The chapter places Jake Lamar in the tradition of Black American writers in Paris and offers extended readings of Lamar’s two Paris-based mystery novels, Rendezvous Eighteenth (2003) and Ghosts of Saint-Michel (2006). Through close analysis of these two novels, the chapter traces the ways in which Lamar’s work both excavates the history of Paris Noir and elucidates the impact of diasporic Paris on the race and nation consciousness of Black American expatriates up to the onset of the twenty-first century. The chapter highlights Lamar’s use of the mystery novel to interrogate everything from the racial politics of France to the codification of Black American expatriate identity, to the anti-Muslim/Arab sentiments, and to the psychosocial impact of the post-9/11 war on terrorism. Lamar’s fiction, the chapter argues, portrays Paris at the start of the twenty-first century as a transcultural city highly attractive to Black artists and, at the same time, an urban space where communities of color still suffer fear and violence.