Paris is the inspiration for songs, poetry and plenty of crime fiction: from the original The Murders in the Rue Morgue to Maigret, Aimée Leduc and beyond.
The French capital is also home to world-renowned food and wine, and that’s the theme of Murder Most Delicious, a new novel from Danielle Postel-Vinay.
Postel-Vinay is the pen name of Danielle Trussoni, an award-winning author whose work spans gothic fiction, supernatural thrillers and more, as well as being a New York Times Book Review columnist and a Pulitzer Prize juror. NBC is planning a series based on her mystery book The Puzzle Master.
Murder Most Delicious represents a personal passion for her – she’s married to a French man, and lives part of each year in Paris, a lifestyle which has inspired her to write a cosy crime novel set around the cafés of the city’s traditional 7th arrondissement. It’s fun, frothy and faintly preposterous, like a cross between Emily in Paris and The Thursday Murder Club.
This is the story of Olivia Beech, a disgraced American sommelier seeking a fresh start in France, only to have her new employer drop dead from poisoning at a wine tasting. What follows is less of a police procedural, and more of an ode to Gros-Caillou, the district just east of the Eiffel Tower where you’ll find plenty of lovely pastries, cheeses and chocolates.
Olivia’s case attracts the attention of the ‘Paris Neighbourhood Watch’, a circle of local sleuths led by Augusta Dupin, an agoraphobic former police detective. If the name Dupin rings a bell, well, Augusta is said to be the descendant of C Auguste Dupin, Edgar Allen Poe’s detective!
This is an ensemble story, and Dupin lurks in the background while the enthusiastic but amateur investigation is conducted by this team of Gros-Caillou irregulars. There’s Chantal, the sexy middle-aged florist; Prosper, the young radical librarian; Gaston, the pâtissier; Martine, a café owner and twin sister to Romain, a handsome local beat cop – mais oui, there’s a whiff of romance in the air as well as that tell-tale scent of almonds.
There are slightly too many characters, and many of them ultimately play only minor roles. Chantal seems to get the most page time, emerging as the author’s favourite, and a character much more given to action than the others.
And of course, there’s Olivia Beech, who lost her taste due to COVID and was fired from her swanky job in New York. Given the chance of a fresh start in Paris, she leaps at it. Olivia is our avatar, the outsider seeing Gros-Caillou for the first time, pulled along by circumstance or by the will of Augusta and Chantal. It stretches credulity that she somehow avoids becoming an official witness, but this is a charming fantasy, not an episode of Spiral. So Olivia helps the Watch snoop around, and along the way, folk make observations on Parisian life… and eat a lot of dessert.
Gros-Caillou itself is a real presence in the book, too. Everything takes place within walking distance – the murder, the clues, the conversations, all occur on the same two or three streets. Despite Paris’s size, the narrative has a closeness bordering on claustrophobia. Postel-Vinay describes Gros-Caillou as having a village-like quality, which is not entirely untrue, but go there today and you’d find it just as bustling with tourists as anywhere else within 15 minutes’ walk of the Eiffel Tower. Regardless, it’s the perfect setting for a quaint crime story; with its local gossip and social hierarchy, it feels like a classic small-town whodunnit.
The book is written in the present tense, which suits the story’s conspiratorial nature and brings us the sights and smells of Paris with striking immediacy. The crime is almost incidental. Flowers and pastries are celebrated in vibrant depth, and every page brings to life the tastes and textures of food and drink.
Is it a good murder mystery? The plot itself is not complicated (there are maybe one or two decent red herrings), but the poison is delivered ingeniously, and the motivation is delightfully personal after plenty of hints at financial gain. It’s clearly fantastical that Olivia and the Paris Neighbourhood Watch are given such a long leash to behave how they like. But this is not meant to be a gritty procedural; it’s whimsical, a Paris where everything is idealised and romantic: “A rainy night in Paris. Fog and jazz. A handsome man at her side.”
It’s worth noting that the MacGuffin at the heart of the mystery, a long-lost 19th-century bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne, is a real thing. It refers to the Föglö shipwreck, a schooner found in 2010 near Finland that contained 168 preserved bottles of Napoleon-era wine.
Murder Most Delicious is fun and colourful if a little obsessed with evangelising the Parisian lifestyle. The case itself is lightweight, but it unfolds as a richly described dive into friendship, food and French hospitality. By the end, the mystery may not have taxed you, but you’ll be desperate for a coupe de champagne and a wedge of blue cheese.
See our photo log of Maiget’s Paris here.
HarperCollins
Print/Kindle/iBook
£9.99
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
