Murder in Clichy (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 5)

Aimee continues with her frantic exploits, but here not of her own making. After being blinded, she has reordered her life (according to Aimee), slowing down , taking meditation classes which is where this mystery starts. She is sucked into a trap involving jade figures belonging to Viet Nan’s 1st emperor. It’s complicated with many characters and many plots and sub-plots, But it is the milieu Aimee thrives in. She flows from one incident to the next–that’s who Aimee is. Her dalliance with Guy appears to be over, but is clarified at the end when the jade mystery is solved. Aimee continues to be a complex but an endearing character, as does her partner Rene, a winning partnership these two. Aimee has an abiding sense of loss, a thread running through the fiber of who she is. In every story she’s involved in, there’s a hole in her heart from these losses–her mother’s neglect and disappearance, her father’s death, her inability to keep a man, all redound to her palpable loss.

I just love this series. Paris is our favorite city in the world and even after 10 or 12 trips we don't feel we know it well enough. This series is great and Aimee is a great charater. Each series provides neat insight into a different neighborhood.

One of the problems with reading a novel that is part of a series is not reading until the fifth. Black's descriptions of Paris and the ambience of the neighborhoods reads like a well written travelogue on Lonely Planet. But I got tired of the number of times people drummed their nails or their finger or rattled their cups on a "zinc counter". Or how many time's Aimee had to changed torn fishnet stockings. Sometimes I got the feeling that the story was secondary to Black's knowledge about different areas of Paris. As to the story...it gets in it's own way from time to time, and sometime just meanders along, "like the Seine on an amber autumn morning, lit by sun filtering through the clouds and fallen chestnut tree leaves, as lovers wandered hand in hand among the book stalls". Sorry got carried away... Hard to tell whether she was trying to flesh out the story or had condensed it! Bottom line, the mystery was good and kept you guessing, but much of the time that may have been because we were "darkly looking through a nineteenth century, dappled window, which are so reminicent of the 14th arrondisement".

Like Paris, the newest novel in the Aimee Leduc series is complicated, elegant, and lush with pleasures. I've ardently followed this series from the start. As always, Paris herself is a leading character (and the history of France is too); unlike other popular writers Black draws a Paris very much like the real one, of wealthy aristos and struggling immigrants, refinement and poverty, where past and present mingle with comfortable familiarity. We also are given more and richer insights into Aimee and, in particular, her partner Ren. I am loving the way Aimee, and Black, are developing. This is the best Leduc Detective yet.

Excellent new entry by Cara Black. This is the third Aimee Leduc book I've read and I find myself gladly anticipating the ride. (Glad I still have two more to read). I'm enjoying Black's character, Aimee, as much as Harry Bosch, Elvis Cole, Nick Stefanos, Tony Valentine and Tess Monaghan. I keep coming back. Black's Paris is as much a character as L.A., D.C., Vegas, and Baltimore are in the aforementioned author's books. I love learning and reading about the arrondissements in Paris. Very well done.

In 1994 Paris, Aimee Leduc has sight for the most part and the blurriness is going away, but she still struggles with her injuries especially to the optic nerve from last month's assault. Her computer security firm partner Rene encourages her to continue to seek a healthier lifestyle. Vietnamese Sister Linh asks Aimee to deliver an envelope to Thadee Baret because the nun insists she cannot do it as she is watched, even in Paris, as she is the daughter of a blackballed judge in her native country and the sister of a jailed dissident.. Reluctantly, Aimee agrees. The drop off seems to go smooth as Aimee provides the envelope to Thadee who hands over to her a jade piece to give to Linh. Not long afterward someone kills Thadee. Aimee wonders what is going on as she was just a delivery intermediary, but government agents tell her to back off from making inquiries and someone abducts her partner, making the scenario even more baffling. The fifth Aimee Leduc investigative tale is a fantastic story in which the readers remain in the dark along with the heroine wondering what is going on yet unable to stop reading to learn the truth. Aimee is a fabulous protagonist who learns a life lesson about Good Samaritans as she investigates the murder, the nun, and the abduction while pressure for her to back off increases. Cara Black provides her usual terrific Parisian joy ride that has helped make the Leduc tales consistently some of the best professional sleuth novels in recent years. Harriet Klausner