A Trail of Blood — Peter Goldman

Once, Sophie Guichard was a star -- the toast of Paris and Hollywood, a screen goddess hailed as the next Bardot, the next Monroe, the next Bergman. But now, in her sixties and alone in her grand villa on the Côte d'Azur, she's fallen in love with a smooth-talking stranger less than half her age. He calls himself Tony Orsini and says he's trying to float a start-up investment business. In fact, he's a Brussels pimp with blood ties to the Corsican mob and dreams of building a Stateside chain of sex clubs, starting in Miami's South Beach party scene. He spends random weekends at Sophie's place, mostly in bed, and leaves with large checks from her partly earned, partly inherited fortune.

In desperation, Sophie's son J-J (for Jean-Jérôme) hires two American PIs, Max Christian and Nick Testa, to bring him evidence of Tony's real start-up business -- a brothel and call-girl service operating out of a fading South Beach hotel -- and his real love life with his young and equally ambitious partner, Paulette Guyot.

Max, a former NYPD homicide cop, and Nick, a Special Ops combat veteran, wire the hotel with spy-cams and hidden mics and gather what they assume are the makings of a slam-dunk case for the prosecution. There's a video tour of the hotel's sex-for-sale offerings. There's extensive footage of Tony and Paulette in nonstop two-, three-, and four-way sex play. And there's a tape of a poolside lunch at which the lovers partner up with Luca Paolucci, the don of New York's last viable Mafia family. For fifty-one percent of the take, he'll finance their dream of a transcontinental “empire of the senses.”

But when Max and Nick present their findings to Sophie at her villa, she stubbornly resists the evidence of her eyes and ears. It's not until Tony's goons beat her J-J nearly to death that she calls the detectives back to her villa and tells them she wants them to loose “a trail of blood” in revenge. “She doesn't want detectives, she wants a lynch party,” Max frets. But they accept the assignment, not knowing whose blood will be spilled along that trail. It could well be their own…