Growing up in the very rough suburbs to Paris, Célie was always determined to make something of herself, unlike her drug-dealing low-life of an older brother. Apprenticing herself to a baker, the brightest part of her day was always when her brother’s friend Joss came to walk her home. Pretty much at the moment Célie had worked up the courage to confess her massive crush on him, Joss broke her heart into a million pieces by going off to join the French foreign legion. Five […]
A French mystery that dabbles in immigration issues and murder
Intrepid Parisian detective Aimee Leduc is back with another murder to solve, and it takes place in Belleville, a heavily Arab neighborhood rife with tension, mystery, violence and pathos. Leduc has been asked by the sister of her best friend to help her. The sister is married to a government minister and Aimee had actually attended their wedding several years earlier. Now, the sister suspects her husband of straying and wants Aimee to intervene. But when Aimee, a software specialist, reluctantly agrees to meet Anais […]
Nazi Hunting in High Places
This debut novel by author Cara Black centers around her heroine Aimee Leduc, a French female private eye who gets mixed up with violent neo-Nazi skinheads, Jewish survivors of the holocaust, and a secret Nazi organization which is staging a comeback and whose tentacles reach into the highest offices in Europe. The author’s scope is ambitious, her history fascinating, her writing is evocative, and I give her extra kudos for creating a female PI when the genre is so male-centric. But her novel’s biggest weakness, […]
A picture is worth a thousand words
It seems ironic to choose this cliched aphorism as a title to compliment a book, but Anna Gavalda wrote this novel as if she were painting. Hunting and Gathering has, ostensibly, no plot; it’s a character piece, a window into the lives of four main characters living together in Paris over the course of a few months, and a loving observation of their relationships and effects on each other. One of the main characters, Camille, is, herself, a painter. She’s very talented, and her portraits are […]
Concerning Beauty, Money & Bohemian Paris
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