Recursos inhumanos

Can Unemployment Turn Us Into a Time Bomb?

WINNER OF THE BEST EUROPEAN CRIME NOVEL AWARD IN 2010

TRANSLATED INTO 14 LANGUAGES

With humor, rawness, and brutal realism, Lemaitre explores the most immoral side of the business world and the perverse effects that unemployment can have on any of us.

"My name is Alain Delambre and I am fifty-seven years old. I am an unemployed executive."

Alain Delambre, once a brilliant human resources director, has lost all hope of finding work and feels increasingly marginalized. When a recruitment company considers his application, he is willing to do anything to get the job and recover his dignity, from lying to his wife to asking his daughter for money to participate in the final test of the selection process: a hostage-taking simulation. However, the anger accumulated over years of grievances knows no bounds... and the role-play can turn into a macabre game of death.

The winning novel of the European Crime Novel Award, by the winner of the Goncourt Prize, three Dagger Awards, the Best Novel Valencia Negra Award, and the San Clemente Award, with more than 3,000,000 readers.

Reviews:
"Forceful, irritating, pious and violent. Inhuman Resources is the story every writer would want to write about our dehumanized present. One of those books with the "Harry Quebert syndrome": once started, you can't stop."
Sergio Pent, L'Unità

"I read Pierre Lemaitre, an excellent suspense writer."
Stephen King

"Lemaitre thoroughly enjoys breaking conventions and playing with them because he knows them well and handles genres with the skill of a magician."
Javier Aparicio Maydeu, Babelia

"A brilliant example of how the noir genre can take advantage of the crisis. A painful, yet pleasant and daring plot at the same time, which manages to avenge all the unemployed, real and potential."
Le Magazine littéraire

"His machinery proves infernal. Bravo! Each chapter seems like a sprint: we score the points, we clench our fists."
Brigitte Hernandez, Le Point

"Lemaitre, right now, the best and fittest French noir novelist, a guy capable of treading on the heels of the master (Banville) Black, in narrative skill and muscular literary magnetism."
Laura Fernández, El Cultural

"Lemaitre conscientiously lambasts capitalism. A fast-paced and, at times, uncomfortable labor thriller, as literary as any novel by Raymond Chandler or Benjamin Black."
Laura Fernández and Matías Néspolo, El Mundo

"Acid noir in which the mordant French novelist points the cannon at the most miserable aspects of the business world. HR directors should abstain. Or not..."
Victor Rodríguez, Expansión

"A great book. The masterpiece of one of the figures of current crime fiction. A very sharp vision of the world of the unemployed and how unemployment can affect people's psychology and lead them to limits they did not suspect of themselves when everything was going well."
Benjamín Prado, Radio 3

"Completely different. [...] Authentic good literature, the kind that shatters old myths [...]. An essential novel to remind us of the main problems of the modern world. [...] A literary gem."
Daniel Martín Ferrand, República