A Cyclist’s Guide to Villains & Vines

Book 2: Cyclist's Guide Mystery

by Ann Claire

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; International Crime & Mystery; Mystery

Synopsis

When ex-pat bicycle proprietress Sadie Greene guides a hard-to-impress group of sophisticated seniors on a stunning trip in northeastern France, she expects some twists, turns, and sudden stops to sip the Riesling. She doesn’t anticipate a detour leading straight to murder . . .

Sadie Greene and her Oui Cycle crew vow to wow her most discerning private group yet with a trip they will never forget. It won’t be easy. The Silver Spinners, six globetrotting seniors, arrive with thrilling tales of two-wheeling adventures. Sadie worries she’ll fail to impress such worldly travelers, even with the backdrop of Alsace, a dreamy region of rolling vineyards, delicious cuisine, and fairytale architecture. Sadie is dead wrong. Her group is stunned, but not for the right reasons . . .
 
Trouble starts when a guest crashes into a corpse on a solo midnight ride. Or so she says. But when body isn’t found, Sadie hopes it was all a bad dream. She aims to reset the mood with a fun, sunny day pedaling through the vineyards. However, an impromptu detour ends in a crash, and a shattered wine barrel isn’t the only victim. A dead man spills out. Sadie still thinks they can ride away unscathed. After all, who would they know so far from home? Murder once again throws a wrench in Sadie’s gears. The corpse has shocking links to her tour.
 
The Silver Spinners are key witnesses, prime suspects, and dangerously eager to play amateur detectives. Sadie finds herself tangled in the chaos. With her guests’ lives and Oui Cycle’s reputation on the line, Sadie is determined to trail the culprit. But can she stay on course long enough to reach the truth, or is she heading for a fatal collision with a cunning killer?
 

 

Release date: May 27, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

Saturday:

The village of Riquewihr, just after midnight.

KEEP PEDALING AND LEAVE YOUR REGRETS IN THE DUST. So said a mug I once spotted in a thrift store back in my hometown of Elm Park, Illinois. I still think of that mug. Not because it was a rare find. The base had a chip, and all-cap italics dubbed it the property of STEVE.

I’m Sadie. Sadie Greene, proud proprietress of Oui Cycle, the best little bicycling-tour company in southern France. But pedal away regrets? There’s a message I can embrace.

I urge my sleep-soggy legs to pedal faster. My wheels and bones chatter over ancient cobblestones as I aim for the flickering halo of my headlamp. Too far ahead, another lamp bobbles into the darkness. A darker darkness, I note. Overhead, clouds as gnarled as witches’ fingers grasp at a plump moon. Run! I want to yell to the unsuspecting celestial body. Look out behind you!

For a moment, the moon appears to hear. With a triumphant glow, it slips free, etching the skyline like a page from a pop-up storybook. Steeply pitched roofs glimmer in dragon-scale tiles. Stork nests as big as king-sized beds perch atop chimneys, and a tower of stone and timbers watches over the slumbering village.

A surreal feeling grips me. My bike and I have ridden back in time! I imagine the sights and sounds. Women in rustling gowns, come down from the castle on the hill. The scrape and creak of wooden-wheeled carts, the clop of hooves. Minstrels and knights, bakers and archers and—

My front wheel slams into a gap-toothed pit in the cobblestones. Reality shoots back with pain from my wrists to my molars. My lamp stutters.

All the while, regret spins merrily along at my side.

Leave your regrets in the dust? That mug was a liar!

Do I regret sinking my life savings into a bike touring company I purchased sight unseen? Never! Do I wish I was still toiling in my suburban Chicago accounting cubicle instead of leading cycling tours around glorious France? Double, triple, infinite times nope! However, while I may be a former accountant, I’m a forever enumerator. I shake aches from my wrists and launch a mental tally of remorse.

For one, I should have bought that mug. The message was inspiring, and for $1.99, I could have overlooked the chip. As for Steve, well . . . I could have launched a Steveware collection worthy of an ironic coffeehouse. Plus, the vessel was technically a vat, capable of holding a good four cups of coffee, the minimum I’ll need in the morning.

Correction, later this morning. My eardrums still reverberate from riding under church bells announcing the time in sixteen clangs: four for the top of the hour, twelve for the time.

There’s a bigger regret: it’s after midnight. I should be back in my bed. And what a luxurious bed it is, fit for a princess and the posh inn my tour group will call home for the next week. The pillows are perfectly plump, the sheets soft as silken filigree, and the eiderdown duvet just right for the dew-cooled night.

Which rolls into my prime regret: not only did I abandon my bed, but I also let Keiko Andersson drag me out into the dark. Ye olde fallacy, “The client is always right,” requires serious questioning at all hours but especially around midnight.

A bang slices the inky silence. A door? A shutter? Jousting knights? A dog barks, a single sharp note bouncing off tile and stone. My rationalizations tap out their own tally.

I am out here because Keiko Andersson—a guest—begged me for help. Because she was ashen-cheeked and insistent. Because of what she saw.

Said she saw, I amend. Thought she saw.

I shift to rational explanations: Keiko saw a shadow, a trick of the dueling moon and clouds. Things look different at night. We’ve proven that by circling the village of Riquewihr at least three times, searching for the spot where Keiko—

Nope! I won’t even think the words. There are so many more probable possibilities. A nasty prank. An honest misunderstanding. A medical emergency, happily resolved.

That’s really why I’m out here. I am here to politely prove my tour guest wrong. Keiko will thank me later. We’ll laugh about it in the morning. Better yet, we’ll never mention it again.

I stomp on my pedals. Farther ahead, Keiko zips around a corner, a sixty-eight-year-old leaving me in her dust. In my defense, she’s on an e-bike from my new battery-assisted fleet. If my wheels and teeth stopped clattering, I could follow the bike’s breathy acceleration through the quiet lanes.

I’ve never seen Riquewihr so deserted. Granted, I haven’t ridden its streets after midnight. I’ve only been here a week. I arrived early to plan for this tour. More correctly, to cram like a student who’s forgotten to attend class all semester, the night before the final.

There’s another regret: I need sleep if I’m going to bring my guiding A-game to this group. Sure, they seem like six pleasant seniors, a cycling club with a cute name, the Silver Spinners. They are pleasant and enthusiastic. They’re also intimidating and know everything about, well... everything.

I want to wow the Silver Spinners. They want to be wowed. They said so on their pre-tour questionnaire. Stun us! Thrill us! Show us something to die for!

No dying! Death is not on our itinerary!

As for wowing, I’d feel more confident back in my home base of Sans-Souci-sur-Mer, a village with “no worries” right in its name, nestled between the Mediterranean Sea and the high Pyrénées. The Silver Spinners requested a tour in Alsace in the northeast of France, my farthest tour from home yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to be here. Alsace is glorious, an idyllic wonderland of fairy-tale half-timbered houses and rolling vineyards, perfect for cycling.

This, however, is not my idea of idyllic. I round a corner too fast. My back wheel skids. An age-buckled wall juts into my path, pale as bone. I do what I warn my guests against. I squeeze my brakes and propel toward the handlebars.

Accidents can happen faster than a blink on a bike, the stuff of a cycle guide’s nightmares. I wrestle my bike back into balance and face a personal guiding fear: I’ve lost my rider.

“Keiko?” I stage-whisper into the inky silence.

Narrow lanes spoke in three directions, gobbled by shadows. The clouds have caught the moon, and moths muffle the wan glow of an antique streetlamp. Reading the mood, my handlebar lamp flickers, dims, and dies.

Great. Just great. Cue another regret. I failed to charge my lamp. A year into professional tour guiding and I’m still making rookie mistakes.

I try again. “Ms. Andersson?”

High on a third floor, lace curtains waft, as if softly snoring. A rhythmic whoosh brushes overhead. I look up in time to spot a stork glide by. Storks are considered good luck here, yet the sight seems so prehistoric that I grip my handlebars tighter, lest my bike and I tumble down, down, down through the eons.

Where is Keiko? I can’t flee this time warp until I find her.

I listen, hard. Soft clacks come from above. Clicks and scrapes. I hope it’s only those good-luck storks. I’m searching for the flashlight app on my phone when more human sounds reach me—a low, muttering grumble. At first, I think my feelings have taken flight. That mutter sounds frustrated. That would be me! Except my jaw remains clenched shut and the sound comes from the lane to my left.

Of course it’s that lane, the darkest of the three, no wider than my arms outstretched. In a scary movie, that’s where danger would lurk. A psychotic mime, ready to overact strangulation. A charcuterie maniac, armed with cleaver, hook, and curing salts.

Given what Keiko said she saw, that just might be true.

I wheel my bike down the inky tunnel, calculating an escape. A bicycle can act as a shield. Gears can be a weapon. I can leap to my saddle and—

A dogleg corner opens into a small courtyard shaped like a wobbly triangle. Ancient buildings press shoulder to shoulder, nodding in sleep. Keiko stands at the center, her bike lamp aimed at a hip-high wine barrel.

She wrenches the handlebars, turning her lamp into a color wand flashing over rosy plaster, golden roses, and shutters in periwinkle, emerald, sea blue, and red.

“This is the place,” Keiko says, frowning all around.

I wrench my expression into what I hope is professional concern and care. A polite fib. My true feelings combine giddy relief with You dragged me from my princess bed and scared me half to death for nothing? But that’s okay. It’s okay!

“It’s not right,” Keiko scrapes a hand through her hair, mostly dark with silver highlights. A daisy print decorates her cycling shorts. Pink earbuds dangle from the pocket of her peachy windbreaker. She’s all of five-foot-nothing with a towering confidence I attribute to her profession. Keiko is an orchestra conductor, semi-retired. Our cycling tour had to work around her schedule. She had a classical music festival in Stockholm in July. Later in the fall, she’s co-organizing a Wagner “extravaganza,” fifteen hours of opera to be staged in a grand converted chicken barn near her home in the Cotswolds. I’ll cycle all day, but that much opera in a barn sounds like way too much endurance for me.

Keiko points to the barrel as if directing it to change its tune. “I recognize that barrel.”

I do too. I came by this courtyard the other day on a dining reconnaissance mission. The barrel held handwritten menus for a winstüb, a rustic bistro serving local favorites, heavy on German influences. Think ham hocks and sausages, pretzels, chicken braised in white wine instead of red, and sauerkraut. Lots and lots of sauerkraut. I have pickled cabbages on my itinerary.

On my prior visit, I snapped photos of the menu and the scene. The wineshop next door is picture perfect, its second story decorated in old-timey vineyard equipment: baskets, hammers, and the spigot-tapped tops of wine casks. A vintage handcart stood out front, filled with geraniums color-matched to blood-red shutters. The cart must be tucked inside for the night, like the suits of armor that guarded the antiques gallery next door and the statue of a beret-wearing pizza chef at the restaurant on the corner. At the pizzeria, I photographed my first encounter with tarte flambée, a crispy flatbread topped with crème fraîche, onions, and smoky lardons. What a revelation! Continued taste-testing research is needed.

Keiko’s lamp flashes over metal. The pizzeria’s aluminum tables and chairs are stacked against their restaurant for the night. Come lunchtime, they’ll extend into the courtyard and bordering lane—a lane that leads downhill before a short quarter-mile spin to our inn. We could be back in our beds in a flash. I inch my bike that way.

Keiko whips her handlebars back toward me.

I blink against the light. “Well, then!” I announce. Tour guides everywhere would recognize my tone, taut but firm, a tone that says Okay! We’ve enjoyed just about enough of this trainwreck of a stop! “We can return to the inn down that lane,” I add, gesturing hopefully.

Keiko wheels her bike in the opposite direction. She stops at the wine barrel and wobbles it, ear cocked toward its hollow, empty clonk.

“I wasn’t even going to turn,” she muses, her hand on the barrel. “A cat ran across my path, coming from this direction. I had to swerve and ended up here. It was a calico. You know how calicos are.”

I don’t. I nod along anyway. When confused, I have a bad habit of bobbing my head as if I understand. This automatic reaction—like my semi-obsession with croissants—was cemented on my first trip to France. Then, just out of high school, my A grades meant I could formally announce my name, ask directions to libraries and swimming pools, and talk exhaustively about luggage.

But I wanted to understand. I felt like I should. Thus, I nodded along to whatever French speakers might be saying. You have a dire disease? Why, yes, sounds wonderful! You want to sell me a large household appliance? Oui, oui, merci!

“Calicos are bossy,” Keiko says. “They have ‘tortitude.’ You can look it up.”

My head agrees. Fine, my priority is to herd Keiko back to the inn. Tomorrow, I’ll redeem the sweet reputations of calicos.

“So I come this way and that’s when I see it.” Keiko scowls back at the cobblestones.

My head switches course to no, no, non!

“A man.” Keiko lowers her voice. “A dead man!”

Chills skitter up my arm. I stare at stones worn smooth by the centuries. They’re clean. Clear of any bodies, that’s for sure. Even stray geranium petals have been brushed into a neat row by the antiques shop.

Too clean? No! Ridiculous! Riquewihr is among the officially designated Most Beautiful Villages of France. Les Plus Beaux Villages de France are tidy and safe. They’re filled with flowers. They are most definitely not scattered with bodies.

“I didn’t hit him.” Keiko’s eyes shift from mine. “I swerved just in time.”

Is she protesting too much? But there’s no body to hit. I clasp my hands in a prayer disguised as a rallying clap. “Well!” I announce again. “He’s gone, so . . .” So, let’s get out of here!

Shutters creak shut somewhere above us. Keiko is a statue, melded to the stone.

What does she want me to do? I remind myself that tour guests crave new understandings of the world. I wave an open palm over the corpse-free cobblestones and offer fresh perspectives. “Perhaps the gentleman was drunk? A local who enjoys the wine too much? A tourist? People on vacation let go.”

There’s a thought. I inch closer to Keiko and take a discreet (I hope) sniff. I detect delicate jasmine perfume and a scowl equivalent to a slap.

“I know what I saw,” Keiko says. “He was right there. Right where you’re standing.”

My feet lurch back before I can stop them. They, along with my twisting stomach, believe Keiko.

“Did you . . . ah . . . check his pulse?” My mind spins more rationalizations. He fainted. He swooned from the Most Beautiful Village beauty of it all, recovered his senses, and stumbled home to dream of half-timbers and pickled cabbages.

Keiko’s lip curls in revulsion. “I don’t go around touching strange men.”

Then—just as I’d feared—there’s miming.

“He lay like this.” Keiko splays an arm and twists her head, chin up, mouth and eyes wide.

“Oh, don’t give me that look!” she huffs, when I apparently fail to hide my horror. “He was dead. Even if he hadn’t been lying like that, he had the aura. The death aura. You, of all people, should understand, Sadie Greene.”

Me, of all people? I could feign incomprehension or offense, but I know what she means. I also know that literally and metaphorically, lightning can strike the same place twice. So, too, could crimes zap a small cycle-touring company centered on joy, discovery, and stops for croissants.

But come on! What are the odds of such cosmic injustice?

I will myself to shake off the thought, for my head to issue a firm no, no, non! Fear has frozen me solid.

I had followed Keiko into the darkness to prove her wrong. The empty courtyard suggests I did just that. I should be delighted—skipping, cheering, and spinning wheelies. Why, then, am I even more terrified that Keiko is right?

Saturday:

Good morning! I hope you enjoyed your first night at L’Auberge des Trois Cigognes. The Inn of the Three Storks will be our home base for this tour. After enjoying a gourmet breakfast, we’ll strike out for a full day of cycling adventures.

Who came up with counting sheep as a route to sleep? Common wisdom credits an ancient shepherd, tucking in her flock. As a tour guide, I doubt that. Oh, I get the obsessive accounting. But don’t the sheep leap over a fence? A fence they could hurtle back over as soon as the shepherd drifts off? And what about predators slipping under the rails?

When I fell into bed at 1:42 a.m., luxury linens and leaping lambs failed to lull me. If I closed my lids, I imagined dead eyes and Keiko cycling defiantly back into the night as a shadow watched from the vines.

Other numerical distractions also flopped. I ranked recently enjoyed croissants. I counted the steps from the sea to my cottage back in Sans-Souci and the ticktocks of the antique wall clock.

I didn’t sleep. Couldn’t sleep. Or so I thought.

My counting resumes with a shock. Three shocks, actually.

One: I’m suddenly awake, meaning I must have drifted off.

Two: eaves. As in, my attic bed is tucked under a steeply pitched roof. Levitating from my pillow like the possessed protagonist of a horror film means I slam my forehead into fifteenth-century Alsatian oak.

Three: light. Not the pale periwinkle of pre-dawn. Not the golden hues of first sunrise. Not even the dancing sparkles of a near concussion. Bright, clear daylight streams through lace curtains.

I didn’t just sleep. I overslept!

I toss off the abused duvet and tug on work attire, once again giving thanks for spandex, with no time wasted buttoning, zipping, or heaven forbid, ironing.

The wall clock reads 8:40. Up in the village, a bell clangs once for the quarter hour. I’m so late that minutes matter. By my carefully calibrated schedule, we will depart for a full day of cycling at precisely nine.

I hurry down the back stairs, flip-flops slapping wood. I’m usually the hotel guest who tiptoes and whispers. Desperate times! Plus, this home-turned-inn is exclusively ours for the week. The innkeeper and her family live in a separate cottage just across the exquisite back garden. I hope my riders will be out in that garden, strolling among the blooms. Better yet, I hope they’re in their rooms getting ready for the day. I don’t want them to see me, frazzled and late. Early impressions matter in tour guiding.

I collected the Silver Spinners from the Strasbourg train station yesterday morning. I arrived early, clutching a sign with their name. Then I almost missed them because I was ogling the station, the historical façade encased in a modern glass shell, like standing in a Christmas ornament.

The Spinners were blasé about the station and my memorized lines extolling its historicist architecture of the Wil-helminian period. They’d seen it before. They’d explored Strasbourg in all seasons, too, including its magical Christmas markets, a treat that’s still on my wish list.

So, I piled them into the Oui Cycle van, and we came straight here. After a leg-stretching ride and picnic at a vineyard, they relaxed at the inn before gathering for a first-night feast. I’d then accompanied Keiko on her midnight body search.

In the bright morning light, that nightmare is fizzling away. A body? A disappearing corpse? Please! How did I believe that?

But I know how. Those witchy clouds and dark alleys. The night sounds and my too-fresh crime PTSD. Keiko, as well, so adamant in her urgency.

The back stairs steepen before shooting me into a between-spaces corridor. I think I hear footsteps shuffling away and a door creaking. My imagination again? Ghosts? If I believed in spirits, I’d picture them haunting this ancient, rambling home. Portraits of the innkeeper’s ancestors watch from a forest of exposed beams as I make my way down the main hallway. I interpret their unblinking stares as disapproving. Who am I to flip-flop through their family home? Who do I think I am, leading tours in Alsace? Anywhere in France? On a bike, no less!

My cottage back in Sans-Souci feels like home now. A dream home, despite some leaky roof tiles and blackbirds nesting in my chimney. My colleagues are like family. I’ve made friends and maybe, possibly, a budding romantic connection. I am known to innkeepers, museum docents, market vendors, and bakers in a wide swath of the glorious Pyrénées-Orientales.

I’m known for my past troubles, yes. However, I’m also increasingly greeted with a bonjour, Madame Greene and chitchat about the weather, baked goods, bikes, or fromage. I adore those hold-up-the-line chats!

Yet sometimes, doubts crash in, hissing in my ear like a leaky tire. You’re an imposter, an interloper, a fraud.

I hustle on, toward voices burbling from the breakfast room. At the threshold, I pause. The room is a newer addition, more air and light than heavy beams. Glass doors open to the flower-filled patio. Cups clink, newspapers softly ruffle, and Scarlett Crabtree-Thorne holds forth at the head of the table.

Scarlett is the matriarch of the group, the queen. She even has a touch of royalty, being married to an honorary knight, Sir Rupert. Rupert isn’t on the tour.

“Rupy never enjoyed cycling,” Scarlett told me yesterday on the way down from Strasbourg.

That’s understandable—except for never enjoying cycling, but to each their own. Other aspects of the absent Sir Rupert are less clear.

Scarlett waggles a butter knife at Keiko, who wears a sunny yellow blouse and a sour-lemons expression. Is she still mad that I refused to call the police last night? And report what? An overly tidy courtyard?

“So, I said to my Rupy—” Scarlett is saying.

Scarlett’s drawl hails from Charleston, South Carolina, where she was born, raised, and married the first of her several husbands.

“I said, ‘Rupy, darlin’, if you don’t join your ancestors soon, I won’t be responsible for what I—’ ”

Join his ancestors? So, this is what I really don’t get about Sir Rupert. Scarlett has mentioned things such as darling Rupert resting in peace and dear, dear Rupy, gone beyond. Is he dead? I can’t very well ask. I keep meaning to google him. A “Sir” must be easy enough to find, especially if there’s an obituary attached.

Scarlett is rolling her head dramatically when she spots me. “Sadie, darlin’! There you are! We worried we’d lost you too!”

Maybe she talks about everyone like that? I press up a smile.

“You poor lamb.” Scarlett pats under her eyes. Her skin is taut and smooth. She’s closing in on eighty and spends her days in the sun. Either she’s cycled to the fountain of youth or a tasteful plastic surgeon. Her hand flutters to her flawless forehead, needlessly pinpointing the location of my blossoming goose egg, a gift from my bedroom ceiling beam.

I know, I know . . . I don’t look my best.

“Just look at her,” Scarlett orders the table. “Our Sadie is exhausted!”

Maurice Guidry and Benjamin “Benji” Patel—partners in love and a shared passion for art and antiques—lower matching newspapers and assess me. Two heads shake. They add a chorus of tuts.

Scarlett turns back to Keiko. “Kei-Kei, apologize. This dear girl is spent, and we haven’t even started. We can’t have her flatlining like that unfortunate Tunisian guide we had to leave behind.” Her razor-sharp bob is flashy silver, dyed with a shimmery swatch of ruby red.

“That was a tiresome tour,” murmurs Maurice, crossing spindle-thin legs, ropey with cycling muscles.

“No, no! I’m fine,” I assure them. “Great! Grand.” I hope I’m not tiresome. A guide must never be tiresome, or boring, or bossy, or prone to crime, getting lost, or running late. “I just need—.” Coffee. I need coffee.

The table is decorated in red-and-white Alsatian linen. There are pretty porcelain cups, wicker baskets, and cut-glass carafes. There’s also destruction. Desolation. Crumbs and pulp and beautiful buttery shards of croissants now gone. A flock of ravenous ravens might have descended on the inn’s “complete and gourmet breakfast.”

It’s fine, I assure myself. I have snacks in my pack, and my tours include stops for fortification at least every fifteen kilometers. By fortification, I prefer croissants, but when in Alsace, a soft pretzel or apple strudel will certainly do.

But coffee . . . I count four French presses—cafetières, I should say—plunged to their desiccated grounds.

“Apologize?” Keiko huffs. “Why would I apologize to Sadie?”

“I’m the one who should be apologizing,” I say to Keiko’s hearty agreement. “I overslept. It’s these lovely beds. I must have slept like the—” My hasty fib is careening toward a verbal hazard. I try to reverse. “I mean, I slept—”

“Like the dead?” Keiko interjects, tone as dry as a week-old baguette. When I wince, she turns to . . .