Douglas Kennedy - The Pursuit of Happiness

Just when Harry begins to think that he has hit rock bottom, romance enters his life. Her name is Margit - an elegant, cultivated Hungarian emigre, long resident in Paris - widowed and, like Harry, alone.

But though Harry is soon smitten with her, Margit keeps her distance. She will only see him at her apartment in the fifth arrondissement for a few hours twice a week, and remains guarded about her work, her past, her life.

However, Harry's frustrations with her reticence are soon overshadowed by an ever-growing preoccupation that a dark force is at work in his life - as punishment begins to be meted out to anyone who has recently done him wrong. Before he knows it, he finds himself of increasing interest to the police and waking up in a nightmare from which there is no easy escape.

Set in a shadowy, sinister Paris, where nothing is exactly as it seems, The Woman in the Fifth is a novel that is guaranteed to keep you turning the pages well into the night. This eerie and unsettling tale of exile and revenge - and the murky frontier between the imagined and the terrifyingly real - is genuinely haunting. And it confirms Douglas Kennedy's reputation as a true master of narrative fiction.