DOGS AND WOLVES

After serving five years in prison for carrying his older brother Fabien’s drugs, 26-year-old Frenchman Franck quickly finds himself in compromising situations with Fabien’s girlfriend, Jessica, and her drug-dealing family.

Franck had planned to move on with his life after reuniting with Fabien, who walked away from the drug bust thanks to his sibling’s silence. But Fabien is away in Spain on “business” and may never come back. In his absence, Franck can’t resist tumbling into an intense affair with Jessica, a femme fatale who runs hot and ice cold. “Unpredictable, unfathomable, poisonous,” she is just as erratic with her daughter, Rachel, an oddly nonresponsive 8-year-old. Franck has barely settled into a trailer outside Jessica’s parents’ faded house in southwestern France when her creepy father presses him into running drug errands, arming him with a gun. No macho dude, Franck is prone to weeping when his bones are being crushed by bad guys. Lost without his brother, he spins through streams of consciousness in which he wonders “if he still [exists].” But after Jessica is raped and left half-naked in an alley, he finds a more formidable side of himself. Though the book is rooted in classic noir (think Jim Thompson), its focus is increasingly on the mistreatment of children—by Jessica, her grotesque parents, and Franck’s neglectful parents. The long-term damage from which Rachel will suffer can only be imagined: “It was likely she’d already experienced too much for her age.” Le Corre has a tendency to repeat the same basic scenes, but he sustains a coiled intensity in exposing a life in which innocence is nowhere to be found.

As nasty as it gets, this French noir sets itself apart with its beating heart.