A CYCLIST'S GUIDE TO VILLAINS & VINES

Bike tour guide Sadie Greene goes literally out of her comfort zone, taking a half-dozen Anglophone tourists through Alsace.

Sadie, an American expatriate, has finally settled into her chosen home in Mediterranean Sans-Souci-sur-Mer. As owner and operator of Oui Cycle, she believes firmly that the customer is always right. So when the Silver Spinners, headed by formidable South Carolina native Scarlett Crabtree-Thorne, want to cycle through northeastern France, Sadie’s game. The village of Riquewihr seems like a likely starting spot, and in deference to the cyclists’ age, rather than riding point-to-point, she’ll make L’Auberge de Trois Cigognes the tour’s home base, with day trips to charming nearby villages tailored to the seniors’ endurance. Her charges’ physical limitations turn out to be the least of Sadie’s problems. The rambunctious seniors oversleep, drink lots of wine, ignore Sadie’s historical insights, and wander off path. Fascinated by neighbor Pierre-Luc Bauman’s old-fashioned high-wheeled bicycle, Scarlett diverts the group to an impromptu garden party at his estate, and they miss their lunch reservations. Longtime partners Maurice Guidry and Benji Patel get the group thrown out of Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg for trespassing. But the two who cause the most trouble are the quietest. Orchestra conductor Keiko Andersson insists she saw a dead body on the main street of Riquewihr, forcing Sadie to make a fruitless midnight ride in search of Keiko’s phantom corpse. Taciturn Keiko has the last laugh nonetheless: There’s a dead man stuffed into one of Pierre-Luc’s wine barrels. He turns out to be Edwin Perch, long-departed husband of Scarlett’s reserved English goddaughter, Rosemary, who’s also on the tour. Unfortunately, Edwin was also the common-law husband of Gabi Morel, innkeeper of Trois Cigognes.

Managing her freewheeling bunch gives Sadie little time for sleuthing, but no worries—they have that covered and then some.