Murder at the Porte de Versailles

Cara Black’s riveting 20th installment in her New York Times bestselling Parisian detective series entangles private investigator Aimee Leduc in a dangerous web of international spycraft and terrorist threats in Paris’s 15th arrondissement. November, 2001: in the wake of 9/11, Paris is living in a state of fear, with constant bomb alerts and heightened ethnic tension. For Aimee Leduc, November is bittersweet: the anniversary of her father’s death and her daughter’s third birthday fall on the same day. A gathering for family and friends is disrupted when a bomb goes off at the police laboratory—and Boris Viard, the partner of Aimee’s friend Michou, is found unconscious at the scene of the crime with traces of explosive under his fingernails. Aimee doesn’t believe Boris set the bomb. In an effort to prove him not guilty, she battles the police and his own lab colleagues, collecting conflicting eyewitness reports. When a member of the French secret service drafts Aimee to help investigate possible links to an Iranian Revolutionary guard and fugitive radicals who bombed Interpol in the 1980s, Aimee uncovers ties to a cold case of her father’s. As Aimee scours the streets of Teheran-sur-Seine trying to learn the truth, she has to ask herself if she should succumb to pressure from Chloe’s biological father and move them out to his farm in Brittany.