ladies. At ten o'clock in the morning, the music hall that had set the legendary heart of Montmartre beating, where Lautrec and Picasso kicked up their heels and caught the clap, was no postcard. The girl in the red raincoat burst into the office of the imbecilic personnel manager, whose mouth was constantly agape from stupidity and chronic sinusitis."
The naked bodies of a star male dancer and a beautiful young girl have been found entwined together, murdered in a dressing room of the Moulin Rouge. A junkie is killed in a nearby flat, his throat chewed open, the teeth-marks human.
Seemingly unconnected, these deaths form part of a sinister pattern involving crack dealers and addicts, wild sex parties and shady property deals.
In charge of both investigations is Maurice Laice. Depressed by what is happening to his Montmartre and exhausted by the emptiness of his love life, Maurice is plagued by a female boss who bombards him with tales of her sexual exploits. Yet they make a good team, each obsessed for different reasons by the crimes at hand.
Together, they start to uncover a twisted trail of fear and broken dreams, greed and revenge that reaches from Corsica and Algeria into the very heart of old Paris.