Tonino Benacquista – författare

Some favours simply cannot be refused. Tonio agrees to write a love letter for Dario, a low-rent Paris gigolo. When Dario is murdered, a single bullet to the head, Tonio finds his friend has left him a small vineyard somewhere east of Naples. The wine is undrinkable but an elaborate scam has been set up. The smell of easy money attracts the unwanted attentions of the Mafia and the Vatican, and the unbridled hatred of the locals. Mafiosi aren't choir boys, and monsignors can be very much like Mafiosi. A darkly comic, iconoclastic tale.

Who hasn't wanted to become 'someone else'? The person you've always wanted to be...the person who hadn't given up half way to your dreams and desires? One evening at a bar two men who have just met at their tennis club in Paris conclude that it is time to change their lives and decide to meet again in three years time to see whose transformation is the more radical. Thierry is a picture framer with a steady clientele, but he has always wanted to be a private investigator. Nicolas is a shy teetotal executive trying not to fall off the corporate ladder. But becoming another is not without risk; at the very least the risk of finding yourself. A helter-skelter tale of humour and suspense.

Antoine's life is good. During the day, he hangs pictures for the most fashionable art galleries in Paris. Evenings, he dedicates to the silky moves and subtle tactics of billiards, his true passion. But when Antoine is attacked by an art thief in a gallery his world begins to fall apart. His maverick investigation triggers two murders - he finds himself the prime suspect for one of them - as he uncovers a cesspool of art fraud. A game of billiards decides the outcome of this violently funny tale, laced with brilliant riffs about the world of modern art and the parasites that infest it. "You know, you can see parallels in the histories of crime and painting. At first, men painted as they kill, with bare hands. Raw art, you could say...Instinct before technique. Then came instruments, the stick, the brush. One fine day, painting with knives began. Look at the work of Jack the Ripper...And then the gun was invented. Painting with a gun brought something final and radical. And today, in the age of terrorism, they paint with bombs, in cities, in the metros. Anonymous graffiti that explode on street corners..."

The story is violent, pacy and full of black humour. Imagine the Soprano family arriving in France, or perhaps better, Ray Liotta, the snitch from 'Goodfellas' settling down with his family in a small town in Normandy. Under cover of darkness, an American family moves into a villa in Cholong-sur-Avre in Normandy. Fred Blake tells everyone he is writing a history of the landings. In fact Blake is Giovanni Manzoni, an ex-Mafia boss who grassed and is now in the FBI Witness Protection Program. Having blown his cover a number of times in the US, the FBI finally sends him to France. Things happen to this thuggish family: a plumber who angers Fred with delays and exorbitant estimates 'falls down the stairs' and breaks both arms, the manager of the local supermarket insults Maggie behind her back so that afternoon his supermarket burns down, Warren, the son, starts a gang in his lycee, to intimidate and extort other pupils. A coincidence beyond belief blows Fred's cover yet again and, with the arrival of the shooters from Newark, he is able to dive back into the violent life of crime he misses so much.