A Cassoulet Conspiracy in Carcassonne

Cozy murder mystery.

Elodie Marais wasn't looking for trouble. She was looking for cassoulet. When she navigates her floating bookshop barge to Carcassonne for the annual Cassoulet Festival, it's supposed to be a holiday — her first real journey since settling into life on the Canal du Midi. Good food, autumn light, someone else's cooking. Simple. Then the festival's celebrated chef collapses mid-tasting, and the simple holiday ends. The police call it sudden death. The toxicology says poison. And Elodie — retired social worker, reluctant investigator, and owner of a cat with better instincts than most detectives — finds herself drawn into a mystery simmering beneath the surface of a town built on two levels: the medieval Cité above, performing for tourists, and the working Bastide below, where people actually live. Everyone had a reason to resent Chef Mathieu Sorel. The local cook whose family recipes he stole. The critic who traded silence for access. The wife who stopped recognizing the man she married. And a quiet kitchen assistant whose hands move like a chef's — but whose name disappeared from the culinary world years ago.

Elodie investigates the way she's always worked: through conversation, not confrontation. Through what people say with their hands when their mouths are being careful. And through Pistou, her cat, whose stubborn refusal to go near one person turns out to be the clue she almost missed. A sun-washed cozy mystery set between canal and castle, where the real question isn't who poisoned the cassoulet — but what justice looks like when the dead man wasn't innocent either.

Canal & Croissant Mysteries, Book 2

Story

The canal held its own weather.

Even under a clear late-morning sky, the air above the water stayed a degree cooler than the towpath, touched by damp stone and the slow, vegetal scent that rose from the banks. Plane trees lined both sides in a long procession, their trunks pale and flaking, their branches throwing a thin lace of shade across the channel. Some stood healthy and heavy-limbed. Others were marked with the ugly stains Elodie had learned to notice only after living on the water: patches of canker blackening bark, dead limbs cut back hard, an unease inside beauty.

Le Livre Vagabond moved west at the pace the canal permitted, the engine humming steadily beneath her feet.

Eight kilometres an hour had a way of disciplining the mind. Eight kilometres an hour. The speed limit on the Canal du Midi, and also, it turned out, the speed at which doubt could keep pace. One could not dash toward anything. One could not even really drift. The barge required a hand on the tiller, an eye on the bend ahead, a respect for other boats, trees, banks, bridges, depth, wind. It asked for attention, and kept asking.

In practice, it left too much room to think.

She stood at the stern in a navy sweater with the sleeves pushed up, one hand on the tiller, the other resting briefly on the rail when the channel widened. The light had the particular brightness of the south in autumn, clear without cruelty, gold caught under the white. Ahead, the canal stretched between its banks like a sentence still deciding how it would end.

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