Unfinished last novel featuring Manchette's usual tight writing. Interesting characters. The details -- much name dropping of products, cars, guns, music to set scenes.The plot notes compiled by his son at the end make me wonder how the hell he was going to pull it off. ( )

She’s back! In the spirit of Aimée Joubert from Jean-Patrick Manchette’s hip, hyperviolent Fatale, with his very last novel, Ivory Pearl, we have another robust beauty attracted to violence, this time its insurrections, revolutions and war.

Widening his lens from Dashiell Hammett-style hard boiled crime fiction to John Le Carré-style international thriller, Manchette sets Ivory Pearl not only in cities across the globe but in the remote mountains of Cuba. Get ready for fast-paced adventure.

The year is 1956 and our fetching twenty-six year old protagonist, Ivory Pearl aka Ivy, is a professional photographer selling to top magazines, Paris Match, Life. She’s not only good, she’s outstanding, primed to be the next Robert Capa. Danger is her game - Ivy has accompanied guerillas in Malaya and Vietnam, revolutionaries in Morocco and Algeria. No war zone is off limits. She’s known combat from an early age. During the German invasion of France when she was just a little girl, she ran away from a horrible orphanage and was soon adopted as a mascot by a British fighting unit. After the war, she made her way to Berlin to live on the fringes, selling photos she snapped with a stolen camera.

One bright spot in Ivy’s life: back in 1946 as a Flight Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, Samuel Farakhan meets the plucky sixteen-year-old and decides to share his inherited wealth by paying for Ivy’s schooling at a college in Switzerland. The only thing Samuel asks in return is that Ivy meet with him every new year's day. And so she does, for ten years running, right up until the time we join her paying a visit to Farakhan’s home north of Paris. As is their custom, gifts are exchanged: Ivy, as per usual, gives Farakhan a gun, usually stolen, this time a Chinese-made semiautomatic pistol; Farakhan, in turn, gives Ivy a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, although he knows Ivy much prefers American hard-boiled crime novels.

After dinner and a round of evening target practice, Ivy surprises her friend (there’s nothing sexual between them as Samuel is gay) by telling him she’s quitting, leaving civilization behind for the next months to go off and take photos of trees and animals. Manchette fans will hear a familiar ring – hired killer Martin Terrier from The Prone Gunman also wanted to call it quits. Farakhan stays cool, lets Ivy know, if she is really serious, he has the perfect spot for her retreat from civilization: the Sierra Maestra in Cuba. Sounds grand but does her longtime friend have an ulterior motive in picking this exact mountain range? He just might. The thick plottens.

The plot not only thickens but quickly accelerates. Among the players in the unfolding drama: Victor Maurer, savvy combatant and hunter, expert in all manner of weapons, including long bow and Malaysian parang; Negra, adolescent European girl kidnapped to be raised out in the jungle; Aaron Black, international arms dealer who works a deal to deliver five thousand Mauser short rifles and over two hundred La Coruna submachine guns to revolutionaries in North Africa. Also, no small contributor to pace and high risk stakes is the opening chapter's bloodbath, vintage Jean-Patrick Manchette, where hacking, shooting and explosion account for a stack of corpses.

Very much in keeping with J-P Manchette’s chic aesthetic, there’s supercool brand name products galore: black Aronde sedan, semi-automatic Sauer Model 38 pistol, Gitane cigarettes, Zippo lighter, Voigtlander camera with 135mm telephoto lens. Dizzy Gallespie jazz fills the air and Ivy reads Ed Lacy’s Something on a Stick and William Riley Burnett’s Vanity Row. Men and women floating along in their sleek, new, ultramodern world.

Ivory Pearl contains twenty-seven chapters, mostly following the female protagonist but also shifting focus to other major players. Although cancer claimed the French author at age fifty-two before he was able to finish, this NYRB edition includes Jean-Patrick Manchette’s extensive notes on how he planned to continue and conclude his novel. All in all, a satisfying read, one I highly recommend. ( )