Murder on the Champ De Mars

January 26, 2015
Family matters dominate bestseller Black’s absorbing 15th Aimée Leduc investigation (after 2014’s Murder in Pigalle). The baptism party of Aimée’s six-month-old baby, Chloé, is complicated by the arrival of the baby’s biological father, Melac, and by Nicu, an anguished Gypsy boy. Melac and his new wife want to share custody of Chloé. Nicu insists that his dying mother, an old family acquaintance and informant of Aimée’s late father, who ran the detective agency she inherited, has information to share about Aimée’s father’s unsolved murder a decade earlier. Classic spy scenes with an old-fashioned feel—meetings with dramatic figures in the back of cafés, trailing suspicious characters at fashionable parties—brush up against Aimée’s angst at managing life as a working single mother, while modern behavioral sensibilities and high-level politics butt heads with Gypsy traditions. Black imbues Aimée’s personal story with an exotic charm that feels more intimate than foreign. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown.

Carine Montbertrand returns to narrate the fifteenth entry in the Aimée Leduc detective series. In this outing, Leduc receives a mysterious message from a gypsy boy, which brings back the pain and intrigue of her father's unsolved murder. Much of the action involves Leduc's adjustments to being a single parent to a newborn while continuing to run her security agency and, in her free time, investigate new evidence relating to her father's death. The Paris setting is paramount to the action, and Montbertrand's believable accent and ability to move easily between French and English add to the Gallic ambiance. Her distinct voices make it easy to follow the dialogue and imagine the characters. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine