
The man upon the stair : a mystery in fin-de-siècle Paris / Gary Inbinder.

Reviews
Booklist Reviews 2017 December #1
Achille Lefebvre, now chief inspector of the Sûreté, returns in Inbinder's third Fin de Siécle Paris mystery. Baroness de Livet frantically reports her husband missing; then her maid dies, ostensibly of flu, setting off a complex mystery involving suitcases of money, the baroness' diamonds, unidentified bodies, and mysterious connections to the Russian secret police, the Okhrana. Hercule Poirot might solve this puzzle through intuition alone, but Lefebvre uses traditional gumshoe methods, chasing down and teasing out clues and then leisurely gathering the disparate players and events into a logical explanation for the crimes. A dizzying number of details re-create the nineteenth-century Paris of artists, prostitutes, aristocrats, gamblers, and spies. Paris itself and Lefebvre are the most fully developed characters, while others, some of whom we met in The Hanged Man (2016), adhere more to type, making it a little hard to keep them straight. Nevertheless, Achille continues to endear, with his mashed flowers and good heart, much like Louise Penny's Armand Gamache. Fans of fin-de-siècle Paris may also enjoy Claude Izner's Victor Legris series. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.
PW Reviews 2017 November #2
Inbinder's solid third mystery set in fin-de-siècle Paris (after 2016's