Cara Black’s Paris Mysteries

Veteran mystery writer Cara Black is the author of the popular Aimée Leduc series, set in contemporary Paris. Black knows her setting and relishes taking the reader into the insider’s Paris, as noted by a reviewer for the New York Times who wrote, “If the cobblestones of the old Marais district of Paris could only talk, they might tell a tale as haunting as the one Cara Black spins.” Of Cara’s spirited protagonist, a Publishers Weekly contributor observed, “Aimée makes an engaging protagonist, vulnerable beneath her vintage chic clothing and sharp-witted exterior.”

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Judith Rock’s Charles du Luc Novels: Seventeenth-Century Paris Comes Alive

American novelist Judith Rock has been a busy person. Before commencing her Charles du Luc series set in seventeenth-century France, she was variously a dancer, choreographer, actress, playwright, professor, police officer, lecturer, and researcher. “Each of those passions and adventures has deepened and expanded my writing.” she has noted.

The first Charles du Lac installment, The Rhetoric of Death, appeared in 2010. With rehearsals for a ballet in full swing, a killer is on the loose at the Jesuit college on the rue St. Jacques, and it is up to Charles to stop the killings. “Rock’s superb historical debut opens with 28-year-old Charles du Luc arriving in 1686 Paris to serve as a teacher in a Jesuit school…With an experienced writer’s ease, Rock incorporates details of the political issues of the day into a suspenseful story line,” declared Publishers Weekly in a starred review. Booklist offered a further starred review of this debut, noting that “Rock’s novel boasts a style all its own and is sure to satisfy those eager for a great new historical mystery.”

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Paris Then and Now

George Vance is one of my oldest friends, but he is not appearing on Scene of the Crime because of nepotism. He is also a damn fine poet and world traveler. Those of you who follow my occasional forays into memoir might already know George as the guy who coined the phrase “Moose Lodge stage of development” in a post on Vienna then and now, and as the one whose mother, in “The Word,” busted a less than honest Ohio newspaper which had published one of my freelance pieces without payment.

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Hemingway on the Case: The Mystery Novels of Michael Atkinson

Film critic and novelist Michael Atkinson is the author of the Hemingway Mysteries series. The first in the series, Hemingway Deadlights, finds “Hemingway on the verge of serious decline: the booze taking its toll, the writing stalled, the paranoia that would eventually lead to his suicide beginning to assert itself,” as a Booklist critic noted. The novel takes Hemingway from Key West to Cuba to solve the harpooning death of a fisherman friend in a novel that “deftly mixes fact and fiction with graphic sex and violence in a mystery sure to please Hemingway aficionados,” according to  Publishers Weekly.

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Murder by Arrondissement: Cara Black’s Aimée Leduc Novels of Paris

Today Scene of the Crime welcomes veteran mystery writer Cara Black, author of the popular Aimée Leduc series, set in contemporary Paris. Black knows her setting and relishes taking the reader into the insider’s Paris, as noted by a reviewer for the New York Times who wrote, “If the cobblestones of the old Marais district of Paris could only talk, they might tell a tale as haunting as the one Cara Black spins.” Of Cara’s spirited protagonist, a Publishers Weekly contributor observed, “Aimée makes an engaging protagonist, vulnerable beneath her vintage chic clothing and sharp-witted exterior.”

Black began her series in 1998 with Murder in the Marais, and since that time has been working her ways steadily through the districts of Paris, setting each new novel in a different part of the city. However, the idea for the series had been percolating since 1984 when she was inspired by the Marais district before it was gentrified. A decade later the idea for the first novel came to her as she was walking around the city at night. Along with the story came the image of her tattooed, spike-haired female detective. Cara’s tenth Aimée Leduc novel, Murder in the Palais Royal, is out next month.

Cara, thanks so much for taking the time to sit down with Scene of the Crime and talk about Paris.

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