StephenClarke

Here's the latest in my Merde series. Paul West is, as usual, in dire need of cash and accepts a job helping France's national pétanque association to try and get its sport accepted as an Olympic event. (It isn't, by the way, which is scandalous – France's national sport not at its Olympics? When breakdancing has been accepted as a new event? Quel scandale!)

Paul translates at meetings with the Olympic committees, and comes up against his nemesis, Elodie Martin, his former boss's daughter. Naturally the shady Martin family is up to no good, keen to profit from the Paris Games.

Post-Brexit, Paul is also applying for French citizenship. A Waterloo-style battle with French bureaucracy ensues...

Meanwhile Paul meets and falls for a tech genius who has invented a new kind of solar panel. She doesn't have time for romantic dalliances, and thinks Paul is an idiot anyway. So he offers to help her out with translating and interpreting, just to stick around. You'll see how well, or disastrously, that turns out.

And Paul's old friend Jake is still slumped in a corner, campaigning to create a version of the Olympics that doesn't, as he sees it, discriminate against the lazy and talentless, like him. He wants to set up the Nolympics. (Thugh he's not going to put much effort into it.)

All in all, a new Parisian romp, mainly set in my neighbourhood, in the north of Paris by the canal. It's being jazzed up for the Olympics. Though there are some things that even French jazz can't achieve.

Here's a link to the book on Amazon.

Here's a link to the Kindle 

(Other links coming)