Fiction:Harry Ricks is an American in Paris. But unlike hordes of his countrymen before him - both in fiction and reality - Harry has not come to the City of Light to indulge in a fantasy of sunset rambles along the Seine and rosé-soaked afternoons in the Marais.
Rather he has been forced to flee his small American college town after a scandal involving a student, and has escaped to Paris. Estranged from his wife and, more painfully, his daughter, he arrives in the city with no friends, no job and enough money to last but a few weeks. Adding to these woes, he immediately falls prey to an immobilising fever and after being tormented and cheated by the hotel clerk from hell - an exquisitely awful character, recognisable to anyone who has suffered at the hands of the wrong kind of establishment - eventually ends up in a filthy garret in a run-down part of town. But his downward spiral has just begun - after taking up a job as a night watchman for a sinister operation, Harry finds himself increasingly drawn into a netherworld of violence, blackmail and crime.
The only counterbalance to this bleak existence are his assignations with Margit, an elegant Hungarian widow he becomes involved with after meeting her at an ex-pat salon. Mysterious and with her own haunted past, Margit will only see him in her apartment for three hours twice a week - hours that become a lifeline to Harry as the outside world grows more menacing. And yet, as her influence over him grows, so too does the creeping sense that forces beyond his control are at work as terrible fates start to befall anyone who has wronged him. An unsettling metaphysical shadow hangs over his unfolding misfortunes - one that Kennedy enhances with his film-buff's eye for the noir potential of Paris's dingier alleyways and seedy quartiers.
IN FACT, THE city is as much of a character in this tale as any. Kennedy clearly knows and loves its streets and arrondissements and the landscape he creates is evocative of the immigrant experience rarely explored in its ex-pat literature. Internet cafes, cheap electronics stores, call centres advertising low rates to Africa - these crowd the unlovely streets of Harry's Paris, and the everyday brutality that permeates these deprived communities is exposed in each banal encounter. This sense of claustrophobia is heightened by the twilight hours Harry keeps (thanks to his nocturnal job) giving a grisaille tint to the whole novel.
But more than a Francophile thriller, this is a novel about being alien - both Margit and Harry are foreigners, as are the Turks, Arabs and Africans who populate his neighbourhood. None of them belong in this city that has little use for them, and as such their internal and moral landscape is altered; the normal rules don't apply. This lets Kennedy explore what a person will do when they are taken out of their element, stripped of everything they value. And as an American, this applies even more to Harry: his guilt - about his family, about the scandal that brought him to Paris - is, as Margit never tires of telling him, a result of his country's strict, and often hypocritical, moral code. As punishment is meted out to each enemy, the police become involved and Harry's paranoia reaches nightmare pitch, complex questions of revenge and culpability are raised, all posed in Kennedy's spare, sharp-shooting prose.
It's this layering of tension that propels the novel with the force of an engine. The book's characters - all of them emotionally flawed, many detestable - tell a sorry tale of human experience and yet are never entirely defeated. His publishers know that they have a good thing in Douglas Kennedy, and this book's cover - in the airport-friendly style of his backlist - may give a softer, more romantic impression of this compelling story than is strictly true. But there is no need to package this - The Woman in the Fifth punches well above the weight of commercial fiction.
Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor to the Gloss magazine
The Woman in the Fifth By Douglas Kennedy Hutchinson, 386pp. £11.99