Cara Black

Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc has been framed for the murder of her daughter’s father—now she’s on the lam, and must find the real killer to clear her name in this thrilling 21st installment of Cara Black’s New York Times bestselling mystery series. Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc doesn’t know that her life is about to be upended. Her ex, Melac, has been hounding her to move their daughter, Chloé, to Brittany. Aimée is fed up with his threats to take her to court and has stopped answering his calls. Which is why she doesn’t know he’s waiting for her by the Bassin de la Villette as she leaves a client’s office late one night. When she finds him there, bleeding in the canal, he has just been stabbed by an assailant, who knocks Aimée unconscious and plants the bloody knife in her hands. Now Aimée is in police custody, debilitated by a concussion, with overwhelming evidence pointing to her as Melac’s killer. She must figure out who murdered Melac—not an easy job, given the target on his back as a former homicide investigator. Cut off from her typical network and forced to operate under multiple layers of cover, Aimée must go deep into the underbelly of Paris’s 19th arrondissement, where she rubs shoulders with biker gangs, paranoid journalists, grieving parents, and frustratingly tight-lipped ex-cops on her hunt for justice.

Cara Black's riveting 20th installment in her New York Times bestselling Parisian detective series entangles private investigator Aimée Leduc in a dangerous web of international spycraft, postcolonial Franco-African politics, and terrorist threats in Paris's 15th arrondissement. November, 2001: in the wake of 9/11, Paris is living in a state of heightened fear, with constant bomb alerts and ethnic tension high. For Aimée Leduc, November is bittersweet: the anniversary of her father's death and her daughter's third birthday fall on the same day. A gathering for family and friends is disrupted when a bomb goes off at the police laboratory—and Boris Viard, the partner of Aimée's friend Michou, is found unconscious at the scene of the crime, his fingerprints on the bomb fragments. Aimée doesn't believe Boris set the bomb. In an effort to prove him not guilty, she battles the police and his own lab colleagues, collecting conflicting eyewitness reports. When a member of the French secret service drafts Aimée to help investigate possible links to an Iranian Revolutionary guard and fugitive radicals who bombed Interpol in the 1980s, Aimée uncovers ties to a cold case of her father's. As Aimée scours the streets of Teheran-sur-Seine trying to learn the truth, she has to ask herself if she should succumb to pressure from Chloe's biological father and move them out to his farm in Brittany. But could Aimée Leduc ever leave Paris?

Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc is about to go onstage to deliver the keynote address at a tech conference that is sure to secure Leduc Detective some much-needed business contracts when she gets an emergency phone call from her daughter’s playgroup: Aimée’s own mother, who was supposed to pick Chloe up, never showed. Abandoning her hard-won speaking gig, Aimée rushes to get Chloe, annoyed that her mother has let her down yet again. But as Aimée and Chloe are leaving the playground, Aimée witnesses the body of a homeless woman being wheeled away from the neighboring convent, where nuns run a soup kitchen. The last person anyone saw the dead woman talking to was Aimée’s mother, who has vanished. Trying to figure out what happened to Sydney Leduc, Aimée tracks down the dead woman’s possessions, which include a huge amount of cash. What did Sydney stumble into? Is she in trouble?

Parisian P.I. Aimée Leduc finds herself involved with a secretive North African radical group the French government would rather she didn’t investigate Parisian P.I. Aimée Leduc finds herself involved with a secretive North African radical group the French government would rather she didn’t investigate When Anaїs de Froissart calls private investigator Aimée begging for help, Aimée assumes her best friend's sister wants to hire her to do surveillance on her philandering husband again. Aimée's too busy right now to indulge her. But Anaїs, a politician's wife with an unhappy marriage and a young daughter, insists Aimée must come, that she is in trouble and scared. Aimée tracks Anaїs down just in time to see a car bomb explode, injuring Anaїs and killing the woman she was with. Aimée, who saw her father die in a car bomb five years earlier, is shaken by the attack, but manages to escort Anaїs to safety. But Anaїs can't explain what Aimée just witnessed. The dead woman, Anaїs says, is Sylvie Coudray, her cheating husband's long-time mistress, but she has no idea who wanted her dead, and Anaїs officially hires Aimée to investigate. As she digs into Sylvie Coudray's murky past, Aimée finds that the dead woman may not be who Anaїs thought she was. Her Belleville neighborhood, full of North African immigrants, may be hiding clues to who Sylvie really was. As a prominent Algerian rights activist stages a hunger protest against new immigration laws, Aimée begins to wonder whether Sylvie's death was an act of terrorism, and who else may be at risk. To make matters worse, Yves, Aimée's ex-boyfriend, a journalist who seems to appear in and disappear from Aimée's life without any regard for her feelings, is back in town. Just the kind of distraction she doesn't need right now.

Meet Aimée Leduc, the smart, stylish Parisian private investigator, in her bestselling first investigationAimée Leduc has always sworn she would stick to tech investigation—no criminal cases for her. Especially since her father, the late police detective, was killed in the line of duty. But when an elderly Jewish man approaches Aimée with a top-secret decoding job on behalf of a woman in his synagogue, Aimée unwittingly takes on more than she is expecting. She drops off her findings at her client’s house in the Marais, Paris’s historic Jewish quarter, and finds the woman strangled, a swastika carved on her forehead. With the help of her partner, René, Aimée sets out to solve this horrendous murder, but finds herself in an increasingly dangerous web of ancient secrets and buried war crimes.

When a mysterious visitor promises contact with her long-lost mother, Aimée Leduc finds herself hot on the trail of the Seventies radicals with whom her mother was evidently associated. The result is not just good suspense but an affecting and realistic psychological study of a daughter's coming to terms with an absent parent. This is another high-class mystery from Black, whose previous works in the series (Murder in Belleville, Murder in the Marais) have the same indelible sense of place and sophisticated political context.

October 1942: it’s been two years since Kate Rees was sent to Paris on a British Secret Service mission to assassinate Hitler. Since then, she has left spycraft behind to take a training job as a sharpshooting instructor in the Scottish Highlands. But her quiet life is violently disrupted when Colonel Stepney, her former handler, drags her back into the fray for a risky three-pronged mission in Paris. Each task is more dangerous than the Deliver a package of forbidden biological material. Assassinate a high-ranking German operative whose knowledge of invasion plans could turn the tide of the war against the Allies. Rescue a British agent who once saved Kate’s life—and get out. Kate will encounter sheiks and spies, poets and partisans, as she races to keep up with the constantly shifting nature of her assignment, showing every ounce of her Oregonian grit in the process. New York Times bestselling author Cara Black has crafted another heart-stopping thrill ride that reveals a portrait of Paris at the height of Nazi occupation.

In June of 1940, when Paris fell to the Nazis, Hitler spent a total of three hours in the City of Light—abruptly leaving, never to return. To this day, no one knows why. Kate Rees, a young American markswoman, has been recruited by British intelligence to drop into Paris with a dangerous assassinate the Führer. Wrecked by grief after a Luftwaffe bombing killed her husband and infant daughter, she is armed with a rifle, a vendetta, and a fierce resolve. But other than rushed and rudimentary instruction, she has no formal spy training. Thrust into the red-hot center of the war, a country girl from rural Oregon finds herself holding the fate of the world in her hands. When Kate misses her mark and the plan unravels, Kate is on the run for her life—all the time wrestling with the suspicion that the whole operation was a set-up. New York Times bestselling author Cara Black is at her best as she brings Occupation-era France to vivid life in this masterful, pulse-pounding story about one young woman with the temerity—and drive—to take on Hitler himself. *Features an illustrated map of 1940s Paris as full color endpapers.