The Marais Assassin

Izner has long specialized in these historic thrillers set in Paris at the time of Touluse Lautrec, whose protagonists are an extended family of booksellers with a Japanese component.
Like the other with the same protagonists, this one,is pleasing, with a well-treated setting and a fair amount of depth to the characters, despite the fact that some of them are very unbelievable.
A pleasant book, with which to intermingle more serious readings.

Marais Assassin, Izner

★ (almost got a minus)

From Goodreads: "Parisian bookseller Victor Legris finds a new case to investigate very close to home, when his business partner's apartment is burgled. Curiously the only item stolen is a decorative goblet of little value. But on learning that two people have been murdered who were connected to to the goblet, Victor becomes convinced of its secret significance. How quickly can he recover it and end the killing spree, in a city beset with terrorist activity? In this fourth case for the bookseller sleuth, Claude Izner offers a convincing portrait of a Paris shaken by anarchist bombings in the spring of 1892."

I want to tell you, that I didn't understand this book, nope not at all.... It was show more all very mysterious, by that I mean: some guy (we don't know who) goes to visit an old lady, he asks her for something (we don't know what), but she has given it away so he leaves... The next paragraph has someone climb in her window & kill her: BANG! Shot dead!

So then there are some men talking about bombs.... Meanwhile some weird guy writing in a journal, and we're told that another person is found dead in connection to the missing item (?)...

It was just too weird & jumped around... As I said, the author was trying too hard to be mysterious & it got to be annoying & too jumpy.

Also, there was a poem in the beginning of the book, in French & then it was translated into English, but I know for a fact that it was not translated exactly, because I can read a tiny bit of French.... show less