Cara Black

Struggling to be happy for René and his new girlfriend in spite of considerable misgivings, Aimée fears her suspicions are correct when the girlfriend disappears at the same time a man with her photograph is found murdered.

"November 1989: Aimee Leduc is in her first year of college at Paris's preeminent medical school. She lives in a 17th-century apartment that overlooks the Seine with her father, who runs the family detective agency. But the week the Berlin Wall crumbles, so does Aimee's life as she knows it. First, someone has sabotaged her lab work, putting her at risk of failing out of the program. Then, she finds out her aristo boyfriend is planning to get engaged...

"November, 2001: in the wake of 9/11, Paris is living in a state of heightened fear, with constant bomb alerts and heightened ethnic tension. For Aimée 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 Aimée's friend Michou, is found unconscious...

When Aimee Leduc's godfather, Morbier, a police "commissaire," asks her to check on his girlfriend at her home there, Aimee finds Xavierre, a "haut bourgeois" matron of Basque origin, strangled in her garden while Aimee waits inside. Circumstantial evidence makes Morbier the prime suspect, and to vindicate him, Aimee must identify the real killer.