title: Murder in the Sentier (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 3)
author:  Cara Black 
description: After completing Anthony Award-nominee Black's third Aimee Leduc mystery, those who haven't read the first two in the series Murder in Belleville and Murder in the Marais won't rest easy until they've devoured the earlier volumes as well. One of the best new writers in the field today, Black sets her novels in a Paris so real one can hear and smell the street. Her characters are just as real, in particular her heroine, the daughter of an American, Sydney Leduc, who disappeared when Aimee was eight years old, and a Parisian cop, Jean-Claude Leduc, who was murdered and from whom she inherited a detective agency that specializes in computer security. Aimee has always wanted to know the truth about her missing mother, so when she gets a phone call from a woman with a German accent claiming to have known her mother in prison she agrees to meet the mysterious caller in the Sentier (the garment district). Back in the '60s, Sydney was involved with a gang of young terrorists. Some of them kidnapped a wealthy man and looted his home of bonds and art works. A former gang member knows the location of the treasure, and another is stalking the survivors of the gang, killing them off. What did her mother have to do with these people? How guilty was she of their crimes? And is she still alive? This is the stuff of a thoroughly engrossing story that's never less than compelling. The subtly sinister jacket photo of a Parisian street scene perfectly captures the spirit of the text.<BR>Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: Black Book Detective, June, 1947 
   
   
   
  Prayle knew the girl was deadly—but it wasn’t her killing looks that gave her husband that bad 
  case of rigor mortis! 
  D 
   
  EPUTY Sheriff Roger Prayle’s steely 
  blue eyes shifted from tawny-haired 
  Daphne Hagar’s young face to her 
  husband’s horrible swollen blue-green leg, 
  with the two small holes in it. The rest of 
  Henry Hagar’s body was covered with a sheet, 
  
  Black Book Detective 
   
  2
  for he was dead. 
   
  The snake was still on the floor of the 
  living room of the two-room Hagar guest 
  house. 
   
  It was a rattler, its severed head lying 
  near a big lounge chair a yard from its body. 
  The dead man was lying on a bed in the 
  bedroom. 
   
  Questions packed Prayle’s eyes as he 
  looked at narrow-faced Lawrence, the butler. 
  Lawrence, at this hour of the morning, was in 
  a black coat with tails, bat-wing collar, black 
  four-in-hand and striped trousers. That was 
  city folk in the mountains for you, Prayle 
  thought 
   
  “It did the master in,” Lawrence 