Fatale cover art

Fatale

Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for £5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Fatale

By: Jean-Patrick Manchette, Donald Nicholson-Smith - translator
Narrated by: Amrita Acharia
Try Standard free

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £12.06

Buy Now for £12.06

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Murder isn’t always ugly.


Aimée is drop-dead gorgeous, razor-sharp, and lethally efficient. A killer with a cool head and a taste for chaos, she arrives in the backwater town of Bléville – a festering stew of grudges, corruption, and small-town rot – ready to make a killing.

It's a game she’s played before: stir up trouble, pit the locals against one another, then disappear with blood on her hands and money in her pocket. But this time, something breaks and the game turns on her.

Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the crime novel into a weapon of satire and stylish mayhem. Fatale is his bloodiest, funniest, and most brilliantly unhinged work: a riot of revenge, farce, and gleeful destruction.

PRAISE FOR JEAN-PARICK MANCHETTE

‘Manchette was Le Homme... We must revere him now and rediscover him this very instant. ’ James Ellroy

‘Manchette is Camus on overdrive... He deserves much the same attention’ James Sallis

‘Manchette is legend among all of the crime writers I know, and with good reason: his novels never fail to stun and thrill from page one’ Duane Swierczynski


© Jean-Patrick Manchette 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Classics Crime Crime Fiction Literature & Fiction Modern Detectives Mystery Satire World Literature Witty

Critic reviews

France's king of noir fiction…he writes with a bleak, tragic beauty
Shocking, funny, sad, smart and cool… A macabre delight from start to finish
A fist between the eyes, leaving the reader reeling… So devastating it takes your breath away
Manchette's books are all action, unfolding with a laconic efficiency that would make his killers proud
I’d rather read Manchette than many contemporary noir writers. (Sarah Weinman)
This pair of explosive, absurd French crime thrillers – with plenty of oh là là and even more zut alors – will cheer you up and help you forget the desperate weather… these [are] funny, nasty, perpetually surprising books
No reviews yet