MURDER IN THE PALAIS-ROYAL

With an impeccable French accent, Carine Montbertrand leads the listener through the arrondissements of Paris as private eye Aimée Leduc encounters a seriously bad day that just keeps getting worse. A disastrous date is followed by the near-murder of her partner and the financial destruction of their business when 100,000 francs suddenly appear in their account and the tax men are alerted. Life-threatening moments are not as tense as could be, but Montbertrand’s low-key delivery works wonderfully for Leduc’s humorous entanglements with political foes, villains, and suspects. Some tangled threads in Black's tale are not woven tightly, but Leduc solves the financial imbroglio and recent attack on her partner as well as a decades-old murder. D.P.D. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2010]