Published by Turnaround, 23 March, 2014.
ISBN: 978-1-6169-5284-5
Aimee Leduc rides again, and this time she’s pregnant!
The backdrop is the run up to
the 1998 World Cup in Paris, where the police are more concerned with herding
football fans and projecting a “disciplined” face to the world than solving the
more serious crimes happening to their citizens. A serial rapist is breaking into homes and
attacking teenage girls. This would have
nothing to do with Aimee, trying hard not to smoke or drink in the light of her
impending motherhood, until her friend’s teenage daughter, Zazie, disappears.
Police think it’s just a case of teenage rebellion, but they don’t know that
she was following the man she thought was the rapist.
Armed with this knowledge,
and a promise to Zazie’s parents, Aimee goes looking for the teenager, unaware
of the true nature of the crimes and of where Zazie fits in at all. Battling
against her pregnant state, as well as the resistance from her own friends and
colleagues that she should be involved, she once more tries to push the police
into doing their job by doing some of it for them. Not content with making noises from the
background, she is accused of inciting rioting and is shot at, but still persists
to expose a paedophile and rock the establishment.
I have liked Cara Black’s
writing for many years, she creates a wonderful picture of Paris which leaps
off the page and evokes memories of very small black coffees, croissants, and
cafes where you can people watch with impunity.
Her characters have a good depth to them, they are sometimes stupidly
human, but likeable, and she is not afraid to have grey characters who are not
quite within the law, but you like them anyway.
Murder in Pigalle is another colourful adventure in the Aimee Leduc
series. It is not easy to put this down
as you walk with Aimee down the Paris streets, feeling her frustrations (and
morning sickness) and relating to her anguish in the face of seeming
indifference from the police, and others.
Delightfully written and
gripping, with a twist that you are not expecting. Enjoy.
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Reviewer: Amanda Brown
Cara Black was born in Chicago but has lived in California’s Bay
Area since she was five years old. Before turning to writing full-time, she
tried her hand at a number of jobs: she was a barista in the Basel train
station café in Switzerland, taught English in Japan, studied Buddhism in
Dharamsala in Northern India, and worked as a bar girl in Bangkok (only pouring
drinks!). After studying Chinese history at Sophia University in Tokyo—where
she met her husband, Jun, a bookseller, potter, and amateur chef—she obtained
her teaching credential at San Francisco State College, and went on to work as
a preschool director and then as an agent of the federally funded Head Start
program, which sent her into San Francisco’s Chinatown to help families
there—often sweatshop workers—secure early care and early education for their
children. Each of these jobs was amazing and educational in a different way,
and the Aimée Leduc books are covered in fingerprints of Cara’s various
experiences. She is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling
author of 14 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set
in Paris. With more than 400,000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has
been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and
Hebrew.
Her
love of all things French was kindled by the French-speaking nuns at her
Catholic high school, where Cara first encountered French literature and went
crazy for the work of Prix Goncourt winner Romain Gary. Her junior year in high
school, she wrote him a fan letter—which he answered, and which inspired her to
make her first trip to Paris, where her idol took her out for coffee and a
cigar. Since then, she has been to Paris many, many times. On each visit she
entrenches herself in a different part of the city, learning its secret
history. She has posed as a journalist to sneak into closed areas, trained at a
firing range with real Paris flics, gotten locked in a bathroom at the Victor
Hugo museum, and—just like Aimée—gone down into the sewers with the rats (she
can never pass up an opportunity to see something new, even when the timing
isn’t ideal—she was headed to a fancy dinner right afterwards and had a spot of
bother with her shoes). For the scoop on real Paris crime, she takes the
flics out for drinks and dinner to hear their stories—but it usually turns
into a long evening, which is why she sticks with espresso.
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