Après-Midi Recap

Cara Black is not new to Après-Midi. In fact, she has spoken more often than any other guest—usually with each new book that she publishes. She is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 20 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set in Paris, each in a different arrondissement. The last district to get her attention is the 19th, currently in the works and soon to be published.

Cara has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris—the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture—and invitations to be the Guest of Honor at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime. With more than 400,000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

Her love of all things French was kindled by the French-speaking nuns at her Catholic high school, where Cara first encountered French literature and went crazy for the work of Prix Goncourt winner Romain Gary. Her junior year in high school, she wrote him a fan letter—which he answered, and which inspired her to make her first trip to Paris, where her idol took her out for coffee and a cigar. Since then, she has been to Paris many, many times. On each visit she entrenches herself in a different part of the city, learning its secret history.

Aimée Leduc, her female detective of the series, returned this past March 1st with a new investigation in MURDER AT THE PORTE DE VERSAILLES, her most recent book. This story is inspired by true events, visits to the police lab and dinners with “les flics” and Claire, the scientific head of the lab who became a friend. But the story is about family, your “tribe” and what that means. There’s a French saying “Other things may change us, but we start and end up as family.”

We had as good a turn-out as we ever had pre-Covid-19 with about 60 or 70 of Cara’s fans. As usual, Cara delighted us with her stories—how she got started and couldn’t stop writing and how she’s branching out to more “stand-alone” mystery novels such as Three Hours in Paris, a recent book that takes place in Paris during the only three hours Adolph Hitler spent in the French capital. Her characters came alive during her description of these fictional people we readers have come to know and love.

If you haven’t had the fortune of reading her Aimée Leduc series, or any of her other books, it’s not too late to start. And I’d urge you to start from the beginning with Murder in the Marais, her first of the series.

The entire two-hour session was recorded so you don’t have to miss it! Click here now to take it all in…as if you were there yourself!