Ghosts of Saint-Michel (American Mysteries in Paris, featuring Ricky Jenks)

Marva Dobbs has a life most people would envy. An American who has lived in Paris for most of her adult life, she runs a popular African-American soul food restaurant, and her thirty-year marriage has produced a beautiful grown-up daughter. So why is she jeopardizing everything for a fling with her sous-chef, a mysterious twenty-eight-year-old Algerian man named Hassan? Marva begins to ask herself the same question when she returns from summer vacation to find that Hassan is missing, and that he is the main suspect in the investigation into the bombing of a building in Paris that left one man dead. And then she disappears, leaving her bewildered daughter and secretive husband to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.