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Murder in the Marais

• Title - Murder in the Marais
  • Author - Cara Black
  • Category - fiction
  • Queue status - completed
• Cara Black

Synopsis

This is the first novel by Cara Black, published in 1999, in the Aimee Leduc crime series. The series is set in Paris in the mid '90s. Leduc is a computer security consultant, the daughter of a police detective who had been killed some years earlier in a bomb attack. Her business partner is a dwarf with incredible hacking skills.

She has a private investigator's license, and a gun-carry license. In short, she's smart, she's armed, and she's ready for action.

Or, not quite. Her character seems to oscillate between Lara Croft-like skills and Stephanie Plum-like ditziness. Most of the time the character is professional, skilled, daring, and savvy. But there are odd and unrevealing moments of silly behavior, as if the author is trying to bring her character back to reality, to appease part of her audience, perhaps. It's all rather disconcerting.

In this first novel Leduc is drawn into Paris' Nazi-collaborationist past. An elderly woman, Jewish, is murdered in the Marais, the Jewish quarter of Paris, a swastika carved into her forehead. Leduc quickly comes to the conclusion that the murder has to do with the WWII Nazi occupation of Paris, and not with the skinhead neo-nazis that are now active in Paris. The rest of the novel is a combination of chase scenes, suspense, detection, computer hacking, and human tragedy.

Sadly, it just doesn't work well. It should - it's just the sort of novel I like, set in a European city, with an overall likeable protagonist, an interesting set of characters. But there are structural flaws that detract from the novel. The biggest problem is that we are spoon-fed the WWII details a chapter or two before Leduc finds out the same information. So the reader has always to keep track of what Leduc does and doesn't know. And, of course, since we already know what really happened earlier, Leduc's finding out isn't nearly as interesting as it would otherwise be.

Also, a couple of the characters simply were not believable. The tormented Thierry was especially poorly drawn, in my opinion.

In all, I was very happy to be done with this novel. I will try a couple more in the series (I read one a couple years ago, and enjoyed it well enough). But this first novel does not offer much hope.