Murder on the Quai

April 18, 2016
Set in 1989, bestseller Black’s 16th Aimée Leduc investigation (after 2015’s Murder on the Champs des Mars) is a prequel that tells the intriguing story of Aimée’s debut as a detective. When Aimée’s father, Jean-Claude, travels to Germany on business around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he leaves Aimée, a first-year medical student who’s struggling with academic failure and her boyfriend leaving her for another woman, temporarily in charge of the family-owned detective agency in Paris. Elise Pelletier, who claims to be Jean-Claude’s second cousin, brings Aimée her first case. Elise wants to find the woman whose name and phone number were on a matchbook in the pocket of her dead father, Bruno, who was discovered tied and bound with a bullet in his head under the Pont des Invalides. As Aimée investigates, she becomes enmeshed in the murky history of the murder of four German soldiers in Vichy, France, during WWII. Series fans will enjoy learning more about Aimée’s mysterious past. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown.

April 15, 2016
Black (Murder on the Champ de Mars, 2015, etc.) looks backward to discover the origins of Aimee Leduc, detective. In November, 1942, a line runs through the French countryside near Vichy. On one side lies Chambly-sur-Cher, in la zone libre; on the other, Givaray, under control of Marechal Petain. When a truck laden with Nazi gold gets mired in mud on the wrong side of the river, four Free French farmers kill four of the soldiers transporting the treasure to Portugal, stealing the loot for themselves. A fifth soldier apparently escapes. Sixty years later, an elderly man from the provinces is killed on his way home from a meal with friends in Paris, his body left under the Pont des Invalides. His daughter, Elise Peltier, asks detective Jean-Claude Leduc, a distant cousin, to find her father's killer. But Jean-Claude is about to leave for Berlin to meet a man who can help him get Sidonie, his fugitive American wife, out of trouble with Mossad. So his 19-year-old daughter, Aimee, jumps into the breach. Frustrated with medical school and depressed to discover that Florent, her aristo boyfriend, is about to announce his engagement to another woman, Aimee is ready for new adventures. She scoops up the stray puppy her grand-pere found by the river, christens him Miles Davis, and goes in search of the mysterious Suzy, who left her name and phone number on a matchbook in Peltier's pocket from a club called LE GOGO. Along the way, she runs into a dwarf computer genius who fixes her pager. So begins the arc of Aimee's story: the first corpse, the first clue, the first shattered love affair, the first meeting with Rene, her eventual partner, and the reader's first glimpse of Leduc Detectives. Rolling back the clock gives Black the chance to recast her heroine unencumbered by the baggage she's accumulated over the course of the series. It's not clear, though, where this prequel will take the franchise in the long run.

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May 1, 2016
Over 15 novels in her much-loved Aimee Leduc series, Black has distributed tantalizing facts about Aimee's background, but, damn it, we want more: What's the real story behind Aimee's mother's disappearance? What about her father's murder? How did she meet her partner Rene? And so much more. Apparently, Black has listened to our yowlings of frustration because finally we have the prequel we've been craving. It's 1989, and Aimee is a medical student, though dissatisfaction with her chosen field is growing. Her father is off to Berlin on an unexplained errand that has something to do with Aimee's mother. Meanwhile, Aimee, supposedly helping out with paperwork at the family detective agency, is drawn into a case involving a distant relative and Nazi gold stolen during WWII. The trouble with many prequels is that, in the interest of dispensing backstory, the author forgets to tell a new story. Black doesn't make that mistake here, with the WWII plot proving thoroughly involving, but let's face it: we're here for answers, and while all of them aren't quite forthcoming just yet, we learn plenty. A treat for series fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2016

In her new Aimee Leduc mystery (after Murder on the Champ de Mars), Black intriguingly returns to Aimee's detective beginnings in 1989 Paris, when she's a struggling medical student minding the family's detective business in her father's absence. Soon, she's investigating the execution-style murder of relative Bruno Peltier in a case linked to lost Nazi gold.

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