What is Cara Black reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Cara Black, author of Murder at la Villette.

Her entry begins:

I've been reading The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies in the English translation.

To me, historical fiction matters and it's a way of how to breathe life into forgotten moments, lost voices little told women's stories and the timeless human experience.

Published in French as La Propagandiste, written by Desprairies a historian, this is her first novel.

I've read several of her historical books and this story, her first fiction, pulled me in from page one.

It's the story of Lucie, the narrator's mother. who we meet in Paris during the Trente Glorieuses, the Thirty glorious years of de Gaulle after WW2. Lucie's daughter, as a child, attends the meetings of...[read on]

About Murder at la Villette, from the publisher:

Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc has been framed for the murder of her daughter’s father—now she’s on the lam, and must find the real killer to clear her name in this thrilling 21st installment of Cara Black’s New York Times bestselling mystery series.

Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc doesn’t know that her life is about to be upended. Her ex, Melac, has been hounding her to move their daughter, Chloé, to Brittany. Aimée is fed up with his threats to take her to court and has stopped answering his calls. Which is why she doesn’t know he’s waiting for her by the Bassin de la Villette as she leaves a client’s office late one night. When she finds him there, bleeding in the canal, he has just been stabbed by an assailant, who knocks Aimée unconscious and plants the bloody knife in her hands.

Now Aimée is in police custody, debilitated by a concussion, with overwhelming evidence pointing to her as Melac’s killer. She must figure out who murdered Melac—not an easy job, given the target on his back as a former homicide investigator. Cut off from her typical network and forced to operate under multiple layers of cover, Aimée must go deep into the underbelly of Paris’s 19th arrondissement, where she rubs shoulders with biker gangs, paranoid journalists, grieving parents, and frustratingly tight-lipped ex-cops on her hunt for justice.

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Writers Read: Cara Black (March 2023).

Writers Read: Cara Black.

--Marshal Zeringue