A fascinating book by the cult Russian film critic Mikhail Trofimenkov, telling about the criminal life of the French capital. (back cover)Cult film critic Mikhail Trofimenkov, an employee of the Kommersant publishing house, a professional historian, awarded all possible and impossible awards in the field of journalism, in this appears in an unexpected role in the book. He reveals to readers a dangerous, underground, ghostly Paris of crimes and conspiracies, madmen-werewolves and romantic bandits. Paris, which in criminal jargon is called Panama: seeing it, it’s really not worth dying for anything. Paris, in which Georges Simenon, Pablo Picasso and Edith Piaf are the heroes of true detective stories. Sometimes the author imagines himself as Sherlock Holmes, who can handle riddles that are insoluble to the detectives from Jewelers Embankment, but he has the right to do so. Having first arrived in the capital of France twenty years ago, the author within a week found himself in a cell on that same legendary embankment, and since then fate has brought him together more than once with the kings and jokers of the local underworld. After reading this book, you will never again be able to look at Panama through the eyes of a tourist: behind each façade you will see new “Parisian secrets.”