Pascal Garnier's `deliciously dark and painfully funny' noirs, now collected in three volumes.

¿Garnier's crime novels add significantly to the latest renaissance for this type of dark narrative' - Publishers Weekly 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.

Praise for Pascal Garnier

‘A dark, richly odd and disconcerting world … devastating and brilliant’ Sunday Times

‘A mixture of Albert Camus and JG Ballard’ Financial Times

‘A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony, it makes you grin as well as wince’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Garnier’s take on the frailty of life has a bracing originality’ Sunday Times

‘Marvellously unpredictable’ The Guardian

‘A master of the surreal noir thriller – Luis Buñuel meets Georges Simenon’ TLS

‘Bleak, often funny and never predictable’ Observer

'For those with a taste for Georges Simenon or Patricia Highsmith' The Independent

'Deliciously dark … painfully funny' Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

‘Pascal Garnier is my favourite French crime writer by a country mile ...’ Laura Wilson, The Guardian

‘Horribly funny … appalling and bracing in equal measure. Masterful’ John Banville

‘Garnier plunges you into a bizarre, overheated world, seething death, writing, fictions and philosophy. He’s a trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read’ A. L. Kennedy

‘Wonderful ... Properly noir’ Ian Rankin

'Ennui, dislocation, alienation, estrangement – these are the colours on Garnier’s palette. His books are out there on their own, short, jagged and exhilarating, unexpected slaps around the face that make you laugh with surprise while you spin around to see who did it' Stanley Donwood

‘Exquisite noir’ Publishers Weekly

‘Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining ... Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable’ John Powers, NPR

‘Wickedly fun ... wonderfully dark’ Complete Review

‘A perfectly balanced cross between a thriller and a social document’ L’Express