Cara Black

Paris, July 1999: Private investigator Aimée Leduc is walking through Saint-Germain when she is accosted by Suzanne Lesage, a Brigade Criminelle agent on an elite counterterrorism squad. Suzanne has just returned from the former Yugoslavia, where she was hunting down dangerous war criminals for the Hague. Back in Paris, Suzanne is convinced she's being stalked by a ghost, a Serbian warlord her team took down. She's suffering from PTSD and her boss...

Aimée Leduc is about to go onstage to give 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 up Chloé, never showed. Abandoning her hard-won speaking gig, Aimée rushes to get Chloé, annoyed that, yet again, her mother has let her down. But as Aimée and Chloé are leaving...

Her partner, Jacques, has set up a meeting in Montmartre with an informer. When Laure goes along as backup, Jacques is lured to a rooftop, where he is shot to death. Laure's gun has been fired, gunpowder residue is on her hands, and she is charged with her partner's murder. The police close ranks against the alleged cop killer. Aimee is determined to clear Laure's name. In doing so, she encounters separatist terrorists, Montmartre prostitutes, a surrealist...

"The world knows Aimee Leduc, heroine of 15 mysteries in this New York Times bestselling series, as a tres chic, no-nonsense private investigator the toughest and most relentless in Paris. Now author Cara Black dips back in time to reveal how Aimee first became a detective. November 1989: Aimee Leduc is in her first year of college at Paris's preeminent medical school. She lives in a 17th-century apartment that overlooks the Seine with her father,...

PI Aimee Leduc must decrypt a digitized photo from the 1940s. But when Aimee visits the historic Jewish quarter of Paris to deliver the picture, she finds its intended recipient murdered-and with a swastika carved in her aged forehead. "Literate prose, intricate plotting, and multifaceted and unusual characters mark this excellent first mystery. Strongly recommended."-Library Journal

When a woman wearing an identical jacket to Aimée Leduc's leaves her cell phone on a restaurant table, Aimée follows her to return it, only to be attacked and left blind, discovering that the other woman had been murdered.

When Aimee Leduc's godfather, Morbier, a police "commissaire," asks her to check on his girlfriend at her home there, Aimee finds Xavierre, a "haut bourgeois" matron of Basque origin, strangled in her garden while Aimee waits inside. Circumstantial evidence makes Morbier the prime suspect, and to vindicate him, Aimee must identify the real killer.

Soloing the detective agency when her long-term partner leaves for a new job, Aimee is hired by a mysterious elderly Russian man to protect a valuable painting that is stolen before Aimee can start her work, a situation that is complicated by the client's murder and dangerous adversaries who also seek the painting.

Cara Black's novel follows a chic heroine into the recesses of French society. When her ex-lover returns from Egypt, Aimee accepts his marriage proposal. The next day he's found dead, and she begins tracking clues pointing toward an international conspiracy.

Cara Black has earned a devoted international following for her gripping mysteries set in France and starring the indomitable Aimee Leduc. Here, Aimee faces her greatest challenge when she assumes guardianship of an abandoned infant all the while being hunted by a killer in the sewers beneath the Seine.