French Pastry Murder by Leslie Meier ****

French Pastry Murder by Leslie Meier is a cozy mystery, the 21st in the series, but the first for me. In this installment Lucy Stone and her friends (four couples in all) get mixed up in a veritable crime spree involving the french police, the US Secret Service, and King Farouk. While there are two murders, in keeping with the genre, the protagonists are never in jeopardy and have plenty of time to sample the food and tourists sites.

 A couple of times I wondered about the protagonists (from a small town in Maine), and by implication the target audience. For people who wanted to visit France, their knowledge of basics seemed to be limited, while in many other cases, their knowledge of French history was absolutely encyclopedic.

Truffles, for example, could cost thousands of euros for a kilo, which she thought was less than a pound, but she wasn't actually sure.

This seemed doubly odd because these tourists were also buying fresh food, where they should have had plenty of direct experience with kilograms.

Overall, a pleasant cozy mystery.

Post note: Given the title, I expected recipes, but, alas, no recipes.