E-book
Murder in the Sentier
Record details
- ISBN: 9781569477298 (electronic bk.)
- ISBN: 1569477299 (electronic bk.)
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Physical Description:
electronic resource
remote
1 online resource (268 p.) : map. - Publisher: New York : Soho Press, c2002.
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| Genre: | Mystery fiction. Electronic books. Fiction. |
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Other Formats and Editions
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #2 March 2002
Paris investigator Aimee Leduc continues to work her way through the blue-collar quarters of the city. This time she's in the Sentier, where Resistance leaders printed clandestine newspapers during World War II and where, in the '60s, student revolutionaries plotted the overthrow of capitalism. When former Communist radical Jutta Hald, fresh from prison, turns up on Aimee's door, claiming that the investigator's mother, who vanished when Aimee was a child, was also part of the Red cell, Aimee is thrown into turmoil. She is desperate to know whether her mother is dead or alive, but the trail may lead to places she's afraid to go. Then Jutta is murdered, and Aimee finds herself trying to solve a decades-old crime that may involve her mother. Black does a nice job of mixing the present--hip Aimee's specialty is computer fraud--with the Parisian past. The streets echo history, but the crimes strike a contemporary chord. For Francophile mystery fans ready to move beyond Maigret. ((Reviewed March 15, 2002)) Copyright 2002 Booklist Reviews - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2002 February #1
Eight-year-old Aimee Leduc couldn't understand why she came home from school one day to find her mother gone. Now grownup Aimee (Murder in Belleville, 2000, etc.) must face the grim truth about her mother's disappearance when Jutta Hald turns up at her Rue D'Anjou doorstep claiming to be Sydney Leduc's cellmate at Fresnes Prison and offering to sell papers that could help reconnect Aimee with Sydney. Before Aimee can borrow enough money from Michel Mamou, a fashion designer friend of her partner Rene, she finds Jutta sitting outside the Tour de Jean-Sans-Peur at the foot of the Sentier, Paris's garment district, with half her head blown away. Scared but determined, Aimee infuriates Rene by taking time away from paying clients like Michel to search for the remaining members of Action-Reaction, the French counterpart to the radical Haader-Rofmein gang, who 20 years ago kidnapped a German industrialist named Laborde only to be hunted by the police when they crossed into France. She finds novelist Raymond Figeac, who'd harbored the fugitives to please his wife, an American actress who recently killed herself. Figeac's son Christian is a head case who's too strung out on drugs and too bummed out by the defection of his Senegalese girlfriend, Idrissa Diaffa, to be much help. So Aimee must turn to those who knew her mother best but hated her most-the police-to stop a killer who might strike again.Although overpopulated and a bit overplotted, Black's third offers an authentic puzzle that unravels surprisingly yet logically in a setting of unrivaled charm. Copyright Kirkus 2002 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2002 April #1
When a mysterious visitor promises contact with her long-lost mother, Aimée Leduc finds herself hot on the trail of the Seventies radicals with whom her mother was evidently associated. The result is not just good suspense but an affecting and realistic psychological study of a daughter's coming to terms with an absent parent. This is another high-class mystery from Black, whose previous works in the series (Murder in Belleville, Murder in the Marais) have the same indelible sense of place and sophisticated political context. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2002 March #2
After completing Anthony Award-nominee Black's third Aimee Leduc mystery, those who haven't read the first two in the series Murder in Belleville and Murder in the Marais won't rest easy until they've devoured the earlier volumes as well. One of the best new writers in the field today, Black sets her novels in a Paris so real one can hear and smell the street. Her characters are just as real, in particular her heroine, the daughter of an American, Sydney Leduc, who disappeared when Aimee was eight years old, and a Parisian cop, Jean-Claude Leduc, who was murdered and from whom she inherited a detective agency that specializes in computer security. Aimee has always wanted to know the truth about her missing mother, so when she gets a phone call from a woman with a German accent claiming to have known her mother in prison she agrees to meet the mysterious caller in the Sentier (the garment district). Back in the '60s, Sydney was involved with a gang of young terrorists. Some of them kidnapped a wealthy man and looted his home of bonds and art works. A former gang member knows the location of the treasure, and another is stalking the survivors of the gang, killing them off. What did her mother have to do with these people? How guilty was she of their crimes? And is she still alive? This is the stuff of a thoroughly engrossing story that's never less than compelling. The subtly sinister jacket photo of a Parisian street scene perfectly captures the spirit of the text. (Apr.) Forecast: Blurbs from such big names as Laurie King, Robert Barnard and Marcia Muller, plus a 10-city author tour with Peter Lovesey, will help raise the profile of this young writer, about whom there was a lot of buzz at last summer's Bouchercon. Those Francophiles that sent Adam Gopnik's To Paris and the Moon into extra printings could also help. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
