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Three Hours In Paris By Cara Black Soho, 360 pages, $35.95
Fans of Cara Black’s 19 novels featuring the plucky Parisian private eye, Aimee Leduc, should now make way for Kate Rees, likewise plucky and likewise serving the cause of justice in Paris. But unlike the French Aimee of the 2000s, Kate is an American-born Allied spy operating in German-occupied Paris in June 1940. Kate, a sharp shooter extraordinaire, is assigned to assassinate the Fuhrer himself when he makes an appearance at the Sacre-Coeur Cathedral in Montmartre. Kate’s shot misses — the bullet takes out a German admiral standing behind Hitler — and she spends the following hair-raising day and a half slipping around Paris, avoiding Nazis on her trail, seeking the undercover route to safety in England.
The story packs in all the Second War spy story staples: nasty Germans and nastier French collaborationists; traitors to the Allied cause and infiltrators of its espionage apparatus; cameo appearances by Churchill and multiple off-stage rants from the Fuhrer. All of this, in Black’s familiar style, is relentless, honest and immaculately researched.
Sister Dear By Hannah Mary McKinnon Mira, 360 pages, $23.99
The narrator, 30 and an IT wizard in Portland, Maine, has been hard done by. Just before the man she has always thought to be her dad died, she learned her biological father was actually a rich man-about-Portland. When she approaches him with love in her heart, he slams her out of his life. At that low point, she sets out to win a little justice and fair play.
What follows is a plot heavily weighted in red herrings, much misdirection and several fake leads. There’s a murder, but it comes so close to the book’s end that it’s almost meaningless. All the rest is expertly dodgy and entertaining.
Hurry Home By Roz Nay Simon & Schuster, 260 pages, $24.99
Sibling rivalry has seldom been so fraught.
Alex, the youngest sister by five years, has a solid job and a hunky live-in boyfriend in a Colorado town. Ruth, who split from Alex and the rest of the family 10 years earlier, unexpectedly shows up. She’s loaded with awkward baggage: a stretch in prison, a stash of cocaine and money belonging to a sinister drug dealer who’s on her trail. Ruth is also five months pregnant.
Both sisters spin contrasting but believable lines of narrative explaining their contrasting life histories. As the dark and creepy story grows more complex with every chapter, the question becomes: which sister is speaking the truth? The answer finally arrives not without huge surprises for all concerned, the reader conspicuously included.
The Last Trial By Scott Turow Grand Central, 455 pages, $37
It seems only yesterday — it was actually July 1987 — when Scott Turow introduced Sandy Stern, the absolute ace of criminal attorneys, to American crime fiction. That was in “Presumed Innocent,” and now, many novels later, here is Stern back again. Despite his age (he’s 85) and various frailties, he performs gloriously in what may be Turow’s most legally complex book.
Stern’s client is a man of medicine who conceived a cancer cure that won him a Nobel Prize and made him a zillionaire. Now patients on his regimen are dying. The government charges him with a slew of crimes, fraud and murder not excluded. Everybody goes to court where we all stay, vastly entertained, for almost the entire book.
If law schools offer doctorates in criminal law, “The Last Trial” would seem to make a definitive textbook. It is amazingly instructive, and amid all the heavyduty learning, Turow treats us to one chapter that is as darkly comic as anything he has written. Check it out. Chapter 19.