French Pastry Murder

Lucy Stone, her husband, and her three friends and their husbands—all of them are going to Paris, winners of a tv star's attempt to reward efforts of women in their communities. In Paris, all eight are given free cooking lessons. But this is a mystery, so it isn't long until Lucy Stone runs across a murder (possibly her twenty-first, given that this is a series).

I can take cardboard characters. I can take cardboard plots. I will sacrifice these for a Paris setting. But when these cardboard characters don't like Paris...well, that's too much for me. It got where I was writing down all the slams against my favorite city: The buildings are all alike (unlike the variety of buildings in Maine where Lucy lives). Notre Dame is “dingy.” Lucy's daughter is living and working in Paris and she thought “France was a horrible place.” Lucy's daughter called the apartment where she was staying “a dump,” and she said her roommate was terrible. Lucy distrusted “all Frenchmen.” The line to the Musee d'Orsay was “too long,” and the visitors just left. Monet's paintings at Musee d'Orangerie were “too chaotic.” Lucy tells her friends that she would “never understand these French people.”

If that wasn't bad enough, there is also a great deal of slamming of “the Arab or Muslim population, whatever you want to call them.”

I have no doubt that there are probably people like this in America but that doesn't mean I have to spend time with them.