Blurb

A chocolatier who won every year. A Christmas market that couldn't afford to lose him. A cat in a scarf who keeps visiting the wrong stall.

Elodie Marais didn't plan to spend Christmas alone. But the canals have closed for winter, Le Livre Vagabond is locked in place, and Strasbourg's oldest Christmas market is the only world she has until spring. She fills her days with vin chaud, bredele, and the company of Georges Keller — a seventy-four-year-old chocolatier whose handmade pralines and antique molds have made him a living institution.

Then Georges is found dead behind his market stall at dawn, and the police call it an icy fall. The medical examiner is not so sure. Georges had enemies — a rival pâtissier with a secret worth hiding, an antique dealer reshaping the market's most prestigious award, and a committee that preferred innovation to tradition. He was days from exposing something that would have upended them all.

Elodie tells herself this is someone else's case. Pistou, padding the cobblestones in his knitted scarf, tells her otherwise — one stubborn stall visit at a time.

A warm, festive cozy mystery set among the Christmas markets of Strasbourg, for readers who like their murders served with mulled wine, antique cookie molds, and a cat who follows his nose to the truth.

Canal & Croissant Mysteries, Book 4