‘Intriguing but not exciting read’
Cara Black’s fourth installment in the Aimee Leduc Investigation Series, “Murder in the Bastille,” places the series heroine in a case that is not only tough to solve, but it becomes personal. Very personal.
The book, set in modern-day Paris, finds Aimee at a restaurant where she sees a woman wearing a similar Chinese jacket to what she herself was wearing. This mystery woman gets into an argument on her cell phone and leaves the restaurant, forgetting the phone. When Aimee goes after her to return the phone, she’s viciously attacked by an unknown assailant in a passageway. She wakes up to learn she’s been struck blind from her injuries but that the woman she was chasing after was found dead in a different, but nearby passageway.
Aimee sets out to find not only who attacked her, but who killed the woman. She couldn’t help but believe the two attacks are connected, even though police are initially convinced that the murder was from a serial killer and Aimee’s attack was incidental. All of Aimee’s ways normal ways of doing things are hampered by the fact that she can no longer see, but she’s determined to find a cure for her blindness—and catch the bad guy.
If I were to describe this book, I’d have to say that it’s an intriguing but not exciting read. I like a mystery to be so thrilling that I can’t wait to find out what happens next and I can hardly put the book down even to get some much-needed sleep. “Murder in the Bastille” didn’t fit that bill. It was interesting and I appreciated how Cara Black interwove the story of overcoming a heartbreaking hardship with trying to solve a mystery. It seems as though many troubled heroines these days struggle because of events that of their own doing, but this was different. Aimee Leduc was a true victim but she refused to be treated like one-or act like one.
Although I won’t rush out and get the other books in the Aimee Leduc series, I liked this book enough to perhaps give one of the other books a try if I found it in a library—or a local community book store.
Jamie, Bentonville
http://jamiesnotebook.com/
