A Harbor Homicide in Sète

Cozy murder mystery.

Elodie Marais came to Sète for oysters, an old friend, and absolutely no deaths.

The retired schoolteacher has barely moored her barge in the Mediterranean port before the town's festival week draws her into its bright, noisy orbit — water jousting on the Royal Canal, rivalries older than the harbour walls, and a community that knows exactly who everyone is and has strong opinions about all of them.

Then the chief judge of the joutes is found dead in the harbour at dawn.

The police are competent. The suspects are obvious. A young jouster with a grudge. A promoter who was publicly humiliated. A poet whose decades-long feud with the dead man has become local entertainment. Elodie has no authority, no badge, and no intention of getting involved.

But she was a teacher for thirty years, and teachers read people the way other people read menus — thoroughly, suspiciously, and with an eye for what's been left off.

When she begins reading the poet's work, she discovers that the town's favourite rivalry may not be what it seems. That thirty years of public hatred might be the most elaborate disguise Sète has ever applauded. And that the truth Marcel Duval died for is far more human — and far more devastating — than anyone on the quay is prepared to hear.

The third book in the Canal & Croissant Mysteries. Tielle, oysters, one indispensable cat, and a mystery that asks whether a whole town can misread a love story for a generation.

Story

Pistou refused the outing at once.

He had followed her as far as the gangplank, looked toward the canal where the noise had already thickened into a wall of voices, and sat down with his back feet neatly under him in the position that meant no. Elodie had respected the decision. He was now on the stern deck of Le Livre Vagabond in a patch of sun, supervising harbor life from a distance that suited his standards.

“You are wiser than I am,” she had told him.

He had not disputed it.

The canal looked sharper under full sun than it had under the previous evening’s parade light. The colors were harder. The white of the jousters’ outfits struck the eye more cleanly. The painted boats — red and blue, polished and maintained for this very kind of scrutiny — cut bright tracks through the water. The bunting strung between buildings did not soften anything. If anything, it intensified the practical drama of the place, reminding the eye at every turn that beauty and municipal overconfidence often shared infrastructure.

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