Originally published in 1983, Cherokee won the Prix Médicis and established Jean Echenoz as one of Europe's most brilliant young writers. As the reviewer for the Chicago Tribune noted, "Its erstwhile hero is George Chave, maybe a detective, maybe an underworld figure. With him the reader embarks on a breakneck but loving tour of Paris, punctuated by auto chases, mystery ladies, sleazy bars, and innumerable metro stops. Along the way, the detective-reader alternately follows the trail of a rare talking parrot, an eccentric runaway wife, an elusive missing heir, and a weird religious cult." The novel is "a wonderfully funny piece of controlled, chaotic madness," said the Irish Times.

Jean Echenoz is the author of four other novels: Le Méridien de Greenwich, Lac (winner of the European Literature Prize), and Nous trois. Double Jeopardy is also available as a Bison Book. Mr. Echenoz lives in Paris. Mark Polizzotti, a veteran translator of André Breton and René Daumal as well as Jean Echenoz, is the author of Revolution of the Mind, 1995.

"A razor-sharp Parisian thriller which shares the spaced-out features of the wackier French films of recent years."—London Times

"Worthy of the great films noirs, a literary novel that reads like a detective story."—Paris Match

"Jean Echenoz has brilliantly exploited simple but little-recognized truths about detective-writing. . . . Rarely has the difficult craft of story-telling been as well mastered as here."—Times Literary Supplement

"Read this astute, dreamy, humor-filled book for the sheer pleasure of it."—Le Figaro

"Pushes the detective genre to its limit [with] rapid-fire pace and eclectic humor"—Chicago Tribune

"Echenoz's words are full of grace and surprises, and he has the ability to throw relationships among them just oft-center enough to make the images or people they convey seem all the more compelling and fresh. Writing lives."—New York Times

"Macabre, violent, kaleidoscopic in style and content, this is a compelling motion picture in prose."—Publishers Weekly