Piano player and Polish émigré Jerzy Wozzack brought his family to Paris to escape Communist rule and discover new opportunities for prosperity and freedom. But now they're scrounging along the edge of poverty, stuck in an unwelcoming city that drains Jerzy's self-respect and cultural identity.
Hope shines bright, though, when a fellow émigré offers him an in on a high-paying job delivering anonymous packages to anonymous recipients. Jerzy leaps at the chance and quickly finds himself flush with cash - but snared in the drug-smuggling schemes of a sadistic crime lord and his seductive assistant.
Even as Jerzy struggles to break free from their clutches, the heady whirl of sex, drugs, and riches sucks him deeper into Paris's debauched underworld, where a massive turf war is brewing and the only escape is death.
Nick Copeland is an ad man. Correction: was an ad man. He's been living the pretty-good life, but somewhere under the mountain of bills is buried whatever happiness he had. Desperate, Nick looks for work at a job fair, but instead reconnects with an old college friend who's in it even deeper.
Rob Johnson has already lost his wife and a high-paying position in a Manhattan law firm. He's the rock bottom Nick could be, and now with Nick as his mirror, Rob realizes how low he's sunk. To dig themselves out of this hole, they must also dig up two airtight jars of high-grade heroin long buried under their old college football field and figure out how to make a quick sale. Tarantino meets Mamet in this white-knuckle modern-day morality tale.
What does grief taste like? What does it weigh? How does it quietly curve around your heart, begging long-kept secrets to become unburied? When history professor Jill Bowman learns of her husband's gruesome murder in a seedy motel room, she knows he had no business being there - not serious, sincere Peter, the man she'd known in the most intimate ways a person can be known. Enveloped in grief, Jill struggles to piece together what could have happened that night and slowly uncovers Peter's secrets. But her search reveals dark parts of herself as well...secrets she'd never known she was keeping. The self-discovery forces her to reexamine her relationships with her family, her students, her mentally ill daughter, and the detective handling Peter's case - to whom she finds herself inexorably drawn. At once a shadowy, erotically charged thriller and a heartbreaking portrait of grief, Breathless explores the subtle and precious intricacies of a life upended by sudden death.
Divorced American academic David Reid teaches English by day and spends his free time writing mystery novels that nobody reads. In London he meets his new editor, Kate. Blonde and beautiful, she is also mysterious and aloof - and soon captivates David. The feeling seems mutual and the two are soon wed, but Kate quickly spirals into a deep sadness. In less than two years, she leaves David and heads to New York City. Just as the shock of her absence sets in, David receives a call announcing Kate's instant death under a subway train. Was Kate trying to return to David when she was killed? Was it an accident? A suicide? A murder? The more David learns, the less he wants to know - especially when he discovers Kate had been having an affair with French novelist Marc Rougemont, whose work she was allegedly translating. As David searches for the truth about his wife, he becomes fixated on two paintings of women by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, for whom David and Kate shared a passion that bordered on obsession. Was his wife as unknowable as the subjects of these cryptic, beautifully rendered portraits?
The son of Russian expatriates, London-based writer Alex Ostroff longs to publish a masterpiece. But his manuscripts find only rejection - as does Alex himself when London's literary set unceremoniously toss him from a party.
Heeding the advice of his exasperated agent, Alex finally writes about his own experiences. As he mines his childhood for inspiration, he becomes obsessed with finding the truth about his parents. In 1919, they fled the Russian Revolution for France, taking up with a Mephistophelian character named Felix Dumont and joining him in a mysterious import-export business that involved blackmail, betrayal and murder.
Alex's autobiographical novel, Troika, is a success, but the work makes Alex question his memories. And when he unexpectedly encounters Dumont while filming scenes from the book in a seedy bath-house, past and present intersect and Alex learns the dark truth behind the fictions of his life.
When Adam Füst's wife, Honnie, suddenly vanishes, the couple's friends assume she was just unhappy and skipped town. Wracked with worry and confusion, Adam knows there's more to the story. When the realization hits that he doesn't know his wife well enough to find her, he enlists the help of a brilliant but amoral cop to comb the streets of Paris for her. The deeper their investigation goes, the more Adam learns about Honnie's past - and the secrets she kept from him. Pimps, prostitution, murder... In this modern-day version of the Orpheus myth, Adam descends into Paris's underworld to find the woman he loves. The city's sex shops, seedy night clubs, and the people who inhabit them simultaneously repel Adam and draw him ever deeper, giving him a painfully clear look into Honnie's past - and his own soul. Adam's grief eventually gives way to his obsession with finding her, driving his sanity to the breaking point. Even if he should find Honnie, has he already lost her forever?
