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Summary
Summary
As protesters march in Paris against a government agreement with an oil company suspected of polluting, Aimee Leduc, French-American computer investigator, finds herself with an abandoned infant, a drowned woman, a murdered client and a computer assignment deadline.
Author Notes
Cara Black was born in Chicago, Illinois on November 14, 1951. She was educated at Cañada College in California, Sophia University in Yotsuya, Tokyo in Japan, and finished her degree at San Francisco State University with a BA and an MA in education. She has worked as a preschool teacher and as director of a preschool.
Black is a bestselling American mystery writer. She is best known for her Aimée Léduc mystery novels featuring a female Paris-based private investigator. (Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of Black's gripping seventh mystery to feature Parisian computer expert Aim?e Leduc (after 2006's Murder in Montmartre), a distraught, late-night anonymous phone call distracts Aim?e from her deadline and sends her to the courtyard of her Ile Saint-Louis building, where she finds an infant girl. After the caller never shows up for her baby (whom Aim?e decides to care for), Aim?e wonders if the woman may have become an "Yvette," a Jane Doe dragged from the Seine. She follows a tenuous lead to discover the caller's identity, bringing her Samaritan impulses into direct conflict with her business sense. A wonderfully complex plot is lent immediacy by environmental activists agitating against a proposed oil agreement-secondary characters who play a crucial role in the intrigue. This Paris has a gritty, edgy feel, and Black's prose evokes the sound of the Seine rising with the spring thaw. Aim?e makes an engaging protagonist, vulnerable beneath her vintage chic clothing and sharp-witted exterior. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Aimee Leduc, computer-security analyst and intrepid sleuth, usually needs to wander the arrondisements of Paris to find murder cases in which to involve herself. This time, though, the murder comes to the doorstep of her apartment building on the city's historic Ile Saint-Louis. Not only does Aimee find herself in the middle of a murder investigation, she also finds a baby in her arms--left on that same doorstep by an unknown woman. Following the baby's trail leads her to a violent conflict between environmentalists and an oil company. As the bodies accumulate, Aimee must sort out good guys from bad on both sides of the dispute. Meanwhile, the ever-hip investigator must come to terms with the emergence of some shocking maternal instincts. Black again makes the most of her setting, drawing on the juicy history of the Ile Saint-Louis--a crucial scene takes place on the Rue de la Femme-sans-tete (road of the headless woman)--but this time the plot lacks a bit of the sizzle that sparked previous episodes. Still, this series remains must reading for fans of the jauntier side of European crime fiction. --Bill Ott Copyright 2006 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF you believe that every patch of ground comes with its own story, then Val McDermid is the storyteller for you. In "A Place of Execution," she unearthed the secrets of an insular village in rural Derbyshire that functioned like an ancient feudal tribe when doling out justice. In "The Distant Echo," she uncovered the shameful history of a provincial town in Scotland. Even her more conventional series novels featuring the peripatetic detectives Tony Hill and Carol Jordan make ingenious use of their international settings. The bucolic rolling landscape of England's Lake District yields an unusually rich and complex plot in THE GRAVE TATTOO (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), which is as much a literary puzzle as it is a murder mystery. The story opens in the village of Fellhead with the discovery of a body long buried in a bog, an event in itself so extraordinary that a forensic anthropologist with the euphonious name of River Wilde is swiftly dispatched to the scene. Interest is heightened once Dr. Wilde determines that the desiccated cadaver was tattooed in the manner of 18th-century sailors who visited the South Sea islands - and that he had been murdered. A parallel investigation into the identity of the bog body is initiated by a scholar named Jane Gresham, who suspects that the tattooed sailor was Fletcher Christian, the first mate and lead mutineer on the H.M.S. Bounty. Jane (like Christian, a native of Fellhead) hopes to prove the local legend that he escaped from Pitcairn Island and made his way back to England, also validating her own theory that he confided the true story of his ill-fated adventures to his onetime schoolmate, William Wordsworth. Jane's efforts to find a record of these events in a lost epic by the great poet attracts some unsavory characters to Fellhead, including her ex-boyfriend (now the agent of an unscrupulous dealer in rare manuscripts), a fugitive suspect in a London murder case and a killer whose motives are less than academic. Val McDermid Once all these narrative balls are tossed in the air, McDermid provides enough violence to add real urgency to her intriguing premise, which the late curator of the Wordsworth Trust declared "improbable, but charmingly plausible." Even without the melodramatic plot twists, the novel's scholarship is exciting on its own terms, and entirely appropriate for a district so wildly beautiful that it attracts both poets and pirates. All it takes is one good man - a detective, of course - to humanize events that confound understanding. In THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM (Soho, $22), an astonishing first novel by Matt Beynon Rees, the former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, that honorable man is Omar Yussef, a middle-aged history teacher at a United Nations-run school for Palestinian children outside Bethlehem. When a Christian friend is unjustly accused of collaborating in the Israeli assassination of a local resistance fighter, this mild-mannered schoolteacher finds the courage to stand up to a milita outfit, the Martyrs Brigades, while conducting his own clandestine search for the real killer. Setting a mystery in the epicenter of a war zone challenges the genre conventions, but it doesn't change the rules. In fact, it clarifies the role of the detective as the voice of reason, crying to be heard above the cacophony of gun-barrel politics. Watching friends die and neighbors turn on one another, Omar Yussef decides that "it's time for me to scream." In a world where civilization has broken down into "ignorant, simple-minded, violent politics," this decent man commits the ultimate act of heroism-keeping an open mind. The glossy sheen of Manhattan noir that Peter Spiegelman brought to "Black Maps" and "Death's Little Helpers" has become darker and more lustrous in RED CAT (Knopf, $22.95), a morality tale whose depiction of S-and-M performance art gives the story a peculiarly modern twist. John March, a private eye proud to be the black sheep in a staid family of merchant bankers, narrates in the cool voice of someone who knows his way around the trendier enclaves of NoLita, including the boutique hotel where his married brother David has been having illicit sex with a woman he knows only as Wren. Alarmed by her demands for a moral accounting, David turns to his brother, who discovers that this mystery woman is a video artist, secretly taping her sexual encounters and selling them through high-end art dealers. "There was something in his gaunt face that reminded me of a monk," March says of one dealer. "The abbot, perhaps, of a prosperous and deeply tanned order." No less than the elegant cut of the author's prose and the nice lines of his characters, the fashionable aesthetics of "noir porn" are presented here in high style. Unlike old friends, who have a way of changing careers, marital status or religious affiliation when you lose touch, series detectives can usually be counted on to stay in town and on the job until they drop. Jack Liffey, the Los Angeles private eye in John Shannon's broad-shouldered novels, is one of those stalwart souls. Long a champion of teenagers in trouble, especially kids from L.A.'s culturally torn-up ethnic neighborhoods, this hard-boiled sleuth is on familiar turf in THE DARK STREETS (Pegasus, $25), searching for a Korean film student named Soon-Lin Kim who went missing while filming a documentary about Asian "comfort women" forced into sexual bondage during World War II. But the landscape shifts when Liffey discovers that a paramilitary group of Asian-Americans has taken an interest in Soon-Lin Kim's student project. Although racial tensions always run high in Liffey's world, the violent turn they take here causes him to question his faith in "the innate goodness of man." And another old friend loses his way in the dark. In Val McDermid's latest mystery, the first victim is a body in a bog - an 18th-century sailor covered with tattoos.
Kirkus Review
Murder strikes close to home when Black's computer-security-expert heroine takes charge of an abandoned infant. Aime Leduc (Murder in Montmartre, 2006, etc.) can't identify the voice that interrupts her late-night systems maintenance telling her to go down and look in her building's courtyard. But her partner, Ren Friant, learns that the call originated at a pay phone on Boulevard Henri IV, not two blocks away from Aime's home on Ile Saint-Louis. Aime is desperate to find out who placed the call, since it led her to an infant wrapped in a denim jacket. Unwilling to leave the foundling to the mercy of social services, Aime, whose own mother disappeared when she was eight, leans on Ren and her friends Michou and Martine to help care for Stella, as she calls her, while she investigates the report of a corpse--perhaps the child's mother--floating in the Seine. Viewing the same body is Krzysztof Linski, the deposed Polish prince leading the MondeFocus effort to stop oil giant Alstrom from winning rights to drill in the North Sea. When someone plants a backpack filled with kerosene bombs on Krzysztof, Aime turns to freelance filmmaker Claude Nederovique, whose footage of the MondeFocus rally she counts on to exonerate the prince and lead her to Stella's mother--and whose charms she cannot resist. Bittersweet musings on romantic and maternal love enliven an otherwise routine investigation. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
An abandoned infant leads Leduc to dodge death and deception in the streets (and sewers) of Paris in her seventh caper. Black lives in San Francisco. (See review, p. 57.) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
