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Antoine's life is good. During the day he hangs pictures for the most fashionable art galleries in Paris. Evenings he dedicates to the silky moves and subtle tactics of billiards, his true passion. But when Antoine is attacked by an art thief in a gallery his world begins to fall apart. His maverick investigation triggers two murders - he finds himself the prime suspect for one of them - as he uncovers a cesspool of art fraud. A game of billiards decides the outcome of this violently funny tale, laced with brilliant riffs about the world of modern art and the parasites that infest it.

After being, in turn, a museum night watchman, a train guard on the Paris-Rome line and a professional parasite on the Paris cocktail circuit, Benacquista is now a highly successful author of fiction and film scripts. He wrote the scripts for the thrillers The Beat that my Heart Skipped and Read my Lips, both directed by Jacques Audiard and enthusiastically received in the UK and the US. In 2004 Bitter Lemon Press introduced him to English-speaking readers with the critically acclaimed Holy Smoke, and this is equally beguiling.