A blood red morning

Pryor's vivid third WWII-era whodunit featuring Henri Lefort (after The Dark Edge of Night) finds the French police detective investigating a crime that hits particularly close to home. After Lefort sleeps through a shooting on the doorstep of his Paris apartment building, he's assigned to investigate. The victim is Guy Remillon, a banker who lost his job when the Nazis took over the city and who then began working for the SS, investigating tips sent by French citizens hoping to have their neighbors arrested or fined. The work made Remillon a laundry list of enemies, but Lefort gets a strong lead when one of his neighbors reports seeing the building's busybody toss something out a window soon after the crime. However, when Lefort learns that a Nazi official removed a piece of paper from Remillon's belongings, he worries that investigating the murder with his usual diligence could put him in the crosshairs of the SS. Pryor generates nerve-shredding tension with Lefort's tightrope walk, and he streamlines the plotting more effectively than in the previous installment. This series merits a long run. (Aug.)

A police detective struggles to keep order in Nazi-occupied Paris. No detective would normally be assigned to investigate a murder that took place in front of his own apartment building. But nothing is normal under the German occupation. So when Chief Louis Proulx barges into Henri Lefort's office on the last day of December 1940, the homicide detective doesn't have the luxury of passing the case off to another detective because there are none. Interrogating his neighbors, however, proves tricky. The Millers, who live on the top floor, have disappeared, perhaps due to interference from Gerald Darroze, a third-floor tenant. Claire Raphael is engaged in a liaison with Obergruppenführer Maximillian Zoeller. The building's superintendent, who's fled to his native Greece, has been replaced by his charming young niece, Natalia Tsokos, who takes a suspiciously strong shine to Henri right away. No one is exactly on the up and up, not even Henri's good friend Princess Marie Bonaparte, who has access to quite a bit more food and wine than her ration card would permit. Once the victim is identified as Guy Remillon, a French snitch in the pay of the Germans, the pressure on Henri to solve the case grows. But does Henri even want to solve the murder of someone working for his city's occupiers, much less deploy the limited resources that Remillon's German employers permit him? Pryor's hero has his work cut out for him in this tense tale of people forced to survive with limited options. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.