"What I'm offering you is love with a capital 'L,' all the love in the world!"

This is not the sort of offer professional scapegoat and downtrodden publisher Benjamin Malaussne is used to. But his boss, Queen Zabo, the redoubtable doyenne of the Parisian publishing world, has finally offered him a starring role-all he has to do is impersonate the world's best-loved but hitherto anonymous author. Yet things are never quite so simple for Malaussne and his extended family of misfits and chancers. Soon he is in deep: the theft of a manuscript, a frenzied readership, the disarray of his private life, and then a spate of connected murders that threaten to destroy Vendetta Press entirely.

Think of a cross between Diva and Delicatessen, set within the literary intrigue of a publishing house and the multiracial exuberance of low-life Paris, and you will be somewhere near the world of Pennac's Belleville quarter.