MURDER IN THE LATIN QUARTER

Postcolonial politics and global commerce ignite the murder of a Haitian academic in Paris’s bohemian Left Bank.

Still recovering from the death of her fiancé (Murder in the Rue de Paradis, 2008), Aimée Leduc wants nothing more than to help partner René Friant land a fat contract for Leduc Detective to handle Aérospatiale’s computer security. But she’s distracted by Mireille, an illegal immigrant from Haiti who claims to be Aimée’s half sister, born of a liaison between Jean-Claude Leduc and her mother, Edwige, more than a year before Edwige’s murder by Duvalier’s tonton macoutes. A note from Mireille leads to Professor Azacca Benoît’s office in the Latin Quarter’s Ecole Normale Supérieure, where Aimée finds his body, minus an ear, inside a circle of salt. His file has disappeared—a file sought with equal urgency by Madame Léonie Obin of the Haitian trade delegation and her radical nephew Edouard, who stand on opposite sides in Haiti’s negotiations with Hydrolis, their French water supplier. Aimée’s search for Mireille becomes all the more pressing when Darquin, the night watchman at Benoît’s Osteologique Anatomie Comparée lab, is pushed to his death into traffic, and Huby, Benoit’s research assistant, is thrown from a window, leaving Aimée frantic at the thought of losing the sister she never knew she had.

Black at her peak, with rich historical background and a vivid sense of place supporting her compelling narrative.