Small Crimes

Chosen by NPR and the Washington Post as one of the best crime & mystery novels of 2008, Small Crimes is now a major film starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau ( Game of Thrones ' Jaime Lannister) Bent copper Joe Denton gets out of prison suspiciously early after disfiguring the district attorney. Nobody wants Joe to hang around, not his ex-wife, his parents or his former colleagues - if he had any decency he'd get out of town and start over. Unfortunately, Joe has precious little decency - and a whole lot of unfinished business to attend to. A tale of redemption and revenge as dark and violent as it's bitterly comic, Small Crimes is the UK debut of hard-boiled hotshot Dave Zeltserman. Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life and a terrible attitude, the anti-hero of this grim, funny novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague - the sexually-frustrated Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer systemHouellebecq's first novel was a smash hit in France, expressing the misanthropic voice of a generation. Like A Confederacy of Dunces, Houellebecq's bitter, sarcastic and exasperated narrator vociferously expresses his frustration and disgust with the world.