eyes.2c Reviews

Murder Visits a French Village  (Château in Burgundy #1) by Susan C Shea      ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Mention of Julia Child, Beouf Bourguignon, red wine and baguette, and author Shea had me at  the first paragraph. Widowed Ariel Shepherd is astounded to find Daniel,  her beloved husband of only four years had bought her a ruined château in Burgandy. It was to be a surprise. Ariel impulsively sells their Manhattan apartment and moves to France, and hopefully a new chapter in her life. What she didn’t count on was finding the dead body of a woman, a Sorbonne educated academic, whose area of interest was the provenance of châteaux of Burgundy, in the moat. Madame Breton had been looking into Ariel’s legal forms. Something about them had Madame puzzled.   So early on I had my suspicions about things, although they kept being muddied, as bodies piled up. A cozy mystery that had me salivating over the food descriptions more than anything else. A Severn House ARC via NetGal...

Death and Croissants  (Follet Valley Mystery #1) by   Ian Moore          ⭐️⭐️⭐️ My head’s still spinning from the idea of a slightly  outdated gentleman running a  B&B in the Loire Valley.  I must admit Moore’s opening salvo on muesli was a hoot. One I all to readily concur with. “Muesli…rejected budgie food!”  Richard Ainsworth is a middle aged, fractious man who’s all charm on the outside and seemingly a curmudgeon on the inside. (Or does he just go through life on a slightly different plane to others?) He’s a film historian which probably answers all questions about his jaded, ennui bordering on mécontent  attitude.  His hen’s have movie star names, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, and Ava Gardner. He’s bullied it seems, by his staff he more or less inherited from his former or not? wife Clare. When his cleaner finds a man’s handprint in blood on the wall of one of the guest bedrooms Richard tries to explain it away as ...

Murderous Mistral:  A Provence Mystery (Roger Blanc) by  Cay Rademacher.   Capitaine Roger Blanc is the ideal obsessive investigator, formerly with the Parisian anti-corruption unit. Perhaps a bit too obsessive as after a successful case against personages in high places he finds himself reallocated to Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée, a hamlet in Provence 500 miles south of Paris. At the same time his marriage collapses. Blanc is forced into making a fresh start. Fortunately he owns a 200 year old dilapidated house that he'd virtually forgotten he'd inherited and had for some unknown reason kept on paying the taxes. His welcoming investigation was that of the body of a man deliberately torched. By all accounts Moréas had been a very nasty person; a belligerent bully who terrorized his neighbours and anyone else who crossed his path, a thief and murderer. A man no-one mourned when he met his grisly ending.  Blanc can't help but sniff out corruption,...