Murder in Bel-Air

As she's about to give the keynote address at a tech conference, Aimée Leduc gets a call that her mother, Sydney, has failed to pick up Aimée's daughter at playgroup. And the last person to speak with Sydney has been found dead. Aimée's 19th case involves postcolonial Franco-African politics and secrets in Paris's tech-trending 12th arrondissement.

April 15, 2019
Set in 1999, bestseller’s Black’s gripping 19th Aimée Leduc investigation (after 2018’s Murder on the Left Bank) opens with Parisian PI Aimée abruptly leaving a tech conference right before her keynote presentation on hearing that her American mother, Sydney, has failed to pick up Aimée’s nearly one-year-old daughter, Chloé, from the child’s playgroup. When Aimée arrives, she sees the body of a homeless woman being taken away from a nearby convent that operated a soup kitchen. Sydney was the last person seen talking to the woman. Aimee’s subsequent investigation turns up connections to the Ivory Coast and international spies. As usual, Black takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of Paris, both the well- and less-well-known sections, and Aimée never leaves home without oozing style. Though the momentum falters now and then in the book’s second half, a taut, well-choreographed final confrontation more than compensates. Longtime fans and newcomers alike will have fun. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown.

Starred review from May 1, 2019
Aim�e Leduc's nineteenth adventure is one of her best, both because the plot is notably rich, incorporating the complex relationship between France and its former colony, C�te d'Ivoire, and because the ongoing domestic drama in the extended Leduc household has become a thoroughly involving serial novel of its own. In a manner similar to how Donna Leon builds Guido Brunetti's family life into the fabric of her series, Black tells a parallel story in every book about single-mother Aim�e's relationships in the present and her lingering parental issues, whose roots are in the past and involve both her dead father (killed under suspicion of being a corrupt cop) and American mother, Sydney (vanished for years but now back in Paris, swearing to no longer be a CIA agent). Precariously back in the family's good graces, helping out with child care while Aim�e recovers from a concussion, Sydney reverts to form here, abandoning young Chloe at her playgroup and disappearing yet again. As Aim�e follows the breadcrumb trail Sydney leaves behind, she finds herself in the middle of the political turmoil roiling in the twelfth arrondissement, home to many West African immigrants with stakes in a rumored coup d'�tat in C�te d'Ivoire (the book is set in 1999, when a real-life coup did take place there). Whether read as a crime story with roots in international politics or as the latest chapter in a fascinating family drama, this is a deeply satisfying and entertaining novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)