Murder in the Marais

Cara Black

Aimee Leduc is a computer fraud private investigator in Paris. While she had helped her father locate missing persons, she moved strictly into computer work with her partner, Rene Friant. They are struggling to keep the business solvent.

When the older Jewish gentleman approaches her, she tries to turn him away, explaining she is no longer in the missing persons business. But Soli Hecht is insistant. Her father had told him that Soli could come to her if he needed help. Finally, for her father's sake, Aimee accepts.What the old man needs is a computer coded file cracked. She is to deliver the results to a Jewish woman in the Marais neighborhood. The coded file proves to be an old photo from 50 years earlier during WWII. When Aimee tried to deliver the photo, instead she finds a gruesome dead body. The woman had been murdered.

Now Aimee is investigating a murder for Soli Hecht instead. A friend of ther father's on the Parisian police force tells her to drop the case. But when Soli Hecht is also attacked, she can't. She has to find out what is going on. The roots of this mystery began 50 years earlier, in 1943. Paris was occupied then and Jews were being taken to Auschwitz. Some escaped. Others were able to hide away. Some were protected by Nazi soldiers.

Aimee gets swept up into the investigation. She infiltrates a neo-Nazi group that has begun harrassing the Jewish population of Paris. Their propoganda claims that the Holocaust never happened; it was all a public relations stunt and lies tole by the Jews. The past gets twisted up in the present; old hatreds are once again uncovered.

I discovered Murder in the Marais by accident. I needed an audiobook to listen to at work while doing some very routine work. I hadn't heard of Cara Black or of this series. But the mystery setting in Paris intrigued me.

Murder in the Marais is a noir or dark detective mystery. Cara Black is able to bring the politics of the early 1990's Paris to life for the reader. There's a European trade agreement being negotiated in Paris. An election for Prime Minister is pending. There are demonstrations and union stoppages throughout the city. Black has made Aimee Leduc a layered character that has more to show in future novels in this series. Her partner, Rene, is unexpected, and is able to bring a bit of comic relief to help keep the novel from getting too dark.

An interesting novel, Murder in the Marais gives a good introduction to the books that follow in Black's series. This is not the Paris tourists see. I was surprised that Cara Black is American, not a French writer. I know more of her audiobooks are available through the library. I'll have to look for them.

Notice:  Non-graphic violence