The Stone Angel

This novel introduced Marvin Albert's Franco-American private eyr , Pierre-Ange ( Pete) Sawyer ,whose first name translates literally to " Stone Angel " ,a name bestowed on him by a former girlfriend who feels it admirably conveys his mix of the tough and the tender .His mother is still alive and she , Babette ,is an acclaimed art historian and Resistance heroine ,while his father was an American airman ,killed in the war .Educated in Chicago ,Sawyer now resides in the South of France and plies his trade as a gumshoe . His assignment is to locate a missing American teenager ,Sarah Byrne who has simply gone missing from her Paris apartment .The ostensible reason for her presence in Paris is to improve her language skills and develop a taste for culture -in reality she had gotten herself mixed up with a Californian radical group and narrowly avoided prosecution thanks to parental string pulling . While waiting in a Jewish owned cafe in the Rue des Rossiers ,opposite her apartment the cafe is fired on from inside her apartment .It is the work of a terrorist gang and Sarah is implicated by virue of her relationship to Henri Lemaire ,the heir to a champagne makiing family with a wartime history of collaboration with the Nazis and a reputation for anti-semitism . Sawyers pursuit of Sarah involves him with the Lemaire family and with the hard bitten cop Gonjon who is an unofficial ally in the chase .He is threatened , targetted by a hit and run driver and generally pit through the mill .The case turns darker when Sarah is killed and the terrorists up the stakes by kidnapping a minister of the European Community demanding the release of one of their colleagues in exchange for her life . The climax takes place in Reims and is bloody and explosive . The book betrays some signs of authorial wish fulfillment in the figure of Sawyer -irresitable to women ,sophisticated and at ease across the social spectrum and the terrorist threat here is quite unique in crime writing since it combines leftist and rightist idealogy with the just plain criminal elements . Good writing and a plot twisty enough to sustain interest combine to make this a good example of the mid 80' crime novel -worth seeking out in my view