Aimée Leduc is spike-haired, with jeans, leather jacket and boots. She is the daughter of a flic, that is, a Parisian policeman, and his American wife who bolted when Aimée was eight years old—we don’t know why, but I suspect someone corrected her French pronunciation one time too many. Aimée has a sidekick named René who is a computer wizard, and together they run a quiet little agency in the Rue de Louvre, specializing in computer security. Aimée does a small computer-hacking job for a client in the Marais quarter of Paris, but when she finds her client shot dead with a swastika carved in her forehead, Aimée suddenly becomes a murder investigator.
The Marais is historically the Jewish quarter of Paris, between the Place de la Bastille and what is now the Centre Georges Pompidou. This quarter and the Rue de Louvre where she has her office, and the Ile St. Louis, where Aimée has inherited an apartment from her grandfather, all form the backdrop for this mystery, which has its beginnings in Nazi-occupied Paris, but is very much about the city and its people in the nineties. This book shows us Paris from the rooftops to the catacombs and the sewers.
Aimée Leduc’s creator, Cara Black, is not French but American. Cultural appropriation of this sort is common in detective fiction, where you will find a French detective created by a Belgian, a Belgian detective created by an Englishwoman, and English, Irish, and Italian detectives all created by Americans. And of course, the original fictional detective was also a Parisian created by the American Edgar Allan Poe.
Aimée Leduc is a detective very much in the hard-boiled school, but with a French twist. She is resourceful with costumes, wigs, and the quick lie. She’s tough and resilient. She survives jumping out of a moving car to escape the Neo-Nazi hate group she’s infiltrated, and she’s also knocked off her moped and nearly murdered by hit men. She’s as handy with a gun as with a computer. If you like Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski and you have a soft spot for the City of Lights, Aimée Leduc is probably just your demitasse.
Murder in the Marais was the first of the twenty mysteries Cara Black has written about this character. The first three have been optioned by a Dublin production company, but so far I’ve heard of no TV or movie feature that has resulted. All of the books deal with particular quarters that Black calls “funky . . . gritty, off-the-beaten-tourist-track Paris”—Belleville, the Sentier, the Bastille, and Clichy, as well as the Marais—and all feature Aimée Leduc.
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