First Spring in Paris

In 1946 Daisy and her friend Beatrice decided to move to Paris, because they were fed up with limping London, still crippled and depressed in the aftermath of the war. And indeed, in the spring of that year, Paris was the place to be—isn’t it always? In particular, some very interesting things were going on in Saint-Germain-des-Prés: existentialism, free love, and American jazz throbbing through the night in the cellar clubs.

Then one day, just as the two were settling into a new life, a little boy stepped forward in the street and said, “Can you come with me? My mummy is all funny.” And he led them to a garret where they found his mother’s dead body.

A very disturbing murder case was thrown in their path, and one thing leading to another, Daisy Hayes, blind sleuth extraordinaire, had to rise to the challenge as never before.

“As a great admirer of Simenon and his Maigret mysteries, Nick Aaron now introduces the ‘Commissaire Divisionnaire’ Simonetti from the Parisian ‘Brigade Criminelle’. A gentle spoof and a grudging recognition of debt.” — The Weekly Banner

This 63k novel is a stand-alone Blind Sleuth Mystery:

I D for Daisy

II Daisy and Bernard

III Honeymoon in Rio

IV First Spring in Paris

V The Nightlife of the Blind

The Blind Sleuth Mysteries Daisy Hayes was born in London in 1922. Her father was a bank manager, hoping for a son, but he had to settle for a blind daughter.

Now what do you do when your child is blind since birth and you have the means to do all that is necessary to help her? You hire a private tutor to stimulate her verbal development in the first years of her life, because you realize how vital language will become for her. Then you send her to an exclusive school where everything is done to develop the minds and resourcefulness of blind girls. There they teach them all these fancy techniques of spatial orientation and mind mapping. And before you know it, your darling daughter has developed an exceptional intellect that just seems to draw murder mysteries like a magnet…

The Blind Sleuth Mysteries form a portrait of the twentieth century as witnessed by this remarkable blind woman. In volume one Daisy takes us along with her through World War II. The second book brings us to 1989, the year the Berlin wall came down. At the same time these novels form the life story of Daisy Hayes. “First Spring in Paris” and “Honeymoon in Rio”, for instance, take place in 1946 and 1952, and connect nicely to “D for Daisy”, that ends in 1950. “The Nightlife of the Blind”, on the other hand, takes place in 1984, five years before “Daisy and Bernard”.


Genre: Mystery