It’s summer in the Dordogne and heirs of a modest Périgordian sheep farmer learn that they have been disinherited. Their father’s estate has been sold to an insurance company in return for a policy that will place him in a five-star retirement home for the rest of his life. But the farmer dies before he can move in. Was it a natural death? Or was there foul play?
Chief of Police Bruno Courrèges is soon on the case, embarking on an investigation that will lead him to several shadowy insurance companies owned by a Russian oligarch with a Cypriot passport. The companies are based in Cyprus, Malta, and Luxembourg. But Bruno finds a weak spot in France: the Russian's France-based notaire and insurance agent. As Bruno is pursuing this lead, the oligarch's daughter turns up in the Périgord, and complications ensue, eventually bringing the action to the château of an aging rock star. But Bruno makes time for lunch amid it all.
My friend Joan in Montana is in the middle of reading this one and told me because I asked. The second book was recommended by my friend Cindy when she joined me for lunch recently in the Circle@Crown Café:
Before Jodie Rattler became a star, she was a girl growing up in St. Louis. One day in 1955, when she was just six years old, her uncle Drew took her to the racetrack, where she got lucky — and that roll of two-dollar bills she won has never since left her side. Jodie thrived in the warmth of her extended family, and then — through a combination of hard work and serendipity — she started a singing career, which catapulted her from St. Louis to New York City, from the English countryside to the tropical beaches of St. Thomas, from Cleveland to Los Angeles, and back again. Jodie comes of age in recording studios, backstage, and on tour, and she tries to hold her own in the wake of Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell. Yet it feels like something is missing. Could it be true love? Or is that not actually what Jodie is looking for? It's a colorful portrait of one woman's journey in search of herself.
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