Saturday, 25 November 2017

Murder In The Sentier (Aimée Leduc Investigation Series) by Cara Black


Paperback:  Parisian PI Aimée Leduc finally has the chance to find out the truth about her missing mother but will the truth leave more dead victims in its path?

When Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc picks up the phone one hot July afternoon, the call turns her life upside down.  The voice on the other end, with its heavy German accent, belongs to a woman named Jutta Hald.  Jutta claims to have shared a jail cell with Aimée’s long-lost mother, a suspected terrorist on Interpol’s most wanted list.

If Aimée wants to learn the truth about her mother, she is to meet Jutta at a rendezvous point in an ancient tower in the Sentier.  But when Aimée arrives, Jutta is dead, shot in the head at close range.

Aimée realizes she has stumbled into something bigger than Jutta let on, and that her own life is in danger.  She has a lot of unsolved mysteries in front of her:  Jutta Hald’s murder, resurfaced materials from Sydney Leduc’s terrorist activities in the 1970s, police suppression of important information.

The question is, can Aimée put the pieces together before someone else ends up dead?

Murder In The Sentier (2002) is the third instalment in the captivating PI Aimée Leduc Investigation series set in Paris and was nominated for two Anthony Awards - Best Novel and Cover Design.

To keep up to date with Cara Black's engrossing series, Murder in Saint-Germain is the seventeenth and latest instalment published on 6 June 2017 and fans and readers will be delighted to know that the eighteenth book - Murder on the Left Bank - is set to be published on 19 June 2018.

About the author:  Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 17 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set in Paris.  Cara has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris - the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture - and invitations to be the Guest of Honour at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime.  With more than 400 000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

Cara was born in Chicago but has lived in California’s Bay Area since she was five years old.  Before turning to writing full-time, she tried her hand at a number of jobs:  she was a barista in the Basel train station café in Switzerland, taught English in Japan, studied Buddhism in Dharamsala in Northern India, and worked as a bar girl in Bangkok (only pouring drinks!).  After studying Chinese history at Sophia University in Tokyo - where she met her husband, Jun, a bookseller, potter, and amateur chef - she obtained her teaching credential at San Francisco State College, and went on to work as a preschool director and then as an agent of the federally funded Head Start program, which sent her into San Francisco’s Chinatown to help families there - often sweatshop workers - secure early care and early education for their children.  Each of these jobs was amazing and educational in a different way, and the Aimée Leduc books are covered in fingerprints of Cara’s various experiences.

Her love of all things French was kindled by the French-speaking nuns at her Catholic high school, where Cara first encountered French literature and went crazy for the work of Prix Goncourt winner Romain Gary.  Her junior year in high school, she wrote him a fan letter - which he answered, and which inspired her to make her first trip to Paris, where her idol took her out for coffee and a cigar. Since then, she has been to Paris many, many times.

On each visit she entrenches herself in a different part of the city, learning its secret history.  She has posed as a journalist to sneak into closed areas, trained at a firing range with real Paris flics, gotten locked in a bathroom at the Victor Hugo museum, and - just like Aimée - gone down into the sewers with the rats (she can never pass up an opportunity to see something new, even when the timing is not ideal - she was headed to a fancy dinner right afterwards and had a spot of bother with her shoes).

For the scoop on real Paris crime, she takes the flics out for drinks and dinner to hear their stories - but it usually turns into a long evening, which is why she sticks with espresso.

Rating:  5/5

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