The Queen of Gold Diggers: A Gritty Crime Novel of a Girl from the Streets

Maeva Benassou is twelve years old when she understands how the world works.
That day, she follows her mother — a cleaning lady on her knees in bleach — into an apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. The lady of the house hands her a biscuit. A LU Petit Beurre. Like you’d toss a bone to a dog. Maeva eats it, smiles, says thank you. And she swears it’s the last time.

Maeva grows up in Garges-lès-Gonesse, in the Doucettes housing estate, fifth floor, three rooms for four people. Plain rice at the end of the month. A stepfather who hits. A scar on her cheek, souvenir of a belt strike. And a poster of Tony Montana on her bedroom wall. Scarface. The Cuban who starts with nothing and takes everything. The movie she watches on repeat at night, her little brother asleep above her. “The world is yours.” Maeva corrects it: the world is mine.

At eighteen, she discovers her weapon. Not a gun — her face. Her beauty. Her black eyes that make men fold in two seconds. Maeva becomes a gold digger. Not a prostitute. A gold digger. The difference is an abyss: a prostitute sells her body, a gold digger sells a dream. She doesn’t sleep with them. She seduces, teases, promises, feeds desire like you feed a fire. And men pay. They pay for a dinner, a smile, a “maybe.” They pay for hope. And hope is the most expensive product in the world.

Michel, the dentist from Vincennes, married, three kids, cries in restaurants when she doesn’t answer his texts. Seventy thousand euros in two years. Richard Castello, a real estate developer, one hundred and twenty kilos of vulgarity and champagne, showers her with Cartier and weekends at the Martinez. Forty thousand euros in three months. Kevo, a street boss from Sevran in a Mercedes C-Class, loses both his money and his pride trying to possess her. They all fall. They all pay. None of them get anything.

They call her Scarfesse. Like the film, but female. Because of the scar. Because of the rage. Because of that meteoric rise — from the projects to luxury hotels, Dubai in first class, Monaco on the arms of millionaires, Megève under the stars — that looks like a success story but is really a descent into hell.

Because then there is Gérard Delorme. Seventy-two years old, former CEO, forty million in assets, wolf-blue eyes. Delorme is no sucker. Delorme is Sosa — Scarface’s godfather, the one who never raises his voice and never forgives. Two hundred thousand euros in three months. Scarfesse’s biggest score. And her last. Because Delorme doesn’t forget. Because the pride of powerful men is more dangerous than their money.

Between the betrayal of her best friend, a little brother in prison, a mother who no longer speaks to her, and the only man she could have loved leaving her with the words, “you’re a lucid monster,” Maeva ends up alone. Completely alone. Like Tony Montana in his empty mansion. Like all queens who rise too high and discover that the top is just a point — and on a point, there’s only room for one.

SCARFESSE is a dark, social, violent, funny, and devastating crime novel. A book that smells of the projects, expensive perfume, class hatred, and cash. A story about misery that creates monsters — and monsters that create their own downfall. A story about pathetic rich old men who believe money can buy youth, and about a girl from nothing who proves them right — but not for long.

A female rise and fall. A Greek tragedy in Louboutins. The portrait of a France split in two — those who scrub the floors, and those who walk on them.

Maeva Benassou was born in the gutter. She climbed out standing. She goes back feet first.

“She was a lucid monster. This book hits like a slap.”