A LETHAL LADY

A woman of the Harlem Renaissance uses detecting skills she’s honed back home to solve a baffling murder in Paris.

After 10 months in the City of Lights, Louise Lloyd has settled into a stimulating routine: working at the parfumerie Allaire’s by day, hanging out with a group of artists at Le Chat Noir in the early evening, and dancing ecstatically until closing time at Aquarius. Her neighbor is the prickly playwright Ciarán Dunne. Refreshingly, Louise encounters far less racism in Paris than in New York. Still, she misses her beloved Zodiac in Harlem, the site of two previous sleuthing adventures. News of her triumphs has apparently crossed the ocean, because when talented painter Iris Wright, a “temperamental” member of the Le Chat Noir group, goes missing, her sister appeals to Louise to investigate, an offer she can’t resist. Her eagerness to solve the mystery is amped up when she meets Iris’ husband, Philip, an elitist jerk. Afia’s ebullient portrait of 1928 Paris is highly entertaining, but the novel is stuffed with characters and subplots that threaten to swamp the mystery. Besides separate, albeit sometimes overlapping, groups of characters at the parfumerie, Le Chat Noir, and the Aquarius, there are intermittent letters from Harlem updating Louise on the lives of her friends Rosa Maria and Rafael. Louise’s interest in photography puts her in touch with a group of female artists, and she still manages to solve the mystery. Whew!

A busy, bubbly Jazz Age romp capped by a mystery.