A CYCLIST'S GUIDE TO CRIME & CROISSANTS

Murder disrupts a French bicycle tour.

After her best friend, Gemma Gooding, is killed in a bike accident, Sadie Greene ditches her boring job at Appleton Financial and her equally dull boyfriend, Al Weston. Determined to live her best life before it’s snatched away like Gemma’s, she moves to Sans-Souci-sur-Mer as owner and operator of Oui Cycle, providing bicycle tours throughout southern France. Although she’s tickled when former boss Dom Appleton—along with his wife, Judith; son, Lance; and Lance’s girlfriend, Lexi—book her Secret Southern France tour, she knows it’ll be a challenge to integrate the pastry-phobic Dom and his family into a group that includes enthusiastic Scottish sisters Philomena and Constance; philosophical Manfred, a digital nomad from Germany; and sour Brit Nigel Fox, who hosts an infamous travel review website. Dom’s constant lagging behind to check in remotely with his workplace prevents the group from noticing when he goes missing, and when he turns up dead, barely a tear is shed. His wife declares that the tour must go on, and Sadie’s more rattled that the police investigation causes her to have to rebook all her ongoing reservations than sad at losing her longtime boss. It doesn’t hurt that Det. Jacques Laurent, sent to investigate by the local gendarmerie, is cute in a muscular way. Claire gives the wondrous sites on the tour, the backbone of most travel cozies, only perfunctory attention, focusing instead on the camaraderie among the tourists. But it’s hard for a mystery to offer a plausible solution to the crime when everyone’s too nice to have done it.

Aside from the rain and the murders, a good time is had by all.