(Tension runs high in this working-class neighborhood as a hunger strike to protest strict immigration laws escalates among the Algerian immigrants. Aimee barely escapes death in a car bombing in this tale of terrorism and greed in the shadows of Paris.


April in Paris, 1994, is hardly the stuff of song: forget lilacs and lights twinkling along the Seine and think riots and firebombings. Private investigator Aim�e Leduc (Murder in the Marais) specializes in corporate security, but when Ana�s, an old friend and wife of an interior minister, sends her a terrified SOS from Belleville, an immigrants' quartier, the racial violence festering in the city explodes on a very personal level. Ana�s had intended to confront Sylvie, her husband's mistress, but when a car bomb fueled by Algerian plastique takes Sylvie's life, Ana�s begs Aim�e to unravel the tangled threads that led to her death.

Aim�e's investigations take her into the heart of the unrest surrounding the political status of illegal Algerian immigrants, or sans-papiers. What was the connection between Sylvie (also known as Eug�nie, a pied-noir, or Algerian-born French citizen) and Mustafa Hamid, charismatic leader of the Alliance F�d�ration Lib�ration, a humanitarian mission bent on stopping the forced repatriation of North African Magr�bhins? Was Ana�s' husband being blackmailed by a radical faction of the AFL?

The jam-packed plot is occasionally hard to follow (and the intermittent presence of Yves, Aim�e's fickle lover, is downright distracting), but Black's Paris, at times grimly threatening, is also wondrously vibrant:

She wondered how Sylvie/Eug�nie fit into the melange that swelled the boulevard: the Tunisian Jewish bakery where a line formed while old women who ran the nearby hammam conversed with one and all from their curbside caf� tables, the occasional rollerblader weaving in and out of the crowd, the Asian men unloading garments from their sliding-door Renault vans, the Syrian butchers with their white coats stained bloody pink, the tall, ebony Senegalese man in a flowing white tunic, prayer shawl, and blue jogging shoes with a sport bag filled with date branches, a well-coiffed French matron tugging a wheeled shopping cart, a short, one-eyed Arabe man who hawked shopping bags hanging from his arms, and the watchful men in front of the Abou Bakr Mosque near the M�tro.

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