Nazi Hunting in High Places

 This debut novel by author Cara Black centers around her heroine Aimee Leduc, a French female private eye who gets mixed up with violent neo-Nazi skinheads, Jewish survivors of the holocaust, and a secret Nazi organization which is staging a comeback and whose tentacles reach into the highest offices in Europe. The author’s scope is ambitious, her history fascinating, her writing is evocative, and I give her extra kudos for creating a female PI when the genre is so male-centric.

But her novel’s biggest weakness, I would have to say, is Leduc herself. A rather neurotic and damaged young woman who is a computer genius and who, together with her partner Rene, is making a name for herself in corporate security and code breaking, Leduc throws herself without thought or care into volatile and dangerous situations with little planning or backup. Her behavior is erratic and almost puerile. As a result, one gets the distinct impression that she gets what’s coming to her a lot of the time and the author tends to lose connection between her heroine and her readers.

The story is convoluted. An old Jewish scholar and Nazi hunter bursts into her office and demands in the name of her murdered police father who was his friend that she take on a case that is out of her realm. Namely, to decipher a code and deliver the results to an old lady in Paris’ Jewish district known as the Marais. A reluctant Leduc breaks the code, discovers what appears to be half of an old Paris street scene during the Nazi occupation, and seeks out the old lady only to find her dead, a strange swastika carved into her forehead. A chance meeting with the old lady’s grieving Hasidic son launches her headlong into the investigation, despite warnings from all and sundry—including the police—to leave it alone.

In her investigation, Leduc uncovers an ugly side to the occupation, where Jews in the Marais informed on other Jews, some to survive and others for perverse reasons of their own. A side of things not generally touched upon, the novel takes an interesting turn. Leduc suspects the growing neo-Nazi movement for the old lady’s murder and infiltrates one such organization, determined to catch them with evidence of the crime. Inexplicably, Leduc ends up sleeping with one of the organization’s members, which is where the novel starts to go a little off the rails. More characters get introduced, while a parallel plot of high-level government officials introducing fascist legislation into European-wide trade accords eventually crosses with Leduc’s investigation, with explosive but less than credible conclusion. Still, an interesting read for a debut novel. I look forward to Black ironing out some of the awkwardness in her stories and bringing us some exciting sequels.