Can't Wait to Read...

Champagne: The Farewell (Vengeance in the Vineyard #1) by Janet Hubbard (Poisoned Pen Press, various formats, 7 August 2012).

Twenty-nine-year-old NYPD detective Max Maguire flies to France to attend her friend Chloe Marceau’s wedding at a grand estate in the Valley of the Marne in Champagne, an hour and a half east of Paris. She meets the older and more urbane Olivier Chaumont, a juge d’instruction, or examining magistrate, and experiences a fairy tale evening. But when Chloe’s widowed aunt, the beautiful and successful Lea de Saint-Pern, is found murdered after the wedding dinner, Max and Olivier are shocked back into their respective professional roles.  But to Max’s chagrin, Olivier is put in charge of the investigation and she is banned from an official investigative role.

The value of vineyards and champagne companies is at an all-time high, and Olivier learns that there are several people attempting to gain control of Lea’s business at the time of her death. Max, with her quintessential American girl next door look (belying a gritty interior), takes a stealthier approach.  Quietly using the sleuthing skills inherited from her famous detective dad, she insinuates herself into the victim’s family until their long-held secrets begin to spill out like marbles from an overturned dish. After another family member is found dead on the day of Lea’s funeral, however, Max puts her career, and her tentative relationship with Olivier, in jeopardy as her determination to find the murderer—and prove herself in the process—takes over.



In the Shadows of Paris (Victor Legris # 5)  by Claude Izner (Minotaur hardcover, 4 September 2012).

I haven't read any of this series before, but the publisher's  description of this installment has me hooked:

In the turbulent Parisian summer of 1893,Victor Legris has vowed to his fiancée to give up the dangerous hobby of amateur sleuthing to concentrate on selling books.

But a killer is at large, leaving mysterious references to a leopard in his notes, and intent on revenge for events that took place many years before during the Commune. When a bookbinder friend of Victor's dies in a house fire that does not seem to be accidental, the young bookseller feels impelled to resume his detective work and uncover the identity of the Batignolles predator. Alongside his trusty assistant Jojo, Victor embarks on a new investigation in the bourgeois quarters of Paris, where scoundrels abound and streethawkers call out their wares among market stalls, under the bloody shadow of the Commune.

 

 

 

Sacrifice Fly by Tim O'Mara (Minotaur hardcover, 16 October 2012).

 

 Raymond Donne wasn’t always a schoolteacher. Not only did he patrol the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as one of New York’s Finest, but being the nephew of the chief of detectives, he was expected to go on to bigger things. At least he was until the accident that destroyed his knees. Unable to do the job the way he wanted, he became a teacher in the same neighborhood, and did everything he could to put the force behind him and come to terms with the change.

Then Frankie Rivas, a student in Ray’s class and a baseball phenom, stops showing up to school. With Frankie in danger of failing and missing out on a scholarship, Ray goes looking for him, only to find Frankie’s father bludgeoned to death in their apartment. Frankie and his younger sister are gone, possibly on the run. But did Frankie really kill his father? Ray can’t believe it. But then who did, and where are Frankie and his sister? Ray doesn’t know, but if he’s going to have any chance of bringing them home safely, he’s going to have to return to the life, the people, and the demons he walked out on all those years ago.