Pascal Garnier

Death is Simon's business. Now the aging vermin exterminator is preparing to die. But he still has one last job down on the coast and he needs a driver. Bernard is twenty-one. He can drive and he's never seen the sea. As the unlikely pair set off on their journey, Bernard soon discovers Simon's definition of vermin is broader than he'd expected ...

The future is on its way to Picardy with the construction of a huge motorway. But nearby is a house where nothing has changed since 1945. Traumatized by events that year, Yolande hasn't left her home since. And life has not been kinder to Bernard, her brother, who is now in the final months of a terminal illness. Realizing that he has so little time left, Bernard's gloom suddenly lifts. With no longer anything to lose, he becomes reckless - and murderous....

A widow's quiet retirement in the foothills of the Alps is turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious stranger. Recently widowed grandmother Éliette is returning to her home in the mountains when her micro-car breaks down. A stranger comes to her aid on foot. Éliette offers him a lift, glad of the interruption to her humdrum routine. That night, her neighbours' son is killed in a road accident. Could the tragedy be linked to the arrival of...

Garnier's crime novels add significantly to the latest renaissance for this type of dark narrative.' Publishers Weekly Volume 2 includes The Front Seat Passenger, in which Fabien discovers his wife died in a car accident alongside her lover, and decides to track down that man's widow; Moon in a Dead Eye, in which the paranoia of the residents of a gated retirement village in the south of France spins out of control; The Islanders, whose protagonist...

A crime writer uses the modest advance on his latest novel to rent a house on the Normandy coast. There should be little to distract him from his work besides walks on the windswept beach, but as he begins to tell the tale of forty-something Louis - who, after dispatching his own mother, goes on to relieve others of their burdensome elderly relations - events in his own life begin to overlap with the work of his imagination.

Volume 1 includes How's the Pain?, the tale of an ageing 'pest exterminator' taking on one last job on the French Riviera; The Panda Theory, in which a stranger, Gabriel, arrives in a Breton town and befriends the locals... but is he as angelic as he seems?; and The A26, in which a new Picardy motorway brings modernity close to a flat in which a brother and sister live together, haunted by terminal illness and the events of 1945.

A quiet retirement in the foothills of the Alps is turned upside-down. A struggling author's life becomes disconcertingly entangled with the crime novel he's writing. Vultures circle as a cantankerous retiree falls for his nurse and is confronted by somebody claiming to be his long-lost son.

Gabriel is a stranger in a small Breton town. Nobody knows where he came from or why he's here. Yet his small acts of kindness, and exceptional cooking, quickly earn him acceptance from the locals. His new friends grow fond of Gabriel, who seems as reserved and benign as the toy panda he wins at the funfair. But unlike Gabriel, the fluffy toy is not haunted by his past...