Customer Reviews

Murder in Montmartre (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 6)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Private Investigator Aimee Leduc is at her most sensitive right after she's dumped by her boyfriend, so she takes it hard when a childhood friend, cop Laure, is accused of murdering her partner. Aimee knows Laure would never have killed the man she viewed as her mentor, but the police have their suspect and Laure is comotose and unable to defend herself. It's up to Aimee to do the job.

Aimee's investigation quickly takes her out of the everyday world of Paris into a seamy underworld of prostitutes, underemployed musicians living rough, and Corsican terrorists. It is clear to Aimee that the murder being pinned on Laure is somehow connected to the Corsicans, but the most likely suspect turns out to be the musician who restarts Aimee's bruised libido.

Always in the background is the fear of police corruption--a corruption that destroyed Aimee's father and that continues to haunt much of the Paris police department. What secrets did Laure hide? Could Aimee's father have been, after all, involved with some underhanded scheme?

Author Cara Black continues her Aimee Leduc series with an intriguing tale set in a world where ancient vendetta coexists with modern terrorism, and where the spirit of Tolouse Lautrec haunts the streets of Montmartre, the section of Paris he profiled--and a section of Paris that remains distinct from the rest of the city.

There were times when Aimee's investigation seemed a bit improbable (her invasion of the police computer system seemed particularly far-fetched), but Black's mystery is more of an impressionistic painting than a hard-edged photograph. If you're interested in Paris and in reading an author who treats that city as a dominant character, you won't want to miss MURDER IN MONTMARTRE

I'm a great fan of Cara Black's "Murder in..." series, but I found myself in a bad neighborhood with this book in more ways than one. The story line revolves around the suspected terrorist activities of Corsican nationalists (or are they gangsters?) and detective Amy LeDuc's related attempts to clear a childhood friend of a murder charge. The descriptions of Paris streets, cafes, restaurants and other sites are as interesting as ever, but the book's story line is contrived and uneven. The story opens with a hardly credible, but helpful-for-the-scenario, breakup of LeDuc and her doctor boyfriend. The book ends with LeDuc in the arms of another BF, whom she barely knows and for whom readers have had scant information about from the body of the story. There are other problems with character development here as well--LeDuc's partner, Rene, is given unusually short shrift (what's up with the new girlfriend?) and the childhood friend that LeDuc is trying assist is written into a convenient coma-like silence without much explanation to the reader.
The main point here is that Cara Black has done much better with other stories in this series. If you are considering this book, I believe that you would do better to start with "Murder in the Bastille" or "Murder in the Marais."

It's January 1995, and Aimee is once again involved in a murder mystery that leads her again to secrets concerning her father's death. With the Church of the Sacred Heart (Sacre-Coeur), the neighborhood of the Mound of Martyrs (Montmartre), and the stone quarry caverns below as background, Aimee tries to prove that her childhood friend (Laure) did not kill her policemen partner (yes, her friend is a flic). Laure's father was Aimee's father's partner before he left the force.

Her new friend, Guy the Doctor, has split and gone to the Sudan with Doctors Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders). An old friend, who Aimee has been looking for for years (Jaubert), and was part of her father's police academy group along with Morbier, turns up in a spot she least expects.

As always, our heroine, Aimee, is not only resourceful but always stylish (a true fashionista) as she snoops out the bad guys. Somehow, this time she manages to stay off her scooter and therefore is kept from running into anything or anyone.

The plotline involving some fake Corsican Separatists, who are busy selling the guns (of eastern european make) that were the basis for the case her father had been working on at the time of his death, help Aimee to bring some nagging problems from that time to closure. The rest of the plot is there for Aimee to have something to do until the more important personal issues are resolved.

The people who have said they don't like this series, well, that's OK. We all like different things. Now, as for myself, I can't stand a single book which has won the Booker Prize, except for The English Patient. I like this series of mysteries. I feel like I have gone on a vacation to Paris which may be the only way I get there. I notice that every time I read one of these, I have to go to my neighborhood cafe and read it under awnings!! This may prove hard in the winter, when it is raining or snowing!! Bravo, Cara Black!!

In January 1995 in the working class neighborhood of Montmartre in Paris, the police arrest fellow officer Laure Rousseau for killing her partner, Jacques. She swears she is innocent as she explains to her childhood friend private investigator Aimee Leduc that Jacques was meeting an informer with her as his backup when he was killed; she was arrested because her gun was fired and residue was on her hands. She persuades Aimee of her innocence and to take on her case.

Aimee knows she will find the truth somewhere in the dingiest sections of Montmartre. There she immediately meets a boy who swears he witnessed the killing; she believes him, but also knows he will not be credible with the police or the courts. Other clues lead to danger from street hooligans and a Corsican separatist group that wants Aimee to leave the neighborhood. Instead the intrepid sleuth keeps digging, but soon finds the investigation takes a side tangent involving her deceased father and buried under the soot of police indiscretions, scandals, and illegalities that seem to touch her not so clean friend.

In her sixth French mystery, the Aimee Leduc tales are some of the best private investigative novels on the market over the past half a decade or so. MURDER IN MONTMARTRE is a bit darker than usual, but sill retains that powerful story line that grips the audience form the moment that the two long time friends discuss the murder. Fans will want to go with Aimee as she goes home to find clues to what went wrong in order to exonerate her buddy, but the mean streets of Montmartre are even gloomier and grittier than her nightmares. Cara Black is at her best with her latest murder in France thriller.

Harriet Klausner

One of the signals of a good mystery series to me is if you can pick up a book well into the series and read it as a stand alone and Murder in Montmartre by Cara Black stands up to this test. Murder in Montmartre is the sixth book of the Aimee Leduc series and immediately pulled me in without making me feel lost and confused about the back story or giving me too much extraneous information about it.

Aimee Leduc is a private eye, who specializes in computer investigations. She is young, chic, pert with spikey hair and spike heels. She chose computer investigation because she chose to avoid the more active and dangerous investigations which killed her father, whose agency she inherited. Somehow she always gets involved with them and Murder in Montmartre is about one such case.

I love that Cara Blacks writing gives one the feel for Paris and reading this book took me on a trip:
"This slice of Montmartre had witness several heydays. Before the turn of the century, Edgar Degas had discovered his models here among the grisettes, young women for work amid the horse-drawn milk carts. Now the sex clubs and cut-rate North African shops contributed a different flavor. Still, pockets of cobbled lanes with two-story artist'ateliers dotted the route winding up to Sacre Coeur, which crowned the steep hill.
Aimee entered L'Oiseau through a haze of cigarette smoke and close, steamy air;the party was in full swing. Thank God she'd stuck on a second Nicorette patch in the taxi. Plainclothes flics, in their sixties and older propped up the zinc bar and sat at small round tables. She recognized several faces, men who worked with her father. They were more at home at a zinc bar than in their own kitchens."

I felt that the mystery was a good and satisfying one with the right amount of intrigue and danger to keep me on edge and guessing. There were perhaps too many extraneous characters to keep track of and this detracted from it for me.

I enjoyed the book and will not hesitate to read the first of the series.

"They have sown wheat but reaped thorns;
They have put themselves to pain but do not profit." -- Jeremiah 12:13 (NKJV)

Ah, Corsica! How clever of Cara Black to realize that there's more to Corsica than being Napoleon's birthplace. She makes good use of that island and its more recent history to provide context for an emotionally engaging story that addresses the reasons for Aimee's father's demise, involves defending an old friend, and takes a look at her chances for marital happiness.

Montmartre may not be your first stop when you visit Paris. As a result, the local atmosphere here doesn't carry Paris lovers as far along into the story as other novels in the series do.

Can you think of another recent mystery series based in Paris that provides such rich detail about a neighborhood, its history, its current inhabitants, the lives of those on society's margins, and intriguing looks at a quartier's underground quirks? Anyone who has read more than two books in the series is bound to have found that combination to be intriguing.

I suspect that some people discover Cara Black in the mistaken belief that she provides for Paris what Donna Leon does for Venice. Mais, non! Ms. Leon takes you into the places that tourists would like to go while Ms. Black takes you to places that many tourists probably pray they will never see.

There's also an intriguing choice of detectives by Cara Black that breaks the mold. Her heroine, Aimee Leduc, doesn't want to be an investigator. She just wants to wear vintage designer clothes bought for little, to have exciting times with handsome "bad" boys, and to earn enough money as a computer security consultant at Leduc Detective to keep her home and business. Her pain is not understanding what happened to her mother and father, an intriguing thread that ties the series together. Rene Friant, her partner, is a genius at hacking into computer systems and is an expert in martial arts despite being a dwarf who walks in pain.

Now, if you like offbeat, this series has it.

There's a realistic grittiness to the story that makes it seem more realistic than the immediately prior two books in the series. Check it out!

This is the third book of the series that I have read. Being a Francophile, I enjoyed the setting and the cultural aspects. These books would also be good airplane books and then as one is winging ones way to Paris, upon arrival, you could tour Paris via the story locations.

On the other hand, they provide a mini vacation from home.

Being stuck for a week with only the first seven Leduc Investigations books to read (three I had to give up on), I now know literary hell. The main character is a leftist private detective, who dislikes the incompetent and corrupt police (but is the daughter of a senior Prefecture of Police officer), who has a weakness for bad boys, Couture fashion and cigarettes, and is possibly the most annoying character I have read. The author has no clue about criminal investigations, French law enforcement, weapons, or forensics, but besides that...

Also the author besides her socialist leaning drivel and improbable plot lines, has the charming ability of making Paris the City of Light, seem as drab, grimy and nearly appealing as Detroit.

I've read two of Cara Black's novels (Murder in the Marais and this one), and that's enough for me. While the concepts underlying her plots are very interesting, her writing is pedestrian. Her characters have quirks but aren't fully developed or believable. In fact, her plots and characters remind me of the badly developed detective fiction plots and characters that Jasper Fforde satirizes in his Thursday Next series, except that Cara Black is writing in earnest, not satirically.

The way in which Black attempts to interject the flavour of French and Parisian life comes across as artificial. It's particularly irritating when the author uses French words in an effort to convey a sense of "Frenchness" to her story. It's like watching a movie set wholly in France involving only French characters but having them all speak in French-accented English. One can hope that she'll improve as an author and maybe reach the level of a Barbara Nadel or Donna Leon, but I'm not counting on it.