Armand has written a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka’s Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil. From the off it reeks with sour milk, bad Turkish coffee, grim suits, rain, sadistic sex, corpses and a melancholic weariness that provokes philosophizing of hard won ennui and grainy angst. Armand’s novel is a reprise for a coven of readers and cineastes, a way of reminding us of the permanent aura and atmosphere that noir styles into the imagination, that prolonged anti-meditation of souls going to hell in a hand cart. The book has that kind of plaintive wakefulness, where along with all the other noirs we know and love we recede into the same distance.