The Riviera Contract

PI Peter Sawyer encounters prostitutes, movie stars, a dictatorial general and gallons of blood in this thriller set in the south of France. His trouble starts when he rescues Manon Jabot, a beautiful would-be actress, from a pounding at the hands of Sandrine Tally, a call girl who feels her territory has been invaded. When Peter drives Manon home, he learns that her father is a colonel in the service of an infamous Central American dictator who has ``retired'' to the French Riviera. Two years later, when the two women have stopped feuding and become friends, Peter is called in by Manon to investigate Sandrine's disappearance; learning that she was involved in clandestine activities, he is led through a trail of corpses who have died various gruesome deaths, including a skinning in one case. The plot is functional if abundantly violent. But the man relating the events is never likable or unlikable; while he attempts, through the first-person narration, to give the narrator a classic hard-boiled exterior, Albert ( Bimbo Heaven ) fails to give him much of a personality. (Jan.)