THE BODY IN THE VESTIBULE

Jaunty Faith Fairchild, minister's wife/former caterer and current cookbook writer/amateur sleuth, accompanies her husband Tom and toddler son Ben to Lyon, France, where Tom is doing research. Ben is making friends at his nursery school, and Faith, as usual, is discovering bodies—this time that of a clochard (homeless wino) in their building dumpster. But when she reports it and the police arrive, the body disappears—and the next day the clochard is back at his usual spot in the street, and the gendarmes are writing off Faith's remarks as the delusions of a pregnant woman. But Faith persists, and soon finds herself receiving anonymous notes, strange phone calls, and being kidnapped from her hairdresser's, then escaping to tie together the disappearance of the clochard with the murder of a prostitute and a series of cat burglaries.... Faith is less breezy away from Alesford, Massachusetts, but she does seem to be eating better. Good French food, wine, and ambience, but the mystery is comme ái, comme áa.