- Death at the Château Bremont
- Murder in the Rue Dumas
- Death in the Vines
- Murder on the Ile Sordou
- Mystery of the Lost Cézanne
- Curse of La Fontaine
- Secrets of the Bastide Blanche
- A Noel Killing
- Vanishing Museum of the Rue Mistral
- Disaster at the Vendome Theater
The author, Mary Lou Longworth, was born in Toronto but has lived in Aix-en-Provence since 1997. In 1996 she and her husband were living in Santa Cruz, California when he applied for a webmaster job in Gémenos, France, located outside of Marseille. You can read all about how they got to Aix in Mary Lou’s About info on her website.
When Mary Lou moved to Aix, she lived in an apartment overlooking St. Jean de Malte’s church, which became Marine Bonnet’s apartment in the books. The church is located near the intersection of Rue d’Italie and Rue Cardinale, about 3 blocks southeast of the Cours Mirabeau. Antoine Verlaque’s apartment is on the other side of the old town, on tiny Rue Esquicho Coude between Rue Gibelin and Rue Campra. In between the two apartments is the Cour d’appel or Palais de Justice in the books where Verlaque is the magistrate or judge, in which capacity he works as a detective.
BritBox has made the mystery series into a TV series called Murder in Provence starring Roger Allam (who plays Thursday in PBS’s Endeavor series). We watched it a year or so ago and it didn’t seem right to have an Englishman playing Antoine Verlaque. I think he was definitely miscast. It only played one season.
When you read the mysteries, you need to have Google Maps nearby so you can look up the streets, like Rue Rifle Rafle. What a name! I guess it’s where we got riffraff from.
