Book Review: Murder in the Marais by Cara Black (Aimee Leduc #1)

Stars: 3 out of 5
Pros: Some good characters brought real emotion

Cons: Too much plot for a believable climax; main characters a bit shallow

The Bottom Line:

This debut tries hard

But with too much mystery

It is average

This Debut Tries Too Hard

I've seen Cara Black and heard about her series of mysteries for years.  But I only just sat down and read Murder in the Marais, the debut in her Aimee Leduc series set in Paris.  I could see the potential for a good book in there, but it didn't come together for me.

 First thing on a Wednesday morning in November 1993, Aimee Leduc finds a man waiting for her outside her office.  The man insists that she decipher an encrypted photo and deliver it only to a woman in the Jewish quarter of Paris.  Aimee mainly does corporate security work these days, but the man insists and pays well, so she agrees to take the case.

After a hard day of work, Aimee decodes the photo and goes to deliver it only to find the woman dead in her apartment with a swastika carved in her forehead.  When Aimee is hired to find the killer, she reluctantly agrees.  Was this the hate crime it appears to be or is something much bigger at work?

Despite the fact that the story starts rather quickly, I had a bit of a hard time getting into the book.  The third person writing is a bit cold and factual; it always takes me a few chapters to get fully engaged in a book written that way.  Further complicating things, the author uses what must be common phrases in French.  However, I didn't recognize them, so that was oft putting as well.

Fortunately, it wasn't too far into things that I got into the plot.  There are several plot threads that weave together over the course of the book, and they all drew me in.  However, the book stalled in the middle, which weakened the ending.  It turned out there was just too much going on in the book to support the short time given to the climax.  As a result, I found the action of several of the characters laughable as they tried to wrap everything up.  Not that the resolution wasn't satisfying.  It just wasn't as good as it could have been.

Complicating things were the characters.  Don't misunderstand, there were several well drawn characters throughout the novel.  But all of them were suspect characters.  They were brought to expert life.  Which made it all the more startling that Aimee and her partner, a dwarf named Rene, weren't nearly as real to me.  In fact, both of them felt a bit like characters from an action movie who could do anything the plot called for them to do.

I will definitely give the book praise for its sense of place.  Every time I picked up the novel, I felt like I was in Paris.

Murder in the Marais was one of those books that I didn't want to put down while reading.  But as soon as I did, I started thinking about the flaws in what I had just read.  Most of the flaws seem like rookie mistakes to me, so hopefully they diminish as the series progresses.