Publisher's Weekly
PI Peter Sawyer encounters prostitutes, movie stars, a dictatorial general and gallons of blood in this thriller set in the south of France. His trouble starts when he rescues Manon Jabot, a beautiful would-be actress, from a pounding at the hands of Sandrine Tally, a call girl who feels her territory has been invaded. When Peter drives Manon home, he learns that her father is a colonel in the service of an infamous Central American dictator who has ''retired'' to the French Riviera. Two years later, when the two women have stopped feuding and become friends, Peter is called in by Manon to investigate Sandrine's disappearance; learning that she was involved in clandestine activities, he is led through a trail of corpses who have died various gruesome deaths, including a skinning in one case. The plot is functional if abundantly violent. But the man relating the events is never likable or unlikable; while he attempts, through the first-person narration, to give the narrator a classic hard-boiled exterior, Albert ( Bimbo Heaven ) fails to give him much of a personality.