The Real Bel Ami

Mandragora, 1997, Dir. Wiktor Grodecki
This must be a favourite of Catholic priests and the Pope Nazi Pedobear who currently sits in the Vatican.  It's the story of a 15-year-old small town boy who runs away from home and gets trapped in a world of prostitution with older men, drug addiction, crime and disease.  It makes Christiane F and My Own Private Idaho look like Disney productions.  Some of the scenes, involving children below the age of 11, are so uncomfortable that I'm sure the version I watched doesn't survive intact in many countries.  It's long - two hours - and unrelenting in its depiction of how boys are tricked into selling their bodies and losing their souls.  It's graphic, it's grim and there's less hope available than in a Cormac McCarthy novel.  It captures Prague's underbelly in all its gray misery and Communist residues, without a single shred of sympathy towards its gay community.

Coyote Ugly

Michael Connelly, The Last Coyote, 1995
The fourth book in Connelly's series about L.A. detective and loose cannon Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch is an ode to crime writer supremo James Ellroy. Like Ellroy's "Black Dahlia", Bosch has a mother whose brutal unsolved murder in 1961 shapes his later life and depressive personality. Suspended from work after attacking his commanding officer and evicted from his condemned home after an earthquake, Bosch goes solo - like the straggly coyote he occasionally spots on the Hollywood hills - in an investigation into what happened to his mother and why her murder was covered up by the police and local politicians. It's a cleverly constructed, slow-burning plot with the right dose of action and mood, though genre aficionados may spot the final twist a mile away.