A literary thriller whose plot twists, turns, backtracks, and loops like a medieval maze until one despairs of ever finding a way to a resolution. It is a puzzle palace, a funhouse of deception, where nothing and no one is what one first believes. * New York Journal of Books * This is a fine literary thriller told in a wry, educated style with sly references to everybody from Hawthorne to Mailer. * Booklist * Lemaitre takes his sardonic skills to new heights with this dark, loopy thriller, which portrays the modern workplace as the last place a displaced soul would ever want to be. * Kirkus Reviews * For noir to be good, one must plunge one's head underwater and come out just shy of drowning. Pierre Lemaitre has dared everything here. * Le Parisien * A really excellent suspense novelist * Stephen King *

Alain Delambre is a 57-year-old former HR executive, drained by four years of hopeless unemployment. All he is offered are small, demoralizing jobs. He has reached his very lowest ebb, and can see no way out. So when a major company finally invites him to an interview, Alain Delambre is ready to do anything, borrow money, shame his wife and his daughters and even participate in the ultimate recruitment test: a role-playing game that involves hostage-taking. Alain Delambre commits body and soul in this struggle to regain his dignity. But if he suddenly realised that the dice had been loaded against him from the start, his fury would be limitless. And what began as a role-play game could quickly become a bloodbath.