"Chantal Pelletier is a wonderful story teller: she captures your heart in three short sentences, and takes you through the gamut of emotions, from laughter to tears. A master of funny, bittersweet dialogue. A classic roman noir hero, the world weary inspector, is completely reinvented." Le Monde

The naked bodies of a star male dancer and a beautiful young girl have been found entwined together, murdered in a dressing room of the Moulin Rouge. A junkie is killed in a nearby flat, his throat chewed open, the teeth-marks human. Seemingly unconnected, these deaths form part of a sinister pattern involving crack dealers and addicts, wild sex parties and shady property deals. In charge of both investigations is Maurice Laice. Depressed by what is happening in his beloved Montmartre and exhausted by the emptiness of his love life, Maurice is plagued by a female boss who bombards him with tales of her sexual exploits. Yet they make a good team, each obsessed for different reasons by the crimes at hand. Together, they start to uncover the twisted trail of fear and broken dreams, greed and revenge that reaches from Corsica and Algeria into the very heart of old Paris.

Chantal Pelletier, born in Lyon, began her career as a theatre actor. She founded a theatre company in Paris and is a successful author of novels, essays, plays and film scripts. It is not unusual to find her engaged simultaneously as author, director and actor in the same project. She published her first roman noir in 1997. In Goat Song she introduces Maurice Laice, the world weary inspector of three of her crime novels.