Intrepid Parisian detective Aimee Leduc is back with another murder to solve, and it takes place in Belleville, a heavily Arab neighborhood rife with tension, mystery, violence and pathos. Leduc has been asked by the sister of her best friend to help her. The sister is married to a government minister and Aimee had actually attended their wedding several years earlier. Now, the sister suspects her husband of straying and wants Aimee to intervene. But when Aimee, a software specialist, reluctantly agrees to meet Anais in Belleville, she gets more than she bargains for when she spots Anais confronting her husband’s mistress in the street. The mistress flees into a Mercedes that explodes seconds later.
Aimee is determined to solve the mystery of who killed the woman, who has more than one name and more than one identity, it appears. This intersects a chain of events that becomes more dangerous and—pardon the pun–explosive, by the page, and the book evolves into a highly political thriller. A new set of brutal anti-immigration laws that stink of ethnic cleansing has just been passed in France, and the large Muslim population in Paris is among the first targeted. Protesters—violent and non-violent alike—rise against the new fascism they fear is coming and Aimee gets caught in the middle.
Charged with enforcing the deportations is Bernard Berge, a high-level ministry director who happens to have been born in Algeria. Agonized over his new role as enforcer against the people he grew up with—and continually reminded of his betrayal by his militant mother—a sleep-deprived Berge is desperately looking for a way out of his moral dilemma without quitting his job. And while he doesn’t reappear in any significant way until near the end of the book, Bernard Berges is a compelling figure who epitomizes the horror of fanaticism, whether on the part of government or its victims.
The book has many exciting elements, and its evocative descriptions of Paris—warts and all—is as good as a visit to that European city, but its reputation as the City of Love is definitely shredded by the time you turn the last page. I have to confess to mixed feelings about Black’s series, primarily because I find that Leduc is just not a believable character. She is supposed to be brilliant, and yet her judgment of things is often downright stupid. She is fearless, yes, but inexplicably plunges into danger without backup, often without a plan, and frequently putting her life and the lives of others at risk without apparent concern. She is clearly portrayed as a neurotic sort—unable to commit to relationships, plagued by abandonment by her American mother as a child, and still anguished over the loss of her beloved police detective father to a terrorist bomb—but her friendships and love interests are off-putting rather than intriguing. The plots—because there are two—sort of intersect, but the political one far overshadows the personal one, which is too convoluted to make much sense in the end.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.