On a pleasant October evening in Paris, Aimée Leduc is endeavouring to calm her angry client Vincent Csarda, who is not a happy man having discovered that his advertising agency Populax is running a campaign for a client who is a front for a money laundering operation for gun runners. Vincent is taking it out on Leduc Dectective who are his computer security consultants. Aimée’s evening is going from bad to worse, not only can she not convince Vincent to hand over his hard disk to the authorities before they subpoena him, but the woman at the next table is wearing the same black silk Chinese jacket as Aimée. The one that the boutique assured Aimée was a one-off! After Vincent has flounced off, Aimée sees that the woman has left her mobile phone, before she can hand it to in to the restaurant, it rings. She answers it automatically ‘Meet me in Passage de La Boule Blanche’ says a voice and disconnects. The simplest thing is to take the phone to the woman’s friend, as it is near by.
The attack on Aimée is both sudden and devastating, when she next awakes she is in hospital. In this book Aimée is faced not only with a mystery to solve but with a personal challenge, as the attack has left her with a disability which may or may not be permanent. The police put the attack down to a serial killer, Vadus, who was released from custody on a legal technicality just the day before Aimée’s attack, but she is not convinced. With the help of her business partner René Friant, she sets out to find the woman for whom she thinks she was mistaken, but then a further attack is made on her and she is not sure if she was the intended victim or the unknown woman.
Told from multiple points of view in the is book René, the computer expert takes an active role in the detection which poses problems for a normally desk bound detective, and particularly as René is short being just 4 ft, we learn some of the problem encounter by being height challenged. We also meet again Sergeant Loic Bellan, who was Aimée’s father’s protegy and who is facing his own demons when his wife gives birth to his son who has Down’s syndrome.
As in previous books, the feeling of the Paris I love is strong, this, I admit
makes me pre-disposed to love it, but an excellent mystery exploring personal
challenges that make one think of the things that maybe many of us take for
granted.
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Lizzie Hayes
Other Books in the series are Murder in the Marais, Murder in Belleville and
Murder in the Sentier