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Have you ever sat in one of those tiny cafes in Paris, wreathed in Gauloise smoke and drinking scarily strong coffee? If you have, Cara Black's MURDER IN CLICHY will transport you back there immediately. If you haven't, you're about to witness some of the most impressive world-building in the genre. MURDER IN CLICHY is the fifth in the series starring private investigator Aimee Leduc -- and the previous four, as with this book, are focussed on an area of France's capital city (the Marais, Belleville, the Sentier and the Bastille are the earlier ones). Anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with Paris will admire the way in which Black captures the streets, apartments, parks and cafes of the city. It's always a tad dodgy catching up with a writer partway into a series, but in this case there is enough recapping for it not to be a problem. I soon gathered that Aimee is half-American, is recovering from losing her sight after being attacked in a previous adventure, and has an ambivalent relationship with doctor boyfriend Guy. Amidst all this, Aimee does a favour for Linh, a Vietnamese nun -- but the simple task of passing on an envelope to a man leads to him ending up dead in her arms, and the rucksack he gives her attracting a lot of bad attention. It all leads back to some jade looting from what used to be IndoChina. From then on, it's a bad attack of what I'd call One Damn Thing After Another. Aimee plods round lots of different people, periodically making spectacular escapes which tend to ruin her trendy clothes, and it's all grim as hell. MURDER IN CLICHY raises the question of whether you can enjoy a book where you don't care for the characters. This bunch are either flat, unlikeable or both -- and Aimee and her colleague Rene were poorly fleshed-out. I really honestly didn't care if she solved the mystery or not. In the end I read the book purely for the setting and ignored the rest.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, February 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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