Death and Fromage (Follet Valley Mysteries #2)

by Ian Moore

‘Then I shall stick with this excellent Sauvignon Blanc, thank you, as nature intended,’ he added grandly and in French.

Noel Mabit was an odd little man, dressed almost like a waiter himself, which was quite un-French as they prefer informality in a formal setting.

Their low whispers may have bordered on silence, but spoke volumes.

‘Yes, Richard, but you are English,’ Valérie said emphatically, as if that automatically rendered his opinion null and void.

Richard answered stealthily, having learnt long ago to keep his opinions on women away from other women.

‘Madame, monsieur – Guy Garçon. Call me GG.’ He shook hands enthusiastically while Richard tried to work out why he pronounced it JJ, before remembering it was one of many carefully laid traps of the French language: the G is pronounced J, and vice versa.

That it had set the cat among the proverbial pigeons

Hangovers can be dealt with in a morning; in the evening they offer the potential ruination of two days.

promise of a post-meeting verre de l’amitié, the traditional glass of rosé without which no French public meeting could possibly end.

Richard couldn’t help thinking that Grosmallard was taking things a bit far by equating the swapping of real goat’s cheese with a vegan substitute to actual, physical murder, but then this was France.

An optimist might look on it as a form of jealousy, but Richard had given up optimism sometime around puberty as a trap to catch the unwary traveller in life.

there’s the complicated French protocols of greeting, how many kisses, which cheek and so on and which was a political and social minefield;

‘We have the aforementioned Scotch eggs; Melton Mowbray pork pies; I’ve made my own coronation chicken; there is potato salad; Red Leicester cheese; Jacob’s cream crackers; Marks & Spencer’s cloudy lemonade; I have those dreadful mango chutney poppadoms that you love. And…’ She paused for effect. ‘Ta da!’ She pulled out a family size bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut.

What was the guilt for, though? Post-coital? Surely post-coital guilt was just an English thing?

the starters arrived, which they ate in a very English way – that is, in silence.

‘But whisky is what men drink when they need to feel sorry for themselves, is that it?’

‘Aesthetics are the barriers philosophers put up to stop the appreciation of art,’ he said bitterly. ‘Mending things that don’t need fixing.’

Richard is a watcher, not a doer. He likes to imagine he’s a lover or a detective or on the run, but he wouldn’t actually be any good at any of those things. He’s too English for all that.’

said about her when she’d heard of her death? You should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.