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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I didn't want it to end..., January 20, 2005
and that's the truth. This is the best Cara Black mystery I have read yet. The plot and the details of Paris were so interesting I hated to have to put the book down to do something else (like eat or sleep). I'll add some personal reasons why this book appealed to me, since there are a lot of rave reviews already. First, I have spent time in many parts of Paris, but never the Sentier. I had just finished Sarah Turnbull's Almost French, a nonfiction book about an Australian who comes to live in the Sentier. While it gave me an overview, Black supplies historical and cultural details of the neighborhood that now make me feel I have been up and down every street. The book also comes with a map of the area so that readers can easily follow along. The German terrorists Black bases the story on were real. The Baader-Meinhof gang came to trial in 1975 and I was in Germany at the time. I still have the issue of Der Spiegel magazine that features the indictment on the cover. Much of the detail she uses about the fictional gang members is actually true. "Ulrike" would be Ulrike Maria Meinhof, a journalist turned terrorist. She actually did have a family, with twin daughters, that she abandoned. She was not a young student, however, but a woman over 40. She and others really were found hanged in their cells, and whether it was suicide or homicide has never been proven. "Marcus" is Andreas Bernd Baader, and he was in fact supported by Jean-Paul Sartre and other well known persons. For information on the real story, I recommend www.baader-meinhof.com. This site is in English. Here is my one criticism: if an author is not fluent in a language (German), it is better not to use it or to have a German-speaker proof it. Spelling and grammatical errors aside, there are two things non-German-speaking Americans dont always know. One is that all nouns are always capitalized. I had to convince one of my bosses of this (in publishing) because he thought it looked "weird". Most importantly, English and German do NOT translate literally into each other, and one has to be very careful with idioms. A word in English can have five or six different meanings, while in German there may be five or six different words, one for each meaning. Please, Ms Black, dont get in over your head. It's not hard to make sure of the correct way of saying things, in any language you have your characters use. If you cant do it, use English. Readers will assume that a Russian is thinking in Russian, und so weiter.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Slam-bam action in Paris, June 5, 2002
A woman, a stranger, calls on detective Aimee Leduc with a strange story. She was Aimee's cellmate and can tell Aimee of her long-lost mother--but she demands money for her information. When Aimee shows up with the money, she finds the woman has been murdered. Desperate to find word of her mother, Aimee plunges into an investigation of the revolutionary terrorists of the 1970s--a circle that included her mother. Aimee's search takes her through the depths of the Sentier district of Paris--still home to the remnants of the 1970s radical movement, socialist intellectuals, prostitutes, sweatshops, and the police. Walking a narrow line between law and unlawfulness, Aimee discovers evidence that something is being hidden--something beyond the memories of aging radicals. Author Cara Black keeps Aimee in constant motion, rushing from one scene to the next, calling in favors from an intriguing variety of friends, toying with romance as she fights her craving for cigarettes. Aimee gains sympathy as she searches for her mother and tries to clear her father's name from the hints that he had become a dirty cop. Although Black is an American author, her Paris feels terribly authentic. I would, however, have liked to see a little more cleverness on the part of Aimee. Her constant rushing about sometimes seemed to come at the cost of a bit of reflection--reflection which would have given Aimee insights into what she was doing and the reader a chance to internalize the action. The slam-bam action occasionally felt more like a movie script than a novel.
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15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I really wanted to like this book..., April 24, 2006
This title seemed to have so much going for it: local author, attractive design, Parisian setting.... For me, it just didn't deliver. While the story line is rather (too?) complex, that wasn't a major issue. Instead, I felt that at least two of the major questions posed by the mystery remained completely unresolved at the end, while the momentary distraction that permits our heroine to escape from the clutches of death seemed as contrived to me as if a bolt of lightning had shot from the sky and knocked a gun from the clutches of the villain. In addition, the Parisian atmosphere struck me as a very thin veneer indeed, with unidiomatic French phrases inserted at regular intervals (literal translations of English that don't have the same meanings in French, a reference to the female protagonist in the masculine form...). Other details are off, too (musician Youssou N'Dour's name is misspelled, Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' is referred to as having been released a year earlier than it in fact was, etc). I can say that my attention was at least held to the end. Was I expecting too much?
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