Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, asDirty Snowopens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go.Hans Koning has describedDirty Snowas ';one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right.' In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson'sThe Killer Inside Me, Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destructionand redemption, perhaps, as wellby forces beyond its control.