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A review by booksaremysuperpower
Murder Below Montparnasse by Cara Black
3.0
Francophiles, rejoice! There are books for people like us.
I've long been a fan of Cara Black's Aimée Leduc series, not because it is the best mystery fiction out there, mind you, but mostly because she captures a non-touristy Paris with story lines and plots that don't just follow traditional Parisians and French stereotypes as we know them. While each book is centered around a specific Parisian neighborhood, or quartier, she often highlights all the immigrants and groups of nowadays Paris, not just the native French, but Russian expats, Senegalese, Eastern European immigrants, Algerians- everyone who makes up the French diaspora in the modern age. It's refreshing and ambitious, to say the least.
Black's writing is not always the best, and this novel is no exception. She gets caught up in plenty of details and sometimes I find myself lost in who's who, even though the main character never has any issue. Also, (another reviewer pointed this out and I agree) Black does throw in quite a few French terms and phrases that are mostly unnecessary and would lose most of her audience who are not French speaking. Yes, we get it: the book is set in France. I would expect a "merci" or "alors" and a few slang terms here and there, but there is no need to constantly remind the audience her heroine is indeed French.
Some books are better than others, and while "Murder Below Montparnasse" wasn't my favorite, I still found myself falling in love with Paris in February and all its dark corners. The pace is FAST, and Black certainly does her homework and research to create such an intricate and complicated world. It's the late 90s Paris- a time period I'm particularly fond of since I lived in France from 1999-2000- and a Paris just on the cusp of the internet age. I still remember having to hunt down an internet café because most homes and French families still didn't have personal computers and most restaurants and historical sites had yet to create websites. Aimée Leduc is a computer genius but even so, she is still limited to the current time period and detective methods of that age, i.e. hoofing and footing it around town to get the answers she needs, rather than simply hunting around the web for a couple of hours. This also what I love about Sue Grafton novels- the authors make their heroines work for it, and in order to make the books remotely interesting, they have to encounter others and engage in dialogue. It makes for a usually fascinating and thrilling read, instead of just having the detective ponder through records online.
Still, I get a bit tired reading serial mysteries only because the main characters change little from book to book. A few events have transpired in Leduc's life, but by this point in the series (I don't know for sure, but we are in the tenth book or so) she's still irresponsible, still a slave to fashion, still clueless about men, is still haunted by her family past, still goes through turbulent times with her partner René, and still falls into the same trap as other fiction detectives, which is what I hate the most about mysteries in general: heroine gets nearly killed in almost every single book and never stops to think that either she is worst detective in the world, or perhaps she should look into a new line of business that is less dangerous. To her credit, Black throws in a cliffhanger at the end of the book and wraps up at least one mystery from Leduc's past (about time, in my opinion) that I hope will cause this heroine to grow and move on. Though I love these books set in my beloved France, even I need a bit more "oomph" and plausibility in order to keep reading.
I've long been a fan of Cara Black's Aimée Leduc series, not because it is the best mystery fiction out there, mind you, but mostly because she captures a non-touristy Paris with story lines and plots that don't just follow traditional Parisians and French stereotypes as we know them. While each book is centered around a specific Parisian neighborhood, or quartier, she often highlights all the immigrants and groups of nowadays Paris, not just the native French, but Russian expats, Senegalese, Eastern European immigrants, Algerians- everyone who makes up the French diaspora in the modern age. It's refreshing and ambitious, to say the least.
Black's writing is not always the best, and this novel is no exception. She gets caught up in plenty of details and sometimes I find myself lost in who's who, even though the main character never has any issue. Also, (another reviewer pointed this out and I agree) Black does throw in quite a few French terms and phrases that are mostly unnecessary and would lose most of her audience who are not French speaking. Yes, we get it: the book is set in France. I would expect a "merci" or "alors" and a few slang terms here and there, but there is no need to constantly remind the audience her heroine is indeed French.
Some books are better than others, and while "Murder Below Montparnasse" wasn't my favorite, I still found myself falling in love with Paris in February and all its dark corners. The pace is FAST, and Black certainly does her homework and research to create such an intricate and complicated world. It's the late 90s Paris- a time period I'm particularly fond of since I lived in France from 1999-2000- and a Paris just on the cusp of the internet age. I still remember having to hunt down an internet café because most homes and French families still didn't have personal computers and most restaurants and historical sites had yet to create websites. Aimée Leduc is a computer genius but even so, she is still limited to the current time period and detective methods of that age, i.e. hoofing and footing it around town to get the answers she needs, rather than simply hunting around the web for a couple of hours. This also what I love about Sue Grafton novels- the authors make their heroines work for it, and in order to make the books remotely interesting, they have to encounter others and engage in dialogue. It makes for a usually fascinating and thrilling read, instead of just having the detective ponder through records online.
Still, I get a bit tired reading serial mysteries only because the main characters change little from book to book. A few events have transpired in Leduc's life, but by this point in the series (I don't know for sure, but we are in the tenth book or so) she's still irresponsible, still a slave to fashion, still clueless about men, is still haunted by her family past, still goes through turbulent times with her partner René, and still falls into the same trap as other fiction detectives, which is what I hate the most about mysteries in general: heroine gets nearly killed in almost every single book and never stops to think that either she is worst detective in the world, or perhaps she should look into a new line of business that is less dangerous. To her credit, Black throws in a cliffhanger at the end of the book and wraps up at least one mystery from Leduc's past (about time, in my opinion) that I hope will cause this heroine to grow and move on. Though I love these books set in my beloved France, even I need a bit more "oomph" and plausibility in order to keep reading.