Le meurtre dans la ville lumiere.

As of late, I've been drawn to mystery titles published by the Soho Press, a little company that specializes in works set in diverse locales and unusual investigators (just browsing through the library shelves, I've seen crime stories set in Sweden, Afghanistan and the Arctic). Their list includes some well known authors (they publish Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond series), but some authors are often new to most mystery readers.

One such author is San Francisco-based Cara Black, who sets her main investigator back a decade and on another continent. Aimee Leduc, resident of Ile St. Louis in the center of Paris, makes her living investigating mostly computer crime in the heady early days of the Internet. Yet in Murder in Belleville, Aimee finds herself literally thrown into the search for a murderer after witnessing a car bombing. Roaming far from the well-trod center of the city, Leduc searches the gritty streets of Belleville, a suburb of Paris tense with clashes between Algerian fundamentalists and a government intent on cracking down on illegal immigrants. There's a lot that Leduc has to wade through to get to the truth behind the woman killed in the bombing--and much of it leads to friends of hers and the highest levels of the govenment. Her job is made all the more complicated by shadowy figures intent on keeping her from that truth.

Black creates a multilayered, complex knot of a mystery, fast-paced to the point that it's almost impossible to recall all that's going on. I will admit to be entirely confused by many of the events, some of which tended to assume a strong grounding in the history of Algerian/Franco relations--an area that I'm woefully deficient. But part of the mystery played upon Leduc's relationships with Rene, her brilliant (if mostly off stage) partner, and an Inspector Morbier, whom Leduc seemed to rely on in the past. Murder in Belleville is the second in Black's series (Murder in the Marais is the first), so perhaps anyone interested in Black's P.I. would do best to start with that title. For my tastes, I found Black's frantic pace and sprawling cast of characters a little too confusing. But Black's efforts to provide a different twist to a city that seems so familiar is worth a look for anyone searching for murder in unfamiliar territory.