Book Review: Montmartre Mysteries

Book: Montmartre Mysteries (Winemaker Detective Mysteries book #8) by Jean-Pierre Alaux and Noel Balen with translations by Sally Pane

Source: Borrowed from Publisher/NetGalley for an honest review

Publication: Available now

Description:

Wine expert Benjamin Cooker travels to the French capital, where he is called to help care for some vineyards in Montmartre, a neighborhood full of memories for him. He stops in on an old friend. Arthur Solacroup left the Foreign Legion to open a wine shop good enough to be in the Cooker Guide. But an attempted murder brings the past back into the present. But which past? The winemaker detective and his assistant Virgile want to know more, and their investigation leads them from the sands of Djibouti to the vineyards of Côte du Rhône.


Rating: 2 stars

Review:

In Monmartre Mysteries, Wine Expert Benjamin Cooker and his trusty assistant Virgile Lanssien traveled to Paris for a wine tasting. But Cooker was also in the city to visit Bretonneau Hospital on a request to see if he could help them salvage the vines in the hospital's vineyard.

As Benjamin Cooker was on his way to visit his friend Arthur Solacroup, a local wine seller, he witnessed something strange. He saw a man dressed in fatigues and wearing a ski mask run out of his friend's wine store. When Cooker went into the store he found a horrible sight, his friend had been shot. He was still alive but in poor condition.

Although Cooker and Solacroup were friends he didn't know a lot about him. He couldn't stop thinking about the attack or Solacroup's mysterious past, wondering if the two may be connected.

I do enjoy this cozy mystery series but I was disappointed with this story because all the ingredients were here for a good mystery but it barely contained one. The fun of reading a mystery is reading along following the clues and see if you can figure everything out. This story didn't provide a lot of clues and there was no way that reading this, the reader could figure out the mystery. Which is why I was very disappointed with the ending because that was nothing more than information dump.

The mystery may have been a bust but I love the writing, the characters and the scenery. Perhaps the next book will include a much more developed mystery.