Hannelore Cayre is an award-winning French novelist, screenwriter, and director, and a practicing criminal lawyer. Her works include Legal Aid, Masterpieces, and Like It Is in the Movies. She has directed several short films and the adaptation of Commis d’office (Legal Aid) is her first feature-length film. Cayre lives in Paris. After working as a lawyer in Sydney and London, Stephanie Smee made her literary translation debut with an English translation of the Countess de Ségur’s Fleurville Trilogy.

“Cayre’s middle-aged protagonist delivers her darkly comic adventure in the underworld with sardonic intelligence . . . [Cayre’s] trick is a magnificent one: Patience’s irresistible narration, never didactic, moves at an impressive clip as the reader roots all the while for the criminal — a woman in a man’s world, battling race, age and gender while cheerfully ignoring ethics.” — New York Times Book Review

“This slender and sardonic novel, a prizewinning best seller in France, features a middle-aged heroine as a drug-running crime boss and offers an entire ethnographic study of North African immigrants in the Parisian suburbs.” — The New York Times

“Exuberant . . . Maybe crime doesn't pay, but the guile and guts — and humour — with which Patience approaches this extreme solution to her desperate situation, right under the noses of law enforcement, is admirable, as are her survival instincts. Readers will be anxious about the fate of the forthright, sympathetic Patience up to the final page. It's no surprise that this novel won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, France's most prestigious award for crime fiction.” —
Publishers Weekly STARRED review

“The Godmother is witty, pithy and distinctively French with an emphasis on character development rather than action although there’s no shortage of that, either . . . Cayre is a first-rate novelist and she doesn’t waste a word in this excellent short novel with dealers, traffickers, cops and quirky Frenchmen all getting their time on the page. Compliments are also due to translator Stephanie Smee who keeps the pace going and seems to get the rhythm of the language in the original.” — The Globe and Mail

“Breaking Bad meets Weeds, with a French suburban twist . . . Acerbic and witty, casting a sharp eye on both failing social systems and the fruitless ‘war on drugs’, Patience is one of the standout characters in this year’s crime fiction crop, and you’ll be rooting for her all the way.” — The Guardian