Celebrating 25 years writing mysteries about Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc and the 21st novel in her series, Murder at la Villette, Cara Black comes to Westport. Black will be in conversation with Westport's voracious mystery reader Kelle Ruden.
Aimée 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 installment of Black’s New York Times best-selling mystery series.
Melac, Aimée's ex, has been hounding her for weeks, pressuring her to move little Chloé to Brittany, threatening to take her to court for custody — all but stalking her. Harassed and fed up, Aimée has stopped taking his calls. That’s why she doesn’t know as she’s leaving a client’s office late one night that Melac is waiting for her by the Bassin de la Villette — where an assailant attacks him just in time for Aimee to find his still-bleeding body in the canal. Interrupted, the killer knocks Aimée unconscious and plants the bloody knife in her hands for the police to find.
Now Aimée is in police custody, debilitated by her concussion, with overwhelming evidence working against her. She has to figure out who murdered Melac. 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.
Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of 20 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, and two World War II-set novels featuring American markswoman Kate Rees. Black 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.
Kelle Ruden’s career in the book business has included bookstores, publishing, and libraries. She served as the manager and editor of the Discover Great New Writers program at Barnes & Noble, as a marketing director at Random House, and as the program director at The Westport Library from 2013 to 2016, where she planned and executed more than 400 cultural and educational programs each year. Ruden has been leading book discussions for more than 25 years, including 17 years spent with the Library’s mystery group, The Usual Suspects. She has been a Westport resident since 2000 and served two terms as a member of the Westport Arts Advisory Committee, appointed by the First Selectman.
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