Mastering the Art of French Murder: An American in Paris Mystery by Colleen Cambridge, published in 2023 by Kensington Books, is a work of fiction. The novel centers around Tabitha Knight, an expatriate that moves from Detroit, Michigan, to Paris, France, shortly after WWII. She lives with her Grand-père and Oncle Rafe across the street from her new best friend and confidante, Julia Child, before her future career as a world-renowned French chef.
Julia's sister Dorothy or Dort, as she is known, lives upstairs from her and often invites the members of an American theater troupe she works with over for drinks after an evening's performance. While attending one of these gatherings, Tabitha meets a young woman named Thérèse, who works in the coat check room at the theater. By the end of the evening, the woman turns up dead, and except for the murderer, Tabitha is the last person to see her alive.
When the murder weapon turns out to be one of Julia's best chef's knives, and Tabitha's address...written on a piece of paper by Tabitha herself... somehow finds its way into the victim's pocket, it doesn't look good for this new American in Paris. Tabitha soon finds her life in danger when she puts her amateur detective skills to work, much to the chagrin of the local police...Inspecteur Merveille, to be exact.
Cambridge's Mastering the Art of French Murder has all the elements needed for a good solid mystery. Murder, mayhem, and international intrigue abound. However, some characters needed to be fleshed out more...two prime examples are Inspecteur Merveille and Oncle Rafe. Is there a possible relationship brewing beneath the surface between Tabitha and Merveille? Exactly, who is Oncle Rafe, and what is in his past that is often hinted at but never spoken of?
Too much time and attention were also devoted to Julia's disastrous attempts at making mayonnaise. When Julia makes an excited phone call to Tabitha to come over to her apartment to sample the frothy concoction, as it turns out, it seems overplayed. It leaves the reader with the impression that the Julia Child character is a highly-strung, somewhat silly woman, which the real Julia Child was not. It also adds nothing to the plot or the solution to what could be an excellent story, minus some of the minutiae that gets in the way at times.
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