Review
Author: Cara Black
Reviewed by: SHA
Issue: June 2023
American writer Cara Black has written 22 books, all of which are set in Paris, a city she frequently visits. She is best known for her Aimée Leduc mystery novels which feature a female Paris-based private investigator, about whom she wrote 20 of those novels. We reviewed her Three Hours in París in our June 2020 issue, a terrific suspenseful read which we rated a 10. Her protagonist in that book was American markswoman Kate Rees, who was sent to Paris by the British Secret Service to assassinate Hitler after her husband and baby were killed by a German airstrike. In Night Flight to Paris, Kate has left spy- craft and is working as a sharpshooting instructor in Scotland. In October of 1942, she is asked by Colonel Stepney, her former handler, to return to París on a dangerous three-pronged mission. Reeling from his duplicity in a prior mission to Copenhagen, she turns down Stepney's request but ultimately accepts when she learns that a part of the mission is to rescue and return a British agent who once saved her life. Returning to the dangerous Nazi-occupied París disguised as a Red Cross nurse, she is to deliver a crucial medication, as well as to assassinate a high-level German officer to stop him from alerting the German command that the Allies' real plans were to invade North Africa, rather than the eastern Mediterranean. Three jobs in one trip--delivering the medication, taking out the target, and extricating agent Margo Pryce-Owen. Kate has been taught that, in spy craft, nothing is as it seems and no one is to be trusted and these dictates are highly relevant in this story. Black's crisp, action-related prose shine in Night Flight to París but this is laden with a maze of characters with different alliances and multiple course changes that, while there are certainly elements of suspense, the story does not hold together like that of Three Hours in París.