Backcover blurb: Aimée Leduc, the half-French, half-American detective in Paris, is approached by a rabbi to decipher a fifty-year-old encrypted photograph and deliver it to an old woman in the Marais, the old Jewish quarter. When she does so, she finds a corpse on whose forehead a swastika has been carved. With the help of her partner, a dwarf with extraordinary computer skills, she sets out to solve this horrendous crime and finds herself in the middle of a dangerous game of current politics and old war crimes.
Why not read the first chapter here?
My thoughts: First published in 1999, this novel is so well-written and richly crafted that it is hard to believe that it is Black's debut. What strikes me from the first page onwards is that Black has deftly combined the elegant ambience of Paris in the early 1990s with the terrible historical aspects of the old Paris during the Occupation with her polished and very European prose.
This book intrigues me. The story is downright absorbing with its main plot and subplots, one of them being a poignant forbidden love affair which I shall not elaborate at all. I guess the book could do with a proper editing in some areas because there are too many irrelevant details that made me feel as if I am studying the book rather than reading it for pleasure and there are some parts that seem to jump out of the blue without any prior references where you then have to use your wits to try and piece them together, but overall, I think it is an outstanding debut and holds much promise about a lady private detective and her adventures in Paris. Therefore, I highly recommend the Aimée Leduc Investigation series to all who have not discovered them yet and look forward to reading the next book, Murder in Belleville, in the near future.
This novel has been nominated for 'The Anthony Best First Novel Category' and 'Best First Novel Nominee in the Macavity Award'.
You can find the Paris mystery author's official website here. If you want to get an insight into how the author got started on Murder in the Marais, click here for an exclusive read.
I borrowed this book from my local library and officially my first read of 2011!
Rating: 4/5
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