Customer Reviews

Murder in the Rue de Paradis (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 8)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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."

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.

This was a tiresome book. Black writes like an English teacher and her main character Aimee Leduc goes about solving a mystery with an astonishing amount of coincidences and plot turns that just HAPPEN to be in place. I found her description of the 10th Arondissment of Paris enlightening, but the book just plodded along with only rare snatches of suspense or intrigue. I just had the feeling that the author was trying a little too hard -- and that I was wasting my time.

"They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all." -- Luke 17:27 (NKJV)

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.

In this novel, Aimee receives more than the comfort of an overnight love affair when Yves Robert, a former lover and investigative reporter for Agence France Press, proposes. After a blissful evening, Aimee is called to identify his slain body. Determined to find out what happened, Aimee tracks down terror plots among Turks and Kurds to uncover an unexpected villain.

The appeal of this story is all in the local color. Chances are that ethnic tensions between Turks and Kurds are not a major focus in your life. Yves' appearance in this story is so brief that he's not much more than a nameless victim in terms of plot development.

As usual, Aimee races around sticking her inquisitive nose where it's mostly not wanted in noir circumstances. I suspect you'll figure out the murder solution without too much difficulty.

The story ends with some unexpected elements for Aimee's future happiness that may bring a smile to your face.

Cara Black's "Murder in the Rue de Paradis" is the eigth in a mystery series featuring Aimée Leduc, a computer security expert with a private investigator's license working in Paris. Each novel in the series is set in a different arrondisement, or district, of Paris. Thus, each story is informed by the charm and mysteries of a particular neighborhood. If you like Paris, you will like traipsing through the neighborhoods with Aimée Leduc.

Thirtysomething Aimée also wanders through the romances available to a single woman living in contemporary Paris, love stories that are intertwined with the intrigues surrounding the dark crimes disrupting her computer security business.

Rue Paradis is a fast-paced murder mystery involving a Kurdish assassination plot to kill a member of the Turkish parliament. The action and characters are described within the context of themes that give the story several layers of deeper significance. The novel conveys the yearning for distant homelands in the immigrants' hearts as they struggle with living in the modern, but alienating, metropolis of Paris. The past shapes the topography of the emotional present where the characters act out their lives. The novel illustrates that the current emotional terrain of ethnic conflict is always a product of the past because past grievance constantly drives present circumstance.

East meets West and the international politics of this clash are made vivid and given personality by the colorful characters driving forward the intrigues which provide narrative force to the novel. Moslems are coming from the closed societies of the East to the freedom of free-speaking Paris, one of the capitals of the West. But the freedom of the West also makes it easier for agents from the East to settle scores from the long-simmering blood feuds of the East.

In this novel, Kurds are being ethnically cleansed by the Turks in a tradition of ethnic violence reaching back to the First World War. Kurdish characters have beautifully memories of green valleys and beautiful fruit orchards in their ethnic lands--this region was the home of the Garden of Eden--and these Eden-like images are then obliterated by other memories of destroyed villages and dead women and children. The images of grievance are dramatically painted in the reader's mind; the bleakness of modern progress etched by the irreversible loss of a beautiful past.

Another layer of conflict comes from a religiously motivated young woman on jihad to assassinate a Muslin woman member of Turkey's parliament. This conflict results in a vivid showdown between a woman trapped by ancient religious fundamentalism moving by stealth to assassinate a woman representing the hope of a more tolerant future.

But as the story unfolds, religious and ethnic antagonisms provide only a partial explanation to the crimes occurring. An element is missing. The final missing piece is provided by greed, the universal motivator to low crimes. Western businesses are seeking to capture rich contracts with the aid of Eastern facilitators who cash in by selling out local interests. Greed uses religious fundamentalism to facilitate its agenda, while the opportunists profit on the tragic disruption going on in the Middle East. So people die--there and here.

Cara Black has a detailed eye for the physical changes of progress transforming the appearance of Paris, an old city. Just as building façades change, she sees the lives of new immigrants changing the ambience of Parisian neighborhoods while bringing the cultural diversity to Paris that has been its centuries-long hallmark. For a long time, Paris has been a place of outsiders who came from somewhere else. So it is here.

Contemporary France comes to the reader through the Paris police, energetically battling terrorism with SWAT teams while it's jaded "je ne sais quoi" eye watches the currents of life flowing down the great channel of time in the ancient city.

For Aimée Leduc, one romance left for dead at the beginning of the tale ends with the promise of a second romance, apparently from an earlier novel, landing at the airport an hour after the end of the book. Love and romance circle through the life of a smart young woman trying to figure it all out.

The author lays out the twists and turns and builds the mystery of the plot in the first two-thirds of the book. She then goes uptempo in the last third. I read the novel on my Kindle and as I went past 80 percent I was hitting the page forward keys bang bang bang--a compelling read!

I'm going to spare you a plot summary...it's been covered pretty thoroughly by my predecessors. I've read this and the preceeding Leduc novels. While I enjoy them, I have to confess that I find the author's penchant for looping in contemporary social and political issues to be rather tiresome and uninteresting. They also date the books a bit. Also, they often remove any surprise endings...

I suppose I read mysteries as an escapist activity and am not particularly interested in the typical bogey men trotted out by many contemprary authors and hollywood screenwriters...i.e. greedy corporations, corrupt governments, etc.

Reading these books is like making another trip to Paris and we can all use a Paris fix now and then.

A lucky happenstance to come across while attending the Decatur Book Festival this weekend, I was introduced to Ms. Black and Aimee LeDuc. The protanogist is sucked into the underworld of the "new" Paris of 1995, this time in the ardissmont frequented by the Turkish and Kurdish emigres. Suddenly her finance' is dead under confusing circumstances and she pledges to find out why. Using her PI licence, contacts inside the police and trading on her police godfather's name,she gradually connects the dots. The author draws a vivid picture of the sights, smells and sounds that permeate the City of Lights, helping you "see" the crime scene and surrounding district. An engrossing, hard to set down read for all who want to visit without suffering jetlag....

Don't let the weak writing in the first few pages of this novel put you off.Once Cara Black settles in, this book provides a compelling story line with details that make the setting come alive.

Aimee gets an unexpected phone call from her old flame, journalist Yves Robert. Yves has left Paris and Aimee to work undercover in the middle east. Now he's back in Paris and wants to settle down with Aimee. He's even brought a ring back from Turkey for her. But before they can tie the knot he has to go meet a contact; an ends up having his throat cut.

Aimee is determined to find out why and who killed Yves. The summer of 1995 was one in which Paris was subjected to a series of bombings of the Metro System. The Cite is on heightened alert and every Flick and Mec is looking over his shoulder. Aimee's investigation involves her in a chain of events that reveals an assassination plots (which she foils) informers and secret contracts surrounding the strained relationship of a militant Turkish group and the Kurdish Labor Party, all leading back to Yves.

Aimée worms her way through black ops work by the DST and Brigade Criminalle, while using Yves old contacts to put her on the trail of Yves assassin. The ending is a travelogue through the area around the Gare de Nord and environs, not to mention the Metro underground system. All in all it's very satisfying until the last page when another old boyfriend shows up, desole.