Description de l’éditeur
Louise Lloyd’s time away in Paris is everything she was hoping it would be until a shocking murder turns her entire world upside down.
Louise Lloyd is finally living the quiet life she’d longed for, working in a parfumerie by day and spending time with her new friends every night at the Aquarius club in Paris. When a desperate mother asks for help locating her artist daughter, Louise initially refuses to keep her hard-won but fragile peace intact. But the woman comes with a letter of introduction from an old friend in Harlem, and Louise realizes she has no choice but to do what she can to find the missing young woman.
The woman’s daughter, Iris Wright, is part of an elite social circle. Louise soon finds herself drawn into a world of privilege and ice-cold ambition—a young group of artists who will do anything to get ahead—but would they murder one of their own? With the help of some friends from home, Louise must untangle a web of lies, jealousy, and betrayal to find out what really happened to Iris while fighting to keep her new life from crashing down around her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Afia's underwhelming third mystery starring Black lesbian detective Louise Lloyd (after Harlem Sunset), it's the spring of 1928 and Louise has decamped from Harlem to Paris, where she spends her days clerking in a parfumerie and her nights drinking and dancing. Things take a turn after up-and-coming artist Iris Wright disappears and her mother approaches Louise with a letter of recommendation from a friend back in Harlem and begs her to come out of retirement. Reluctantly, Louise agrees, plunging into the shadowy world of La Mort de Artistes, a secret society of women artists to which Iris belonged. As Louise infiltrates their ranks, she grows frightened of Iris's ruthless milieu, and leans on her circle of glamorous writers and musicians—and her two love interests—for help solving the case. Afia conjures a suitably intoxicating atmosphere, but her plotting drags, and the final reveal is a letdown. In letters to Louise, her friends praise her as "brave," "brilliant," and "formidable," but little on the page bears out such qualities of her character. This disappoints.
