Peachy Reads

Sarah’s Key charts two parallel stories—one from Nazi-occupied Paris and the other sixty years later. The common element is an apartment on the rue de Saintonge and its horrible secret that links two families a generation apart. The story begins with events set in motion by the horrific roundup of Parisian Jews during an initiative known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, (named for the Vélodrome d’hiver) in which Jewish families were warehoused in an indoor stadium under the most inhumane conditions by the French police (not the occupying German Nazis) until they were shipped off to internment camps and, in most cases, their eventual deaths. Julia is a journalist who uncovers the details linking 1942 and 2002, a link that involves her immediate family. The tragic secrets of rue de Saintonge are gradually revealed until the end of the novel where a tidy, but nevertheless quite plausible resolution, pulls all the narrative strands together. This is a powerful book, full of emotion, full of grief. The c...

Okay, so I wanted to find out more about Aimée Leduc, the Parisian gumshoe I was introduced to in Murder in Passy , which was the eleventh in the bestselling series. I rewound to the debut novel, Murder in the Marais . The plot is an interesting (but perhaps overly complicated) tangle of events centered on the Parisian Jewish community involving several murders, two in contemporary times, others dating to World War II. There are Nazi collaborators, a secret contemporary German organization called the Werewolves, French neonazis, corrupt politicians, and more. I was a little bewildered by language issues— Cara Black liberally sprinkles her dialogue with French interjections, and it all seems a bit faux . French Neonazis spout German catchphrases in a meeting in Paris. I suppose this is possible, though I’m not sure why German would be the lingua franca of skinheads just because the Third Reich was German. (I would find it similarly remarkable that German would be used much in mee...

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...