I had high hopes for this book, a woman author (Cara Black) new to me, set in Paris, atmospheric cover—what's not to like? But the cover didn't carry it for me, nor did the series detective, Aimée Leduc, who seems to be able to run up a sleety, cobbled hill in Montmartre wearing heels. As great as I'm sure she looks, I have to ask: if you're gonna stake out a building at night or chase bad guys, and its winter, why in the world do you wear a short skirt? Visiting Paris was fun, however. Black evokes a cold, uncomfortable, but ultimately attractive Paris winter. This cold summer morning in the Bay Area, I definitely feel like finding my way into a steamy bistro and ordering a croque monsieur, wiping the condensation off the window and watching a flic trudging up the hill, hoping he doesn't see me.

It was great to visit Paris, but I couldn't care about Aimée and her colleagues. Maybe it was some mood I was in, I grant that; maybe I was too tired to take in the relationships or the importance of Corsican separatists. But for me, it seemed that the author had a clear idea of why everyone was doing what they were doing, but just couldn't communicate it. There is an art to motivation; part of it is making the human connection—would we, the individual readers, care if we were in the same situation? Can you get us to feel the same emotion as your characters?—and part of it is technical: how do you drop the cues that help us remember, not just which character is which but also something to re-evoke that motivation. So when we hear that Aimée has to do x because she wants to understand who was responsible for the explosion that killed her father at the Place Vendôme years ago, we need to feel her loss—but what I get is a cardboard cut-out: oops! need a motivation! better trot out dad again.