A Cyclist's Guide to Villains & Vines

by Ann Claire

Overview

When expat bicycle tour proprietress Sadie Greene guides a group of sophisticated seniors on a stunning trip in northeastern France, she expects some twists, turns, and sudden stops to sip the Riesling, but not a detour leading straight to murder in the latest sparkling armchair travel mystery from Ann Claire.

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 a 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 dead man spills out of a shattered wine barrel. With the Silver Spinners as key witnesses, prime suspects, and dangerously eager to play amateur detectives, Sadie finds herself entangled in chaos. Determined to catch up to the culprit, Sadie will have to stay the course long enough to reach the truth before she heads for a fatal collision with a cunning killer . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496745729
Publisher:	Kensington
Publication date:	04/28/2026
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Ann Claire is the USA Today bestselling author of the Cyclist’s Guide Mysteries and the Christie Bookshop Mysteries, as well as the Bookmobile Mystery Series and the Santa Fe Café Mystery Series written under the pennames Nora Page and Ann Myers. She lives with her French husband in Colorado, but regularly travels to visit family in Southern France. A member of Sisters in Crime and the Pikes Peak Writers, she can be found on Instagram @AnnClaireAuthor or @AnnClaireMysteries on Facebook.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for A Cyclist’s Guide to Villains and Vines

"Managing her freewheeling bunch gives Sadie little time for sleuthing, but no worries—they have that covered and then some!" —Kirkus

From the Publisher

2025-04-19
Bike tour guide Sadie Greene goes literally out of her comfort zone, taking a half-dozen Anglophone tourists through Alsace.

Sadie, an American expatriate, has finally settled into her chosen home in Mediterranean Sans-Souci-sur-Mer. As owner and operator of Oui Cycle, she believes firmly that the customer is always right. So when the Silver Spinners, headed by formidable South Carolina native Scarlett Crabtree-Thorne, want to cycle through northeastern France, Sadie’s game. The village of Riquewihr seems like a likely starting spot, and in deference to the cyclists’ age, rather than riding point-to-point, she’ll make L’Auberge de Trois Cigognes the tour’s home base, with day trips to charming nearby villages tailored to the seniors’ endurance. Her charges’ physical limitations turn out to be the least of Sadie’s problems. The rambunctious seniors oversleep, drink lots of wine, ignore Sadie’s historical insights, and wander off path. Fascinated by neighbor Pierre-Luc Bauman’s old-fashioned high-wheeled bicycle, Scarlett diverts the group to an impromptu garden party at his estate, and they miss their lunch reservations. Longtime partners Maurice Guidry and Benji Patel get the group thrown out of Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg for trespassing. But the two who cause the most trouble are the quietest. Orchestra conductor Keiko Andersson insists she saw a dead body on the main street of Riquewihr, forcing Sadie to make a fruitless midnight ride in search of Keiko’s phantom corpse. Taciturn Keiko has the last laugh nonetheless: There’s a dead man stuffed into one of Pierre-Luc’s wine barrels. He turns out to be Edwin Perch, long-departed husband of Scarlett’s reserved English goddaughter, Rosemary, who’s also on the tour. Unfortunately, Edwin was also the common-law husband of Gabi Morel, innkeeper of Trois Cigognes.

Managing her freewheeling bunch gives Sadie little time for sleuthing, but no worries—they have that covered and then some.

Kirkus Reviews