Murder on the Quai by Cara Black

First Line: Standing outside the Michelin-starred restaurant, a stone's throw from the Champs-Élysées, the old man patted his stomach.

It's 1989. The Berlin Wall has fallen, and in Paris, Aimée Leduc is a pre-med student who lives with her father and sometimes helps him out in his detective agency. Things are not going well for Aimée. She's at risk of failing her studies due to sabotaged lab work. Her boyfriend is getting engaged to another woman, and her father leaves for Berlin on a mysterious errand.  

Since he did ask Aimée to help out in the office, she becomes intrigued-- and then obsessed-- with a murder that's linked to a transport truck of Nazi gold that disappeared in the French countryside during World War II. At first convinced that she was going to do the bare minimum to answer the client's questions because those fees are urgently needed, Aimée's investigation leads her further and further towards the truth... and her reaction gives her reason to believe that she may need to rethink her true avocation.

For anyone who's followed Aimée Leduc throughout the course of her many investigations, this prequel is a welcome addition to the series, since it does answer several questions: How did Miles Davis join the family? How did she meet René? What did she do before she became a private investigator? For anyone who's brand-new to the series, Murder on the Quai will be the perfect starting point. To be honest, I wondered how Black was going to follow up Aimée's first outing as private eye/mother in Murder on the Champs de Mars. Aimée has a penchant for getting into danger, and there are bound to be some readers who think she should stay in the office and out of the line of fire. This prequel avoids this issue for now, but it will be interesting to see how Black deals with it in future books.

Murder on the Quai is fast-paced, and the occasional "flashback" chapters to 1942 up the tension and suspense. Who's killing these old men? Why? And... what happened to all that gold? This latest book by Cara Black is a first-rate whodunit that showcases Aimée's natural deductive talents. She does make mistakes, and even though she is intuitive, she is a rookie after all. It's going to be fun to see which direction Black takes her series in next!

Murder on the Quai by Cara Black

ISBN: 9781616956783

Soho Crime © 2016

Hardcover, 336 pages

Private Investigator, #16 Aimée Leduc mystery

Rating: A

Source: The publisher   


 

Murder on the Champ de Mars by Cara Black

First Line: Aimée Leduc clipped the French military GPS tracker to the wheel well, straightened up and gasped, seeing the Peugeot's owner standing in the shadowy Marais courtyard.

It's April 1999 in Paris, and maternity leave is over for private investigator Aimée Leduc. Feeling guilty over leaving infant daughter Chloë with a child minder, Aimée vows to spend more time with her child, but it's not going to be easy. She's barely started work on pending cases when she's approached by a young gypsy boy. His mother is dying and urgently wants to speak to Aimée, but the woman is abducted from the hospital before Aimée can see her. All this young private investigator has to go on is the fact that the woman's information has something to do with her father's unsolved murder. It's a race against the clock for Aimée, and race she will because knowing who's responsible for her father's death means a fresh future for her and her baby daughter.

I have come to enjoy Cara Black's series. It's been a pleasure to get acquainted with Paris and its history district by district. In Murder on the Champ de Mars, we learn about the history of the gypsies, and it's a tragic one. I've also been looking forward to seeing how Aimée adapts to motherhood because I didn't think it would be an easy transition. I was right. In fact Aimée-as-parent is one of the things that bothered me in this book.

The parenting issue is clouded by the appearance of Chloë's father, and even with his presence in the background, Aimée's good intentions come to naught. In fact she seems to go out of her way to be away from her baby and to put herself in dangerous situations. This is a woman who needs a sharp jolt to force her to face reality. You can't speed like a maniac through Paris, break into buildings, and generally try to act as though you're a super hero when you have a baby depending on you. But Aimée does, simply because it's more important for her to find out who killed her father. She is a woman obsessed.

Another issue was the pacing of this book. At times it moves at breakneck speed, but there are slow intervals when nothing much seems to be going on. Aimée is a character I've never completely warmed up to. She's much more interested in fashion and makeup than I. My interest has always been more focused on her partner René, their part-time employees, and the stories the author weaves. These slow intervals when Aimée is basically spinning her wheels and grasping at straws affected my enjoyment of the book. By the end, I almost felt as though the mystery solved itself and Aimée just happened to be in the vicinity.

Something else that I noticed in Murder on the Champ de Mars is the prevalence of French words and phrases. Much more than I felt necessary. I certainly don't have a problem with it since I can read and speak French, but if other readers can't, they may find this to be distracting and annoying.

All in all, I did enjoy this book. No non-French crime writer can take you through Paris like Cara Black. It's the main reason why I keep coming back for more. However, it's certainly going to be interesting to see if Aimée's parenting skills have improved in the next book.

 Murder on the Champ de Mars by Cara Black

ISBN: 9781616952860

Soho Press © 2015

Hardcover, 320 pages

Private Investigator, #15 Aimée Leduc mystery

Rating: B-

Source: the publisher


 

Murder in Pigalle by Cara Black

First Line: Stepping into the shadowed cool of Passage Verdeau, Aimée Leduc welcomed the reprieve from the late-June heat-- but not the barrel of the Uzi blocking her way.

June, 1998 is not the best time in the world to be five months pregnant: French football fans are in riot mode anticipating the World Cup, the sticky heat is oppressive, and a serial rapist is targeting teenage girls in Paris's Pigalle district. Private investigator Aimée Leduc is trying to focus on her unborn child, but when Zazie the 13-year-old daughter of the proprietor of Aimée's favorite café disappears, everything changes in a heartbeat. The police aren't taking Zazie's disappearance seriously enough, and her parents are asking Aimée for help. She couldn't say no... even if she wanted to.

There's a lot in Murder in Pigalle for a reader to digest, especially Aimée's own reactions to her pregnancy. How is she coping with morning sickness, getting tired easily, and her clothes no longer fitting properly? How are her friends and business associates reacting to the news? This is all important, especially for future books in the series, but front and center is Zazie's disappearance with this serial rapist on the prowl. Aimée knows how important time is in relationship to the young girl's survival, and her sense of urgency swiftly becomes the focus of the reader. As Aimée fights nausea, exhaustion, and an almost overwhelming sense of panic, I, too, became panicked-- and I couldn't read fast enough.

As her investigation progresses, it soon becomes clear that this is not a simple case of one young girl's disappearance. There are more things at stake here, and Aimée must unravel a tangled skein of clues in order to make sense of it all and save Zazie. Of all the books in this series that I've read, Murder in Pigalle is the strongest. I can't wait to see what Cara Black has in store for us next. 

Murder in Pigalle by Cara Black

ISBN: 9781616952846

Soho Crime © 2014

Hardcover, 320 pages

Private Investigator, #14 Aimée Leduc mystery

Rating: A

Source: publicist  

Murder Below Montparnasse by Cara Black

First Line: Aimée Leduc bit her lip as she scanned the indigo dusk, the shoppers teeming along rain-slicked Boulevard du Montparnasse.

Things just aren't going Aimée Leduc's way. After a meeting with Commissaire Morbier, she learns that she will have to testify in a court case against the Corsican mafia. Her partner René Friant has had a lucrative job offer from Silicon Valley, and he's on a plane to California. Her detective agency has more work than she knows what to do with, and she's hoping that her part-time computer hacker, Saj de Rosnay, will be able to help her out.

But things really start going pear-shaped when she and Saj are involved in an accident in René's beloved car. Now there's a dead man lying in the middle of the street and Yuri Volodya, a grumpy old Russian who lives there,  insists on hiring Aimée to protect a painting. The only thing that makes her agree to the job is the fact that Volodya says that he knows her mother. By the time Aimée gets to his apartment in Montparnasse, the painting has already been stolen... and the very next day the old Russian is found tortured to death in his kitchen.

Some very dangerous people begin threatening Aimée and her co-workers, witnesses are dying, and all this Parisian private detective has to do is stop the thugs threatening to kill her and her friends, find a painting, and figure out just what her mother-- who's on Interpol's most wanted list-- has to do with all of this. And Aimée thought she was busy before!

By the time I'd read fifty pages of this book, I was hooked. Black has two high-octane plot lines, and I enjoyed them both. The first and most substantial story is Aimée trying to stay alive and find a priceless painting, and the second deals with René and his job in California-- a dream job that he soon learns isn't exactly what it appears to be. I wanted to know what was going on with both characters so badly that I couldn't read fast enough.

As usual, Black sets her story in a Parisian neighborhood, this time Montparnasse, and I loved learning about the Russians who've settled in that area over the course of many years. Reading Aimée Leduc mysteries always puts me in the mood for clothes shopping, ratatouille and a François Truffaut film; Murder Below Montparnasse is no exception.

The only thing that didn't set well with me is that Aimée behaved more like an amateur than a seasoned private investigator. She does have the tendency to act like a bull in a china shop from time to time, but the possible involvement of her mother in this investigation seemed to throw her so off-kilter that she didn't seem to be herself. However, this series gets better and better with each book, and I can't wait to see what sort of trouble Aimée gets into next!

Murder Below Montparnasse by Cara Black

ISBN: 9781616952150

Soho Crime © 2013

Hardcover, 319 pages

Private Investigator, #13 Aimée Leduc mystery

Rating: A

Source: the publisher

Murder in Belleville by Cara Black

First Line: Aimée Leduc's cell phone rang, startling her, as she drove under the leafy poplars tenting the road to Paris.

The phone call is from the sister of Aimée's friend Martine. Anaïs is the self-absorbed wife of a government minister. Crying and frightened, she insists that Aimée meet her on a street in the tough neighborhood of Belleville. Belleville, once the home of internationally famous singer Édith Piaf, is now better known for its high concentration of Arab immigrants.

Aimée arrives at the address, and she and Anaïs narrowly escape a car bombing which kills the former mistress of Anaïs's husband. Although the explosion has brought back all the horror of her own father's death, Aimée reluctantly agrees to try to find out why this particular woman would have been the target of a bomb.

The further she digs, the more unsettling are the clues she finds. The dead woman had an alias, and it appears that she led a double life. In one, she was the mistress of a government minister, in the other, she was right in the middle of a situation involving a secret North African radical group. As Aimée continues her investigation, she attracts the notice of people who will stop at nothing to end her snooping, but her findings-- that there is a dark side to immigrant politics that the government doesn't want known-- are too important to ignore.

Author Cara Black is sending me on a tour of Paris, France, one book-- and one neighborhood-- at a time. It is a tour that I am fast learning to savor. A little bit of historical background, a little architecture... add interesting local characters, an intriguing puzzle, and a stylish private eye who doesn't know when to quit, and I'm settled in for the evening.

I found the politically charged theme of immigration to be absorbing, and the more crime fiction I read that's set outside the United States, the more I learn that this is also a problem in many parts of the world. (If you read mysteries set outside the US, you also learn other countries' equivalents of dialing 911 and other bits of trivia such as the fact that "Jane Does" are called "Yvette" in France.)

Aimée is just the sort of strong yet vulnerable character that I like to follow in a series, and the action-filled finale of Murder in Belleville found me starting to chew a fingernail more than once. The only thing in the entire book that bothered me was Aimée's on-again-off-again lover, Yves, whom I found distracting. Fortunately his scenes are few, so he was a minor annoyance.

Do you love France? Do you love reading books set in other countries? Do you love strong-yet-flawed main characters? Do you love carefully crafted mysteries? If you said yes to any of these questions, I would suggest you get your hands on a book written by Cara Black so you can become acquainted with Aimée Leduc!

Murder in Belleville by Cara Black

ISBN: 9781569472798

Soho Crime  ©2000

Paperback, 368 pages

Genre: Private Investigator, #2 Aimée Leduc mystery

Rating: A

Source: Paperback Swap

Murder in the Marais by Cara Black

Title: Murder in the Marais
Author: Cara Black
ISBN: 9781569472125
Publisher: Soho Crime, 2003
Paperback, 360 pages
Genre: Private Investigator, #1 Aimée Leduc mystery
Rating: B
Source: Paperback Swap

First Line: Aimée Leduc felt his presence before she saw him.

Aimée Leduc lives in an inconvenient apartment in an ideal location (an island in the River Seine in Paris), and she's a private investigator specializing in computer forensics. She has an apparently mundane task: decipher an encrypted photograph from the 1940s and deliver it to an old woman living in the Marais, the historic Jewish quarter of Paris. When Aimée tries to deliver the photo, she finds the woman dead, a swastika carved in her forehead.

With the help of her partner, René, Aimée uncovers clues relating to a German war veteran, the Jewish girl he saved from Auschwitz, and other shadowy figures. In order to understand the real motive behind the killing, Aimée has to question reluctant older residents of the Marais and to go undercover in an Aryan supremacist group.

I loved reading this book for its bringing Paris to life, and for Black's inclusion of fascinating tidbits like this:

He referred to white and brown sugar, the metaphor for right-wing conservatives and leftist socialists. She knew that in many households political leanings were identified by the kind of sugar sitting in sugar bowls.

The plot line involving World War II collaborators was fascinating, and although I didn't feel as though I had a very good sense of Aimée or her partner René, I look forward to learning more about them as I read more of this series.

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