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Cara Black has gifted her readers with MURDER ON THE QUAI, a prequel which features a college-aged Aimée Leduc and her very first investigation. It is November of 1989 and Aimée's father, Jean-Claude, has left for Germany, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, on a mysterious errand. Since his secretary is sick, he asks Aimée to help organize the office files at his detective agency.
It's perfect timing for Aimée, a medical student who is becoming fed up with her cutthroat fellow students, one of whom has sabotaged her lab project, putting her at risk of failing. And she is definitely fed up with her aristocratic boyfriend, Florent, who has suddenly become engaged to a woman who his family finds suitable.
Before her father's sudden departure, Jean-Claude had met with a distant cousin, a woman whose father, Bruno Peltier, was murdered on a quai. The woman tantalizingly tells Aimée that she knew her mother - the mother who left when Aimée was eight years old and has never been seen again. Hoping for some quid pro quid - more information about her mother in exchange for information about Peltier's murder - Aimée begins to investigate on her own, without her father's permission or knowledge.
With lessons learned from her father, she picks up clue after clue. But she may be too good for a novice. Her investigation leads her to an old mystery: the disappearance of a Nazi truck filled with gold and the murder of a French mayor in the town where the gold disappeared. But someone doesn't want Aimée to get too close to the truth - she is almost kidnapped, run over by a car and shot at. Despite all that, Aimée finds a thrill in detective work, unlike anything she's felt before.
And it's a thrill for fans, who will find other family threads throughout the book and will discover how Aimée met her detective partner, René. Those who are new to the series, with fifteen previous books, will also enjoy this book, which can be read as the first of the lot.
§ Lourdes Venard is an independent editor who divides her time between New York and Maui.
Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, June 2016
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