“Les Gentils is about suffering, loss and impossible mourning. It is at once cruel, violent and filled with humanity.”— Le Monde

1978, from Paris to Jonestown.

Franck had it all — a record store, a wonderful wife and a beautiful daughter. And then one day in June 1777 the unimaginable: someone robs a bakery in Belleville, empties the cash register and kills the girl who was waiting for her candy at the counter. Franck’s daughter.

Six months later, Franck has become a shadow of his former self and is separated from his wife. He keeps waiting for the cops to give him the answer that never comes: who killed his daughter? But there’s nothing, no leads. So Franck takes things into his own hands, investigating on his own with violent, sadistic methods. He discovers a small detail that leads to several little clues. A lead towards the south, Toulouse, Marseille, looking for a drug addict named Yannick with a tattoo of an anarchist symbol on his soldier.

Franck has very little keeping him tethered to the world, just his rage and finding Yannick proves to be more difficult than he expected. He goes from the South of France to French Guiana to a colony of hippies where Yannick has gone to cleanse his soul and to be reborn an innocent man. But the former addict has no idea that a man is hunting him down, ready to go through hell in order to find him.

And that hell is only the beginning.

Michaël Mention was born in 1979. est né en 1979. He is the author of 12 novels including La Voix secrète (Le Fantascope, 2011 ; 10/18, 2017), Power (Stéphane Marsan, 2018 ; 10/18, 2019), winner of the Grand Prix au Festival Sans Nom de Mulhouse and the Prix Polar Pourpre, and Dehors les chiens (inédit 10/18, 2021). He was winner of the Prix Transfuge for best new crime novelist in 2015 with Et justice pour tous (Rivages).