Fiction / Mystery (Cozy)
318 pages / 4961 kb
5 stars
What fun! Clair Baskerville and her devoted husband of 35 years head to Paris for a vacation. Claire’s father is not only French but lives in Paris with his second wife. Claire and her father were never close, due to the divorce, so she doesn’t let him know she and her husband are coming. Then, Clair returns to their hotel after an afternoon of shopping, to wake her husband from his nap so they can go out to dinner. Except he won’t wake in our world. The chief suspect, she’s taken to the police station, and eventually cleared. On her way out, she receives a phone call from her stepmother, who is 20 years her junior and a real piece of work, informing her that Claude, her father, has just died.
Clair returns to Atlanta and discovers not only has she lost the love of her life, but he spent all of his money, their money, and her money—on his mistress? Then she finds out her father left her his apartment and an inheritance, so she ends up back in Paris. Where the cops are doing nothing to find the murderer, her stepmother is suing her for her inheritance, and just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water…
I love the fact the protagonist is in her 60s and not imbued with supernatural skills, that she worked as a skip-tracer a few years earlier (finding missing people), and that she has learned to live with Prosopagnosia—face blindness. How do you explain that to a cop? “Yes, officer, I made eye-contact with him, but can’t tell you what he looks like.” I had heard of prosopagnosia before, but this is the first time I’ve actually read anything about it.
Love having an older, human, woman sleuth. And one that men of Paris still flirt with, even the cops. ;-)
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