Sarah’s Key / Tatiana de Rosnay

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 central narrative event is almost as horrifyingly shocking as the “Nehmen Sie das Mädchen” scene in Sophie’s Choice. This is a memorable work that will stay with you long after the last page is read.

If you’re looking for a compelling story about Paris’s Marais district, Sarah’s Key definitely trumps Cara Black’s Murder in the Marais (see my blurb below, but of course comparing the two books is a little like comparing apples and oranges…)

Click here for the movie trailer (with Kristin Scott Thomas).

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The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

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...

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