If you want to find a new, enjoyable mystery series, ask Bob Moyer. He is the expert. Here’s his review of No. 21 in what sounds like a good series set in Paris. Another one to add to my list…
Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer
HUGUETTE. By Cara Black. Soho Crime. 336 pages. $29.95, hardcover.
Private investigator Aimee Leduc has solved cases all across Paris. Author Cara Black places her protagonist in neighborhoods around the city, then weaves a mystery from details culled from the secret and not so secret history of that part of town. This now venerable series has featured 20 places throughout Paris.
Black’s latest book is in the same place but a different time — 1945, the demi monde of post-war Paris. At the opening of the story, Huguette, a 17-year-old Parisian, is raped by a German officer. She finds herself on the lam, confined to a home for unwed mothers in Lyons. After giving birth, she escapes, aided by a young Parisian police officer stationed in Lyons. She gets a job as a cook in a nearby movie studio, and soon becomes assistant to the studio’s owner. In an engaging series of events leading through the black market and money laundering, she helps him keep the studio afloat. She also ends up cooking the books for him, a trick she learned doing the books for her father’s bistro. Before long she’s managing the studio.
Meanwhile, the young police officer leaves the police force in Paris and starts the Leduc Detective Agency, the agency that Aimee will inherit generations later. He still follows the case in which Huguette’s father was murdered and his bistro sold off. He needs Huguette’s help, however, and shows up in Lyons to see her. To help him, to return to Paris, would threaten the life she has forged in Lyons, as well as threaten her life literally — whoever murdered her father wants her dead, too.
As the story progresses, Leduc continues to pursue the killers, and Huguette, while Huguette pursues expansion of the movie studio, and her rapist. All of this is accomplished with the attention to detail for the historical period that Black always brings to her mysteries. All the strands of the story are brought together at the conclusion, with a surprising, and satisfying, reveal. Only one question remains: if Leduc is Aimee’s grandfather, is Huguette her grandmother?