Description
A Gentleman in Moscow meets Moulin Rouge in this stylish, sexy page-turner about Clementine, a queer American ex-pat and notorious thief, who is drawn out of retirement and into one last scam when the Nazis invade Paris.
CLEMENTINE IS A SEVENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD REFORMED CON ARTIST WITH A
penchant for impeccably tailored suits. Her life of crime has led her from the รผber-wealthy per- fume junkies of belle epoque Manhattan, to the scented butterflies of Costa Rica, to the spice markets of Marrakech, and finally the bordellos of Paris, where she settles down in 1930 and opens a shop bottling her favorite extracts for the ladies of the cabarets.
Now it's 1941 and Clem's favorite haunt, Madame Boulette's, is crawling with Nazis, while Clem's people-the outsiders, the artists, and the hustlers who used to call it home-are disappearing. Clem's first instinct is to go to ground-it's a frigid Paris winter and she's too old to put up a fight. But when the cabaret's prize songbird, Zoรฉ St. Angel, recruits Clem to steal the recipe book of a now-missing famous Parisian perfumer, she can't say no.
Her mark is Oskar Voss, a Francophile Nazi bureaucrat, who wants the book and Clem's expertise to himself. Hoping to buy the time and trust she needs from him to pull off her scheme, Clem decides to tell him the real story of the life and loves she came to Paris to escape. But Clem doesn't have much practice telling the truth, and her strategy turns out to be more danger- ous than she could have imagined.
ISBN:9780385545754
