Turf Wars

Olivier Norek served as a humanitarian aid worker in the former Yugoslavia, before embarking on a eighteen-year career in the French police, rising to the rank of capitaine in the Seine-Saint-Denis Police Judiciare. He has written six crime novels, which have sold a million copies in France and won a dozen literary prizes.

A second blistering crime novel set in France's most notorious suburb, by a police officer turned million-copy bestseller and key writer on Spiral

"Hits the ground running and never lets up . . . This impressive debut is slick, sick and not for the faint-hearted . . . It will make you cry out (for more)" - Mark Sanderson, The Times on The Lost and the Damned

The summary execution of three dealers - one murdered in full view of a police surveillance team - is the signal for hell to be unleashed in France's most notorious suburb.

Now there's a new kingpin in charge, using his ruthless teenage enforcer to assert an iron grip on his territory. And the local mayor, no stranger to the criminal underworld, is willing to make a pact with the devil if it will secure her a third term.

Enter Capitaine Coste and his team, ready to break the rules to prevent the drugs squad from throwing an elderly stash-minder to the lions as bait. But when the blue touchpaper is lit on the estates, it will be all they can do to save their own skins from the inferno.

Once again, Norek draws on all his experience as a police officer in France's capital of crime - the same experience he drew on as a writer for the hit TV series Spiral - making Turf Wars the most authentic crime novel you'll read all year.

Translated from the French by Nick Caistor

A second blistering crime novel set in France's most notorious suburb, by a police officer turned million-copy bestseller and key writer on SpiralFans of the French TV series Spiral (with its unvarnished vision of urban crime) will find Olivier Norek's Turf Wars a pungent addition to his Banlieues Trilogy . . . As bracingly authentic as its predecessor.

Former cop Olivier Norek was one of the writers on the crime drama Spiral . . . there's no denying the visceral excitement and latent compassion of this policier par excellence

Norek served in the Seine-Saint-Denis Police Judiciaire for eighteen years and everything he writes is thrilling. This is a prime example of crime fiction as social history, but it is far more gripping - and moving - than any work of history

France makes moody crime films and TV, and Norek's latest Euro bestseller sizzles with similar noir atmosphere

Dark, gripping and exciting . . . There is not only a great sense of place but also of characterisation

You will have to go a long way to find a better hard-boiled policier