After enjoying the first three books in Cara Black’s series of detective novels featuring Aimee Leduc, I found Murder in the Bastille to be disappointing. Granted, Aimee and her partner, Rene, were their usual engaging selves, the portrait of a bureaucratic and sometimes dysfunctional Paris police force rang true, and the plot was devilishly complex. But the historical weightiness of the first three books was missing.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
The Holocaust was the backdrop for Black’s first book in the series, Murder in the Marais. The second, Murder in Belleville, centered on a 1990s French refugee crisis not that much different from today’s. And the violent, home-grown European terrorism of the 1970s was the centerpiece of Murder in the Sentier, the third novel in the series. Though there were echoes of history that sounded in the background in Murder in the Bastille as well, the book was a pedestrian murder mystery by comparison with the earlier entries.
Is it possible that Black ran out of French historical crises after her first three novels? I hope not: I’m on to #5 and looking forward to more. All told, there are fourteen Aimee Leduc stories to date. Black, a best-selling, San Francisco-based mystery writer, has been writing an average of nearly one per year since 1998.
Murder in the Bastille (Aimee Leduc #4) by Cara Black ★★★☆☆
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