18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Nancy Drew, Parisienne PI, May 18, 2008
It's good for this genre to have a female private detective, stylized in the manner of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie, solving mysterious murders that seem to elude police abilities. Cara Black creates good stories. My problem is a feeling that her detective tales are not very well written. There are moments of tension, excitement, pathos and surprise which are well-done and convincing. Many times, however, the dialogue seems forced and unrealistic.
Often there is simply too much irrelevant detail: insignificant page-filling stuff, which Black must believe makes her story's setting credible. Ok, already, we KNOW the setting is Paris!! We do not need to be reminded on every page -- perpetually -- of that fact with an over-indulgence of detail. Black, me thinks, likes to show off a bit too much her detailed knowledge of the geography, cafes, monuments, buildings, streets, sounds, smells, views, ambiance, and other unique signs of Paris. We get it, Ms. Black, and you can relax about all that. You're not a Parisienne. You're a San Franciscan. Aimee, herself, would not be lecturing about her knowledge of Paris. Follow Aimee's instincts here, rather than your own.
In her narrative, Black's writing seems a bit "high-school." But perhaps that's because Aimee is portrayed as, while bright and tenacious, not exactly a member of the intelligentsia. Emotions, not brains, rule Aimee's entire life and all her actions.
There are also too many side stories in play. Here the unnecessary distractions are: Aimee's weird newly activated obsession with her long-disappeared mother; Rene's search for new office space; and Black's rather pathetic need to teach us about why there are divisions within Islam. We could do with less of all these TV-like side stories. Stick to the story at hand, the murders and the search for the culprits. If that makes the book shorter, hey, all the better.
Aimee Leduc's persona just feels too AMERICAN, with too much American-style slang, too many 100% American expressions and ways of talking and describing things and events. It's as if Cara Black believes herself as Aimee and places her brain inside Aimee's head, with Black's talking style and Black's emotions. Aimee just isn't FRENCH enough, despite her stereotypical French attire, hairdo, habits and dog. For all her troubles, injuries, near-death experiences and other travails, I never once felt sorry for, or much empathy for, Aimee. I didn't even admire her skills as a PI. Too many turning points in the story were accidental or coincidental -- something that ate away at Aimee's PI competence. The price for these story-telling failures is that Aimee, herself, does not really solve the mysteries. External factors play a major part in the solutions and in the twists and turns of the story. There is not nearly enough portrayal of the brilliance or detective ability of Aimee.
Her side-kick, Rene Friant, is a smart, capable, down-to-earth foil to the erratic, risk-taking, and emotion-driven Aimee. The fact that he is a dwarf, while interesting, is hardly convincing and creates no special interest. How many times must we read about his "hip problem," and its genesis in his dwarfness? Irritatingly, he is too "motherly" toward Aimee. He, of course, arrives like the cavalry at just the right moment at the end of the book. Most of the other characters in the story are forgettable, except for one of the evil-doers, Nadira.
But, the story is contemporary, with Turkish, Kurdish and Iranian extremists, and, at its core, believable. I especially liked the few instances of woman-to-woman combat. Those scenes were very well done. Because of the unevenness of the writing, however, the book was hard for me to rate - somewhere between a "2.2" and "3.4."
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Words do not trail on the hem of a chador in the dust of the market street.", August 29, 2009
This review is from: Murder in the Rue de Paradis (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 8) (Paperback)
This is the eighth Aimee Leduc mystery by Cara Black, set in the 10th arrondisssement, and you will enjoy it more if you have read most of the earlier books. As Aimée is leaving a client's party, Yves, her on-again, off-again journalist lover, steps out of the shadows and invites her for a drink. She nearly declines (she's grown impatient with this yo-yo relationship) but relents & they head for the Canal St. Martin area where he is staying. He's just returned from an assignment in Turkey for Agence France Presse and is working undercover, but he wants her to marry him. She accepts...but late in the morning wakes to find him gone, and her hope of change in him evaporates. She heads angrily for work, only to find a policeman waiting to take her in for questioning. The last call from a homicide victim in rue de Paradis has been made to her rundown cellphone. She is asked to view the victim - who turns out to be Yves.
Aimée's search for Yves's killer (the mysterious "woman" in the chador seen leaving the scene?) takes her into the intricacies of Shia and Sunni Muslim politics as well as the deep-rooted enmity between the Turks and the Kurds. Yves has been reporting on the Kurdish activist groups protesting the displacement of their people by the Turkish government (and its French backers) wanting to establish lucrative dams and power plants in Kurdish territory. Black creates a well-balanced portrait of an Iranian jihadist, Nadira, working undercover as a nanny, but in reality serving as a courier and then an assassin. Nadira is more memorable than many of the other characters, who appear with cinematic brevity primarily as links in the plot, which is quite complex and not always easy to follow.
The subject of Aimée's loss of Yves, a deep though problematic love, offers an opportunity for a more emotionally involving book, but this promise is not fulfilled. The subplot of Aimée's meeting with a coworker of her mother's at UNESCO eventually provides a moving conclusion. If you have read previous books, Aimée's discovery here that her mother was placed on a terrorist watchlist in the 60s will resonate - you know that Aimée's desire to learn about her mother is a major obsession of her life, along with her drive to rehabilitate her father's damaged reputation in law enforcement. If you have not, it will appear to be a gratuitous interruption to the plot.
Parts of this book are quite beautiful, and the plot twists and turns in a compelling trajectory toward a plausible conclusion, even if, as usual, there are an unbelievable number of coincidences enabling Aimée to foil the assassination attempts and solve the mystery of Yves's murder.
Black still cannot restrain herself from inserting fascinating facts about the history of each place of meeting, each café. It's nice to learn that there is a museum of the fan in Paris, but its appearance in the book is a snapshot unrelated to anything else in the complicated plot. I'm sure that many read these books as much for Paris trivia as for the mysteries themselves, but a firmer editorial hand could improve them.
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