Cara Black lives in San Francisco with her husband, a bookseller, and her son. She is the author of Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Belleville, Murder in the Sentier, and Murder in Clichy, all available from Soho Press.
"Like her earlier entries, Black's latest is refreshingly free from the focus on French food culture that marks provincial mysteries and gratifyingly full of local Parisian color. But a little more variation in the detection menu would be welcome."
Aimée Leduc (Murder in Saint-Germain, 2017, etc.) chases across Paris' low-rent district in search of a World War II-era dossier.
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"Black's detective is hitting her post-pregnancy stride, bringing up bébé while battling the bad guys with the best of them."
A job at the École des Beaux-Arts and a search for a Serbian lowlife combine to lead Aimée Leduc (Murder on the Quai, 2016, etc.) through the upscale part of Paris' Left Bank.
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"Rolling back the clock gives Black the chance to recast her heroine unencumbered by the baggage she's accumulated over the course of the series. It's not clear, though, where this prequel will take the franchise in the long run."
Black (Murder on theChamp de Mars, 2015, etc.) looks backward to discover the origins of Aimée Leduc, detective.
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"Aimée's 15th outing is a killer, with all the suspense, all the surprise and all the Parisian flavor you'd expect from Black."
Aimée Leduc (Murder in Pigalle, 2014, etc.) puts everything on the line to solve her most vexing cold case—the murder of her father.Read full book review >
"The ideal mix of the personal, the political, the puzzling and the Parisian make Aimée's latest a perfect pleasure."
Murder strikes close to home when Aimée Leduc (Murder in Palais Royal, 2009, etc.) finds her godfather charged with a crime passionelle.
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"Black's seventh takes longer to get in gear than an old Renault, and tastes less of Paris than earlier outings."
Murder spoils a reunion between French detective Aimée Leduc (Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis, 2007, etc.) and her lost love Yves Robert.
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"Black's fourth is her best yet, with complex, appealing characters, a crisp, well-paced mystery, and a setting like no other."
The Bastille is a neighborhood in the throes of change. Longtime residents like woodworker Mathieu Cavour still ply their trade in studios tucked into dark tunnels like the Passage de Boule Blanc. But the bright new Opera Bastille has brought troops of aristos like publicist Vincent Csarda to dine at the upscale restos that have sprung up nearby. Csarda's dinner companion, private detective Aimée Leduc (Murder in the Sentier, 2002, etc.), gets a little something extra for dessert: She's attacked outside Mathieu's shop as she waits there to return a cell phone left by the chic blond at the next table. Stubborn detective Loïc Bellan, reluctant to investigate, is distracted among other things by the health problems of his newborn son, who has Down syndrome. Even Aimée's old friend Morbier seems to be dragging his heels. He blames the attack on serial killer Patric Vaduz, the Beast of the Bastille, who's evidently claimed two new victims between his release on a technicality and his death in a car crash. But Aimée's not convinced—especially since the other victim turns out to be the owner of the lost cell phone. For all her determination, however, Aimée's own investigation is difficult because the attack damaged her optic nerve, leaving her dependent on virtual strangers like Chantal and Lucas from Quinze Vingts hospital to help her make her way in a world of darkness, which may or may not be permanent.
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"Although overpopulated and a bit overplotted, Black's third offers an authentic puzzle that unravels surprisingly yet logically in a setting of unrivaled charm."
Eight-year-old Aimée Leduc couldn't understand why she came home from school one day to find her mother gone. Now grownup Aimée (Murder in Belleville, 2000, etc.) must face the grim truth about her mother's disappearance when Jutta Hald turns up at her Rue D'Anjou doorstep claiming to be Sydney Leduc's cellmate at Frésnes Prison and offering to sell papers that could help reconnect Aimée with Sydney. Before Aimée can borrow enough money from Michel Mamou, a fashion designer friend of her partner René, she finds Jutta sitting outside the Tour de Jean-Sans-Peur at the foot of the Sentier, Paris's garment district, with half her head blown away. Scared but determined, Aimée infuriates René by taking time away from paying clients like Michel to search for the remaining members of Action-Réaction, the French counterpart to the radical Haader-Rofmein gang, who 20 years ago kidnapped a German industrialist named Laborde only to be hunted by the police when they crossed into France. She finds novelist Raymond Figeac, who'd harbored the fugitives to please his wife, an American actress who recently killed herself. Figeac's son Christian is a head case who's too strung out on drugs and too bummed out by the defection of his Senegalese girlfriend, Idrissa Diaffa, to be much help. So Aimée must turn to those who knew her mother best but hated her most—the police—to stop a killer who might strike again.
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"Blurring the edge between mystery and thriller, Black's second makes April in Paris more spine-tingling but more beautiful than ever."
Tiens! Parisian p.i. Aimée Leduc returns in Black's atmospheric second look at the City of Light's darker corners. Undaunted by her recent brush with death in Paris's old Jewish Quarter (Murder in the Marais, 1999), Leduc responds to an urgent cell phone call from her girlhood friend Anaïs begging for a meeting at the seedy Café Tlemcen. By the time she navigates her partner Rene's Citroën to Rue des Cascades, Anaïs has left, and Leduc follows her trail through Belleville, formerly home to Edith Piaf, but now swarming with Paris's pieds-noirs—Algerian immigrants who work at whatever jobs they can get without French passports—finding her seconds before a car bomb wounds Anaïs and kills her companion, Sylvie Coudray. Anaïs identifies Sylvie as the mistress of her husband, cabinet minister Philippe de Froissart, but neighbors know her as Eugénie Grandet, benefactress to the peaceful Algerian hunger-strikers who are occupying the church of Notre Dame de la Croix in hope of earning immigration papers. Leduc is encouraged in her search for an assassin by her late father's friend Morbier, her guide into a more dangerous circle of Algerian immigrants; he gives her the name of Samia Fouaz, a struggling teenaged mother whose lover Zdanine imports Duplo plastique explosive into France. Samia, in turn, introduces her to dangers beyond imagining, as greed turns political activism into pure evil.
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