If you like noir books you'll love this. Took my a day to read, which makes me feel better about myself, and proves this book has the hallmarks of a great crime read--unputadownability. Yes, I just invented a new word. OED, your welcome.

But there's more to this than the normal crime/noir/mystery novel. It's a bit weird. Firstly, there is a serious anti-capitalist thread running through it, which aligns with me, as the young, beautiful, female, vicious assassin (does this remind you of a tattooed famous literary figure?) exerts revenge on the fat-cats of French village life, and earns a buck or two while doing it. The weirdness comes, and Jean Echeloz has a great afterword pointing them out, when the heroine does stuff like take her clothes off and smother herself in paper money. Or the brutal scene when a young baby suffocates at the town fair, and the narrator doesn't seem to care at all. Or the descriptions of her steak lunches. These, and other, scenes pull the reader out of the usual mystery/violence narrative that hurtles us through the book and presents a character that has become so immoral, so hungry for money, so uncaring, unforgiving, and unflinching in her punishments. That's its a big surprise when she finds her soul. And when she does find it, she decides to kill everyone. Awesome.