Cara Black

Two weeks after Princess Diana's death in Paris in 1997, an illegal Haitian immigrant named Mireille walks into Aimée Leduc's office, claiming that Aimée's late father was also her father. Before Aimée can learn more, Mireille disappears, leaving only a cryptic note with an address in the Latin Quarter where the indomitable Parisian detective finds the corpse of a well-dressed black man with his ear cut off.

Thrilled that her former lover Yves Robert has returned to Paris, Aimée Leduc accepts his marriage proposal, but her happiness is short-lived after he is found dead in a doorway in the Rue de Paradis.

From Amazon.com: The second Aimée Leduc investigation set in Paris When Anaïs de Froissart calls Parisian private investigator Aimée begging for help, Aimée assumes the woman wants to hire her to do surveillance on her philandering politician husband again. Aimée is too busy right now to indulge her. But Anaïs insists Aimée must come, that she is in trouble and scared. Aimée tracks Anaïs down just in time to see a car bomb explode, injuring Anaïs and killing the woman she was with. Anaïs can’t explain what Aimée just witnessed. The dead woman, Anaïs says, is Sylvie Coudray, her cheating husband’s long-time mistress, but she has no idea who wanted her dead, and Anaïs officially hires Aimée to investigate. As she digs into Sylvie Coudray’s murky past, Aimée finds that the dead woman may not be who Anaïs thought she was. Her Belleville neighborhood, full of North African immigrants, may be hiding clues to Sylvie’s identity. As a prominent Algerian rights activist stages a hunger protest against new immigration laws, Aimée begins to wonder whether Sylvie’s death was an act of terrorism, and who else may be at risk.

"It is Paris, November 1993, and Aimee Leduc, a young private detective, is approached by a rabbi to decipher a fifty-year-old encrypted photograph and deliver it to an old woman in the Marais, the old Jewish quarter of Paris. When she gets there, she finds a corpse on whose forehead is carved a swastika. With the help of her partner, a dwarf with extraordinary computer skills, she determines to solve this horrendous crime. Her search for the killer leads her undercover inside a neo-Nazi group, to the next prime minister who is about to sign a trade agreement reminiscent of the old Vichy laws, and to a German war veteran. As the murders pile up Aimee finds herself in the middle of a dangerous game of current politics and old war crimes."--BOOK JACKET.

When Zazie, the 14-year-old daughter of the proprietor of Aimée Leduc's favorite cafe, disappears, the girl's desperate parents approach the private investigator for help and, during the course of her investigation, Aimée discovers a terrifying secret neighborhood history that will leave lives in the whole quartier upended.

"The world knows Aimee Leduc, heroine of 15 mysteries in this New York Times bestselling series, as a tres chic, no-nonsense private investigator the toughest and most relentless in Paris. Now author Cara Black dips back in time to reveal how Aimee first became a detective. November 1989: Aimee Leduc is in her first year of college at Paris's preeminent medical school. She lives in a 17th-century apartment that overlooks the Seine with her father, who runs the family detective agency. But the week the Berlin Wall crumbles, so does Aimee's life as she knows it. First, someone has sabotaged her lab work, putting her at risk of failing out of the program. Then, she finds out her aristo boyfriend is planning to get engaged to another woman. And finally, Aimee's father takes off to Berlin on a mysterious errand. He asks Aimee to help out at the detective agency while he's gone as if she doesn't already have enough to do. But the case Aimee finds herself investigating a murder linked to a transport truck of Nazi gold that disappeared in the French countryside during the height of World War II has gotten under her skin. Her heart may not lie in medicine after all maybe it's time to think harder about the family business"--

Struggling to run her business and care for her newborn, sleep-deprived Aimée Leduc reluctantly takes the case of a French Gypsy boy whose dying mother has been kidnapped by adversaries who would hide a dangerous secret about Aimée's murdered father. "Paris, April 1999: Aimee Leduc has her work cut out for her--running her detective agency and fighting off sleep-deprivation as she tries to be a good single mother to her new bebe. The last thing she has time for now is to take on a personal investigation for a poor manouche (French Gypsy) boy. But he insists his dying mother has an important secret she needs to tell Aimee, something to do with Aimee's father's unsolved murder a decade ago. How can she say no? The dying woman's secret is even more dangerous than her son realized. When Aimee arrives at the hospital, the boy's mother has disappeared. She was far too sick to leave on her own--she must have been abducted. What does she know that is so important it is worth killing for? And will Aimee be able to find her before it is too late and the medication keeping her alive runs out? Set in the seventh arrondissment, the quartier of the Parisian elite, Murder on the Champ de Mars takes us from the highest seats of power in the Ministries and embassies through the city's private gardens and the homes of France's oldest aristocratic families. Aimee discovers more connections than she thought possible between the clandestine "Gypsy" world and the moneyed ancien regime, ultimately leading her to the truth behind her father's death. After all, for Aimee, murder is never far from home"--

Accused of shooting her partner, Aimée Leduc must also contend with the fact that someone is impersonating her, a taxman is investigating her firm, and two murders may have a connection to the youth Aimée sent to prison.