After moving to France, Tabitha Knight has a new friend in fellow expat and Cordon Bleu student Julia Child, whose culinary tips can come in quite handy. But something’s cooking in postwar Paris, and it isn’t just cheese soufflé…

Tabitha has enjoyed an entertaining afternoon in Julia’s kitchen, but her return home is a bit jarring. As she arrives at her grandfather’s rue de l’Université mansion, a woman bursts out the door babbling about messages from spirits and a warning Grand-père must heed. Oncle Rafe angrily sends the woman on her way, and neither man will answer Tabitha’s questions.

It’s not the last she sees of the mysterious visitor. While she’s on a date that evening, she’s accosted by her again—and learns that Madame Vierca is a medium who claims to have visions of a dark fate that awaits Grand-père and Oncle Rafe. The very next night, Tabitha’s messieurs host a soiree at their new restaurant, inviting fellow Resistance fighters from the war known as the Nine Bluets. To commemorate the work of the Resistance network, the vase on the dinner table sports nine of the pretty blue flowers.

But shortly after the revelers leave the restaurant, one of Grand-père’s old friends is found dead on the street . . . and one of the nine flowers is missing from the vase. When a second member of the Nine Bluets is found poisoned the next day, and a bluet flower is left with the body, Tabitha cannot ignore Madame Vierca’s frightening predictions about her dear messieurs. She has no choice but to share her suspicions and fears with the enigmatic and unruffled Inspecteur Merveille.

Tabitha soon finds herself caught up in an investigation that takes her and Merveille to the seediest, most dangerous parts of the Left Bank—home of strange, fantastical legends, disquieting events, and unusual people. As she and Merveille desperately try to find a killer, they know they don’t have much time before the rest of the Nine Bluets are targeted . . . including Grand-père and Oncle Rafe.

My Review:

Five years hasn’t been nearly enough time for Parisians to heal from the devastation of World War II and the brutal occupation of their city and country by the Nazis. As this fourth story in the American in Paris series begins, American expat Tabitha Knight hopes that the re-opening of her messieurs’ restaurant, Maison de Verre, is at least a sign that the healing has begun.

Or that at least it heals something for her beloved grand-père and his life partner ‘Oncle’ Rafe, as well as the gang of their old colleagues from the Resistance who are gathering to celebrate their new but well-loved and well-remembered old haunt. It’s just one link in the chain of Paris reclaiming her nickname as the “City of Light” they all love.

But the first complete gathering of their Resistance cell, “Les neuf bleuets”, after the war tragically turns out to be their last. The evening ends with the murder of one of these old clandestine warriors, the man’s throat slit just down the street where the party is still winding down.

The murder is not as much of a surprise to Tabitha as she wishes it were – and not only because she has an unfortunate tendency to trip over dead bodies. This time, it’s not just her penchant for discovering death, it’s that a creepy but rather formidable old fortune teller visited her messieurs just the day before, attempting to warn them that death was coming for all of their old comrades. Very, very soon.

Once the prediction is proven true, Tabitha, along with her best friend and sometime sidekick, the larger-than-life, not-yet-famous, soon-to-be chef Julia Child, hunt down that fortune teller near the old – and infamous – rue des Maléfices. The street of witches.

Madame Vierca may not actually be a witch, but her predictions are frighteningly accurate. So accurate that the killer eliminates her along with as many of the original members of the old Resistance cell as they can get their hands on.

It eventually becomes clear that the killer is re-enacting Agatha Christie’s 1939 classic, And Then There Were None. Which means that one of the supposed early victims is most likely the killer. It’s up to Tabitha, with the able assistance of Inspecteur Étienne Merveille of the Paris police – or the other way around – to unmask the murderer before Tabitha’s beloved messieurs are numbered among the victims.

Escape Rating A+: The title is more apt than it first appears. In the Spirit of French Murder is a story about hauntings. Not ghosts – well, not exactly ghosts – but the haunting of the spirit. And possibly, haunting by spirits.

And all of that is intriguing and fascinating, making this a, pardon the pun, haunting fourth entry in the American in Paris series.

From the outset, this story is about the way that World War II and the Occupation still haunt both the city and the people within it. Everyone was touched by the Occupation. Everyone did things they regret. Everyone lost people they deeply miss. Ultimately, the murder spree in this story is wrapped around one person who survived but lost everyone they loved along that terrible way. A person who, as people often do, assigned blame to those who were still available for retribution instead of the vast anonymous machinery of the war and the dark souls of those who enabled its brutality.

Alongside the murders and the investigation that stalks Tabitha, her messieurs and all the remaining members of ‘les neufs bleuets’ there’s another type of haunting. The story is also haunted by the spirits that both hide and embody the soul of a place where the veil is thin and porous to both memory and the disturbing myths and legends of the weird and the wonderful that can’t be explained – only told and re-told until they become part of the, well, spirit of the place.

As part of her investigation, Tabitha is exposed to many of those old legends, as they loom over the story every bit as much as the late war. One of those myths even comes to life, right before her eyes, and then vanishes in the smoke. As all the best legends do.

I initially picked up this series with Mastering the Art of French Murder for Julia Child. As, I’m sure, did a LOT of readers. She was a fascinating figure, and even more so after the records of her wartime exploits with the OSS were declassified. In this series, she serves as a terrific introduction to life in post-war Paris as an American in Paris.

But if Julia is the bait, Tabitha Knight and her messieurs are the hook that keeps the reader coming back for more, from A Murder Most French through A Fashionably French Murder and now into the dark haunting of In the Spirit of French Murder.

Tabitha Knight is a fascinating amateur detective. On the one hand, she is very much an outsider, an American expat coming to Paris for a fresh start as the city is itself experiencing the same. OTOH, she has connections both to the city’s past and present through her messieurs and an introduction to her new home through Julia.

Between Julia’s friends at Le Cordon Bleu and her messieurs’ wide circle of friends and colleagues, Tabitha is well-within those six degrees of separation to anything and everything. And yet she’s still just a bit outside and sees things through fresh eyes. So she’s both charmed and scared by those Parisian spirits, and yet determined to keep her loved ones safe – even from themselves and their dangerous assumptions about their old friends.

The case is as twisted as the narrow rues and alleys of the old quartiers of Paris. The red herrings are as tasty as anything served up by Julia Child. Julia herself is a marvelously fluting addition to every scene in which she appears – particularly as she introduces Tabitha and the reader to the delights of post-war Paris, especially its open-air markets, its tiny kitchens, and its delicious food. But Tabitha’s quest is dark and dangerous and pokes into shadows that someone does not want to have exposed. That she has a police Inspecteur at her side – or he has her – for the nearly deadly denouement makes the whole misadventure just that much more captivating – and even more impossible for this reader to put down until the last page was turned.

Hopefully, Tabitha will eventually manage to find a way into the heart of that handsome police Inspecteur,  who often sees her as an infuriating nuisance. This series cannot stop until they figure themselves out. After all, as much as Paris is the “City of Light”, it is also the “City of Love”.