Every Charming Detour

Clara Whitfield has come to Paris to start over.

Four months after a breakup and fourteen months without a vacation, the thirty-two-year-old Chicago book editor lands in France for the first time with a colour-coded itinerary, the wrong electrical adaptor, and the quiet determination of a woman who has decided that the best way to stop feeling like a failure is to be somewhere nobody knows her name.

She doesn't plan to fall in love. She definitely doesn't plan to get tangled in a murder investigation.

On her third day in Paris, two things happen. She meets Julien Marchand — a charming freelance photographer who knows every hidden courtyard, every perfect café, every secret the city keeps from tourists — and she learns that a man has been found dead in an apartment across the river. The police are calling it suspicious. The victim had connections to the Paris art world. And nobody seems to know what happened.

As Julien guides Clara through a Paris she never knew existed — moonlit walks along the Seine, dinners in Montmartre, mornings in the Marais — she finds herself drawn deeper into the mystery. Who was Alain Dessigny, and why does everyone in his orbit seem to be hiding something? A bitter American expatriate with a grudge. A glamorous gallery owner with money troubles. An elderly neighbour who sees everything and says almost nothing.

Clara has always been good at noticing things. It's what makes her a great editor — she spots the inconsistency, the detail that doesn't belong, the sentence that's trying too hard to look innocent. But in Paris, the mystery she's unravelling and the romance she's falling into are more entangled than she realises. And the closer she gets to the truth, the more she begins to wonder whether the man showing her the real Paris has been hiding something from her all along.

Every Charming Detour is a romantic suspense novel set against the backdrop of the world's most seductive city. It is a story about trust and deception, about the difference between being shown a place and truly seeing it, and about a woman who discovers that the most dangerous lies are the ones wrapped in love.

For readers who enjoy sharp female protagonists, atmospheric European settings, and mysteries where the romance is as compelling as the crime.