Ghosts of Saint-Michel (American Mysteries in Paris, featuring Ricky Jenks)
Ghosts of Saint-Michel (American Mysteries in Paris, featuring Ricky Jenks)
Marva Dobbs has a life most people would envy. An American who has lived in Paris for most of her adult life, she runs a popular African-American soul food restaurant, and her thirty-year marriage has produced a beautiful grown-up daughter. So why is she jeopardizing everything for a fling with her sous-chef, a mysterious twenty-eight-year-old Algerian man named Hassan?
Marva begins to ask herself the same question when she returns from summer vacation to find that Hassan is missing, and that he is the main suspect in the investigation into the bombing of a building in Paris that left one man dead. And then she disappears, leaving her bewildered daughter and secretive husband to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Ghos
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multi-layered complex mystery,
Afro-American Marva Dobbs has lived in France for almost four decades and doesn’t plan to ever reside in America again. She has her own restaurant Marva’s Soul Food Kitchen, is considered a celebrity and is married to Loic Reese for almost as long as she lived in France. They have one daughter Naima and ever since she was born, Loic and Marva have been faithful to each other.
That changes when the sixty-something year old Marva has an affair with the beautiful twenty-eight year old Hassan. After a summer in Breton with Loic, Marva realizes he knows about her affair so since she deeply loves her husband, she decides to break it off with Hassan. Before she can do that she finds that he and his cousins are considered terrorists by the police who believe they bombed the WORTHEE Building which houses a liberal think tank. After getting into an auto accident, Marva is taken to the hospital where she checks herself out after Hassan comes for her. Naima, who has come home to see her mother, finds the restaurant’s manager murdered in the middle of the dining room. It is Naima who must figure out how to handle the mess her parents and Hassan have made of their lives.
GHOSTS OF SAINT MICHEL is a multi-layered complex mystery wrapped around a family drama. The storyline is fast paced with interesting characters especially the African-Americans (mindful of authors like Richard Wright and James Baldwin) who have easily integrated themselves into French society. Loic is the most complex character, whose past and present actions come as a complete surprise to the audience because they do not fit the image he projects. Jake Lamar has written a deep and enjoyable tale that keeps the audience interested in the incredible plotting.
Harriet Klausner
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|Remarkable: Insightful and Compelling,
This book, following Rendezvous Eighteenth, is Lamar’s second novel set among the African-American, ex-pat, artistic community in Paris. Since Lamar himself is an African-American, ex-pat, writer living in Paris, it is a world he knows well, and he takes full advantage of that knowledge here. The reader is treated to an otherwise inaccessible view of Paris, for Lamar makes constant comparisons between the French and the American, comparisons that only an American native who had become a Parisian native could make, beyond those that would be accessible to even a long-term visitor to one country or the other.
The “inside look” at Paris and a community within it is also the setting for a political thriller. This is Lamar’s third novel in the thriller genre, and each of his efforts has exceeded its predecessor. By now he is accomplished at creating the page-turner, and this one has some political overtones that add an additional flavor to the stew. The book will linger in your mind long after you’ve finished compulsively flipping the pages because of its special insights into a distinct and interesting world.
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|Yawn!!,
The Ghosts of Saint-Michel by Jake Lamar is an attempt at an enigmatic spy-thriller based in France that foreshadows the events leading to the infamous September 11th terrorist attack in New York City. The “ghosts” the title refers to are “spooks” or spies who are now aged Cold War operatives who worked for the CIA and similar foreign or covert agencies. They now are dormant, blending effortlessly into society appearing as genteel, old men who sit on Parisian park benches and feed pigeons. But they have never truly left the agency and are really lethal weapons hiding behind kind, harmless facades.
Using a spry, sixty-two year old, African American, diva-turned- restaurateur, ex-patriot, Marva Dobbs, as the focal point of the story does not really add intrigue to a painfully slow-moving plot. Her lover is one of her employees, an Algerian chef, thirty-four years her junior who is wanted by the police for a terrorist bombing of a seemingly peaceful think-tank organization in downtown Paris. When Marva disappears in the middle of the night with a man fitting her lover’s description; her husband, Loic, enlists the aid of their daughter, Naima, to find Marva. Then suddenly Loic disappears too under suspicious circumstances, leaving Naima as the unlikely, sole sleuth to solve the mystery of the bombing and her parent’s disappearances.
In over her head, Naima is further distracted by her own drama between a former French lover and a current American lover which only clutters the landscape of numerous, mostly insignificant characters. The author spends a lot of time reflecting on their pasts and delving into their complex interrelationships. He compares American and French cultures, attitudes toward race, politics, religion, history, etc., including some very keen societal and political observations. Surprisingly, it was the infusion of such commentaries and other factual aspects I found more interesting than the terrorist plot and “mystery” behind Marva and Loic’s disappearance. As you can guess, I never connected with any of the characters and could care less about their fate – regardless of whose side they were on. It took too long to get to the heart of the story and once there, it was somewhat anti-climatic and a bit contrived; in other words, it was too much, too little, and definitely too late to save the story. If this book were not a review book, I would have abandoned it after the first 50 or so pages — which is something I RARELY do.
I really wanted to enjoy this book because I really liked Rendezvous Eighteenth. Even though it had some of the same elements and setting, I thought this offering failed to pull the reader in from the beginning. In a nutshell, I thought it suffered from too many characters, an elongated plot, and poor pacing. I think those who like reading about the ex-patriot experience in Paris , particularly from an African American point-of-view would enjoy certain aspects of the story.
Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub
Nubian Circle Book Club
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