Bordeaux

February 10, 2014
In Hubbard’s intricately plotted second Vineyard mystery (after 2012’s Champagne: The Farewell), Det. Max Maguire of the NYPD accompanies American wine critic Ellen Jordan to Bordeaux, where Ellen asks Max to guard one of four magnums of wine, each potentially worth over $30,000. Ellen thinks these wines may be counterfeit; auctioneer Paula Goodwin claims that they are authentic. Experts are to test the wines’ bona fides at the annual tasting of regional wines in the village of Lussac. Soon after Max and Ellen arrive at their hotel, Ellen is found asphyxiated in her room and the wine Max was guarding disappears from the hotel safe. Max, whose intuition tells her Ellen’s death was murder, joins French magistrate Olivier Chaumont, a past lover of hers, in the subsequent investigation. In the course of interviews with numerous suspects on both sides of the Atlantic, readers will have great fun learning about the wine industry.

March 1, 2014
Welcome to la belle France, land of wine and murder. Soon after she's caught on video getting a little too rough with a rapist while her partner stands back watching, NYPD detective Max Maguire returns to France as a bodyguard for wine critic Ellen Jordan. Max's father, Hank, a revered NYPD officer, and her mother, a member of a wealthy aristocratic French family who cast her off when she married Hank, have combined forces to send her to France with Ellen, who's made important enemies by lowering her score on several wines and declaring the valuable bottle a wealthy collector purchased a fake. When Ellen dies in her hotel room, Max convinces examining magistrate Olivier Chaumont that her death was murder. As she resumes her love affair with Olivier, they become entangled in both the tricky murder case and a potentially major scandal concerning French wines rebottled and passed off as expensive vintages. Max tries to maintain her cover as a bodyguard while meeting various people involved in the wine business, each of them a suspect in both fraud and murder. When Max accompanies Ellen's body back to New York, Olivier quickly follows, posing as a wine collector. Digging into the American connection places their lives in danger. This second case for Max (Champagne: The Farewell, 2012) offers a wide range of suspects along with a love affair with both a complex Frenchman and France itself.

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April 15, 2014
NYPD detective Max Maguire, upon being written up for use of excessive force, is suspended to give her some time away from her job. Through family connections, she is assigned a temporary job accompanying a renowned wine critic with a valuable magnum of vintage wine to Bordeaux. The critic, an old friend of her mother's, has received threats after declaring another bottle of the vintage to be fake. Within hours of landing in France, the critic is murdered and the wine missing from the hotel vault. Max is thrown into the case with French magistrate Olivier Chaumont, with whom she had worked on a prior case in Champagne. Oliver, however, has his own case, one involving wine counterfeiting and smuggling, with some of the best families in the French wine trade as suspects. The joint investigations go forward during a week with both elegant receptions in old chteaus and whirlwind trips to Parisand grittier chases through Bordeaux and New Jersey warehouses. The second in the series also brings us the next chapter in the on-again, off-again affair between Max and Olivier. A good choice for Peter Mayle fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)