Synopsis

In Castres, France, Lucie Archambault has come home to begin again. A respected art conservator and recent widow, she has traded the pace of Paris for the quieter rhythms of the Goya Museum, the Saturday market, and a town she once thought she knew. But when Émile Bonnafous, a beloved antiques dealer and one of Castres’s great local characters, dies in what appears to be a tragic fall, Lucie cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong.

The deeper she looks, the more the polished surface of small-town life begins to crack. Old rivalries, family silences, half-finished manuscripts, and a grief-stricken city all seem to point in different directions. Even Lucie’s own brother, distant for decades, may know more than he has ever been willing to say. As questions multiply, Lucie finds herself drawn into a mystery rooted not just in one man’s death, but in the long memory of Castres itself.

Set among the riverfront houses, markets, gardens, and stone streets of a real southern French town, The Parliament of Crows is a warm, atmospheric mystery about loss, loyalty, and the hidden lives that exist just beyond ordinary notice. Gentle in tone, rich in place, and quietly uncanny, it offers a satisfying puzzle for readers who love small communities, layered secrets, and mysteries that linger after the final page.

As one of the first entries in the Good Neighbors Mysteries, this novel continues the series’ promise: real towns, authentic local character, and mysteries shaped by the deeper truths each place keeps hidden. In Castres, the streets are old, the neighbors are watchful, and some secrets have been waiting a very long time to be noticed.

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Excerpt

His shop was in the Maisons sur l’Agout — one of the medieval houses that leaned over the river, their wooden balconies close enough to the water that you could drop a fishing line from the upper floors. Émile’s place was wedged between a ceramics atelier and a vacant storefront whose À Louer sign had been there so long the paper had yellowed and curled. The door was painted blue, the paint chipping to show the green underneath, and above it a hand-lettered sign read: Bonnafous Antiquités — Curiosités et Objets d’Âme. Curiosities and objects of the soul. That was pure Émile.

I pushed the door open and the bell chimed — a real bell, brass, mounted on a spring that Émile claimed was from a Napoleonic warship, which was almost certainly untrue and entirely beside the point.

“Pichona!”

Émile appeared from behind a towering armoire like a benevolent wizard emerging from a wardrobe. He was sixty-eight, compact, white-bearded, with the bright dark eyes of a man who found everything interesting and most things amusing. He wore a corduroy waistcoat over a flannel shirt, and his reading glasses were pushed up into hair that had gone from grey to white so gradually that nobody, including Émile, had noticed when it happened.

“I was beginning to think you’d forgotten me,” he said, kissing both my cheeks with the enthusiastic imprecision of someone who considers personal space a Parisian invention.

“I’ve been busy.”

“You’ve been hiding. Different thing entirely. Come, come — the frame is magnificent. You’ll weep.”

I did not weep, but it was a beautiful frame. Émile had sourced it from an estate sale in Lautrec and restored it himself, with a craftsman’s hand that would have impressed my colleagues at the Louvre. He turned it in the light, pointing out the gilding, the joinery, the faint worm-track in one corner that he’d left deliberately because, as he said, “a frame without scars is a frame without a story.”

We stood in the shop and talked. That was the thing about Émile — you came for a frame and stayed for a conversation. The shop helped. It was a cabinet of wonders: clocks that didn’t work, maps of places that no longer existed, a taxidermied owl that watched from a high shelf with an expression of permanent disapproval. Porcelain boxes of military buttons. A brass astrolabe missing two of its plates. A collection of hand-tinted postcards of Castres from the 1920s, pinned to a corkboard behind the register like memories someone had tried to organize. The upper gallery — a mezzanine reached by a narrow wooden stair — was crammed with furniture, paintings, and boxes of papers that Émile swore he would sort one day. The railing up there was low, barely hip-height, made of turned wood that had been elegant a century ago and was now merely old.

“How is the museum treating you?” he asked, refilling my glass without asking.

“Gently.”

“That’s the Goya for you. It takes good care of its people.” He tilted his head — a gesture that reminded me, absurdly, of the crows in the garden. “And the rest? How is Lucie, not the conservator but the woman?”

“The woman is fine.”

“The woman is hiding behind fine, which is not the same thing at all.” He said it without reproach, with the ease of someone who had known me since I was a child buying curiosities with pocket money. “Marc would not want you to be fine. Marc would want you to be furious and sad and alive.”

The mention of Marc’s name from someone who had actually known him — who had met us at the market on our visits home, who had once sold Marc a pocket watch that turned out to be Belgian rather than Swiss and had refunded him with such theatrical remorse that Marc had laughed for a week — landed in a place I’d been protecting. I felt my eyes sting and looked away, toward the river window, where the Agout was visible through wavy glass.

Review

Such an interesting take on a mystery. It fits the definition of a cozy, but it felt a little darker due to the secrets this town has been hiding for centuries.

Lucie is our protagonist, and she is an art restorer. I found the descriptions of her work fascinating. The focus on detail when restoring work is amazing. When her friend is found dead, she suspects foul play despite the potential for it to be an accident. She works hard to uncover the truth, and finds an even bigger secret that her brother, and others, have been hiding from her.

The mystery was easy to follow, and while I might have suspected the killer, I don’t think I could pinpoint anything that pointed directly to them.

It took some time to understand the meaning behind the crows, and it was definitely an interesting twist to the story. I can’t share much more because it would ruin some of the story.

I did have a hard time with the time pacing. I felt like it was day to day, but then there was a mention of a memorial but not that it was for Emile or that time had passed (like weeks). I think that a chapter on the memorial would have been appropriate because there could have been sleuthing at that time.

I was amazed that the police captain just let Lucie in, but at the same time, Lucie uncovered some clues that the police missed.

The one thing I love about European mysteries is that the killer doesn’t go crazy when confronted, and they go willingly to the police to confess their crimes. Not in America!

Overall, an enjoyable mystery and we give it 3 1/2 paws up.