Aimee Leduc
4 total works
When Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc picks up the phone one hot July afternoon, the call turns her life upside-down. The voice on the other end, with its heavy German accent, belongs to a woman named Jutta Hald. Jutta claims to have shared a jail cell with Aimée’s long-lost mother, a suspected terrorist on Interpol’s most wanted list. If Aimée wants to learn the truth about her mother, she is to meet Jutta at a rendezvous point in an ancient tower in the Sentier. But when Aimée arrives, Jutta is dead, shot in the head at close range.
Aimée realizes she has stumbled into something bigger than Jutta let on, and that her own life is in danger. She has a lot of unsolved mysteries in front of her: Jutta Hald’s murder, resurfaced materials from Sydney Leduc’s terrorist activities in the 1970s, police suppression of important information. The question is, can Aimée put the pieces together before someone else ends up dead?
In the Jewish quarter of Paris an old nightmare is reborn.
Aimée Leduc, a half-American, half-French investigator in Paris, is approached by a rabbi to decipher a fifty-year-old encrypted photograph and deliver it to an old woman in the Marais, the old Jewish quarter of the city.
When she does so, she finds a corpse on whose forehead a swastika has been carved. With the help of her partner René, a dwarf with extraordinary computer skills, she sets out to solve this horrible crime and finds herself caught up in a dangerous game with links to both modern politics and crimes from the Second World War.
When Anaïs de Froissart calls Parisian private investigator Aimée begging for help, Aimée assumes the woman wants to hire her to do surveillance on her philandering politician husband again. Aimée is too busy right now to indulge her. But Anaïs insists Aimée must come, that she is in trouble and scared. Aimée tracks Anaïs down just in time to see a car bomb explode, injuring Anaïs and killing the woman she was with.
Anaïs can’t explain what Aimée just witnessed. The dead woman, Anaïs says, is Sylvie Coudray, her cheating husband’s long-time mistress, but she has no idea who wanted her dead, and Anaïs officially hires Aimée to investigate. As she digs into Sylvie Coudray’s murky past, Aimée finds that the dead woman may not be who Anaïs thought she was. Her Belleville neighborhood, full of North African immigrants, may be hiding clues to Sylvie’s identity. As a prominent Algerian rights activist stages a hunger protest against new immigration laws, Aimée begins to wonder whether Sylvie’s death was an act of terrorism, and who else may be at risk.
Aimee finds herself entangled with murders on the Rive Gauche...
A Haitian woman arrives at the office of Leduc Detective and announces that she is Aimee's sister, her father's illegitimate daughter. Aimee is thrilled. A virtual orphan since her mother's disappearance and her father's death, she has always wanted a sister. Her partner, Rene, is wary of this stranger, but Aimee embraces her and soon finds herself involved in murky Haitian politics, which leads to murder in Paris's bohemian Latin quarter.
Praise for the Aimee Leduc series:
'If you've always wanted to visit Paris, skip the air fare and read Cara Black... It's so authentic you can practically smell the fresh baguettes and coffee.' Val McDermid
"Cara Black books are good companions.... Fine characters, good suspense, but, best of all, they are transcendentally, seductively, irresistibly French. If you can't go, these will do fine. Or, better yet, go and bring them with you."-Alan Furst
"Charming.... Aimee is one of those blithe spirits who can walk you through the city's historical streets and byways with their eyes closed."-The New York Times Book Review
"One of the best heroines in crime fiction." -Lee Child