The Aimee Leduc Companion

Contemporaine)
    Stein, Abraham ( Lili’s son), wife Sinta , son Ital
    Stein, Lili (murderee, we never see her alive)
    Strauss, Sarah ( Griffe’s long-lost lover, a 14-year-old French Jew in 1942), aka Albertine Clouzot’s maid Florence
    Vitold, Herve (Security Administrator, BRI: Brigade de Recherches et d’Intervention)
    Yves (Les Blancs Nationaux)

    Marais

    1. 18, rue du Louvre: Aimée Leduc’s office.
    2. Lili Stein’s apartment, 64, rue des Rosiers (approximate: the actual street ends at #52).
    3. Hôtel du Pavillion de la Reine, place des Vosges.
    4. Commissariat de Police, place Baudoyer.
    5. 17, quai d’Anjou: Aimée’s apartment, Ile Saint-Louis.
    6. Sq. Georges-Cain, rue Payenne.
    7. Post Office, rue des Francs-Bourgeois, said to have been the site of the local SS Kommandantur during the Occupation.
    8. Colonnade with a view of Sq. Georges-Cain. Look for François Ier’s salamander.

    9. Holocaust Documentation Center. (9a is presumably where a certain bus accident happened.)
    10. Javel’s cobbler’s shop, rue Pavée.
    11. Leah’s Mon Bouton button factory, rue des Tournelles.
    12. Snooty Mme. Clouzot’s apartment, Impasse Poissonière.
    13. Place du Marché Ste.-Catherine. Thierry gets here from the Place de la Bastille by a devious route.
    14. Yves’s apartment.
    15. St. Paul taxi stand where Aimée takes her second taxi.
    16. Storefront synagogue, rue des Ecouffes.
    17. Aimée and Abe Stein sit at the café here facing the old covered market.
    18. Restaurant Le Renard, rue des Prêcheurs. 18a/b/c/d the route of Aimée’s and Morbier’s walk. (18d is Berthillon Sorbets.)

    19. Rue Elzevir motorcycle chase.
    20. Archives nationales.
    21. Picasso Museum.
    22. Hôtel de Sully, with its passage to the Place des Vosges.
    23. Restaurant Ma Bougogne, place des Vosges. A real restaurant (some of the best steack tartare in Paris).
    24. Victor Hugo House.
    25. Odile’s apartment, rue de la Plâtre, presumably near Laurent de Saux’s apartment.
    26. Dessange haircut salon. An actual salon.
    27. Brasserie Bofinger, rue de la Bastille. A real and well-known restaurant.
    28. Académie de l’architecture, pl. des Vosges. Nearby, the supposed location of Le Figaro’s offices. (In fact, at the date the story takes place, 1993, Le Figaro’s offices were on the rue du Louvre, where the Leduc agency office is located.)

Murder in Belleville (April 1994)

    When Anaïs de Froissart calls Aimée begging for help, Aimée assumes her best friend’s sister wants surveillance on her philandering husband again, and Aimée is too busy right now to indulge her. But Anaïs, a politician’s wife with an unhappy marriage and a young daughter, insists Aimée must come, that she is in trouble and scared. Aimée tracks Anaïs down just in time to see a car bomb explode, injuring Anaïs and killing the woman she was with.
    Aimée, who saw her father die in a car bomb five years earlier, is shaken by the attack, but manages to escort Anaïs to safety. But Anaïs can’t explain what Aimée just witnessed. The dead woman, Anaïs says, is Sylvie Coudray, her cheating husband’s long-time mistress, but she has no idea who wanted her dead, and Anaïs officially hires Aimée to investigate.
    As she digs into Sylvie Coudray’s murky past, Aimée finds that the dead woman may not be who Anaïs thought she was. Her Belleville neighborhood, full of North African immigrants, may be hiding clues to who Sylvie really was. As a prominent Algerian rights activist stages a hunger protest against new immigration laws, Aimée begins to wonder whether Sylvie’s death was an act of terrorism, and who else may be at risk. To make matters worse, Yves, Aimée’s ex-boyfriend, a journalist who seems to appear in and disappear from Aimée’s life without any regard for her feelings, is back in town. Just the kind of distraction she doesn’t need right now.
    Characters:

    Series characters whose info has changed since the previous book:
    Morbier is now a Commissaire.
    Martine Sitbon is now editor at Le Figaro—she got promoted at the end of Muder in the Marais .
    Non–series characters appearing in this book:
    Anour, Beni (security guard)
    Berge, Bernard (government functionary), late brother Andre, half-brother Antoine (a pediatrician), stepfather Roman
    Cardet, Léon ( Sylvie’s father)
    Claude (strongarm employee of Philippe de Froissart )
    Coudray, Sylvie ( Anaïs’s husband’s supposed mistress, killed in Mercedes