Elodie Marais
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 teacher, 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
