Explaining her reasons for turning to the roman noir when in her fifties, after decades of teaching history at a university in Paris, Dominique Manotti points to François Mitterrand. His presidency, she has said, sounded the death knell for hopes of a radical transformation of French society. Fiction, though, offered her an alternative form of resistance – if only as a stubborn refusal to let things lie. Now aged 78, Manotti has written a dozen novels on subjects ranging from football corruption and factory protests to police violence and oil trading, mostly set in contemporary France. To better appreciate her work, it is useful to understand why it was the