The Mad and the Bad

by Jean-Patrick Manchette

Genres: Hard-Boiled; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

An NYRB Classics Original

Winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction

Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense  fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew—a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with a serious ulcer. Michel hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson pursues. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate.

The craziness is just getting started.

Like Jean-Patrick Manchette’s celebrated Fatale, The Mad and the Bad is a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction.

Release date: July 15, 2014

Publisher: NYRB Classics

Print pages: 184