Witness On The Quay

Amy Page, a middle-aged American widow and food columnist from Charleston, South Carolina, is in Paris to write a cookbook. Her lengthy stay in the City of Lights suddenly takes an unexpected turn when a cab driver is murdered in front of her building on the Ile St-Louis. Jean-Michel Jolivet, Inspector for the French Sûreté and Director of the International Bureau of Security, insists that Amy is essential to solving his ever-widening investigation that now involves several murders and an international plot. While interrogating Amy, Jolivet becomes increasingly annoyed with her incessant ramblings about cookbooks, cuisine, the Ile St-Louis, Paris, French history, culture, and architecture--distracting him from the investigation and from finding the killer. Much to Jolivet's surprise, he determines that Amy is much more complex than she seems and may possess an acute power of observation that is strong enough to assist him in his difficult homicide cases. Intrigue and desire may lead Amy and Jolivet to discover more than they bargained for in a passionate journey toward intimacy and joy on the enchanting Ile St-Louis.

In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna's case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate—about care as a "mere voluntary courtesy"—became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about "good Samaritans." Using Minna's case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free. In exploring this liminal and unsettled legal space, Hartog sheds light on the relationships between moral and legal reasoning and a legal landscape that challenges simplistic notions of what it meant to live in freedom. What emerges is a provocative portrait of a distant legal order that, in its contradictions and moral dilemmas, bears an ironic resemblance to our own legal world.