The Cursed Sommelier

The sommelier Hugo Marchand is famous for three things: an impeccable palate, a wounded elegance, and bad luck. Every client who has hired him to appraise a cellar has died within a month. Now a cantankerous collector of first-growth Bordeaux has been found dead in his own tasting room, and Hugo was the last person to see him. The town calls it the curse. Viveka Nordqvist, the bookseller next door, calls it nonsense — and calls the funeral a crime scene. She doesn't believe the heart attack. She doesn't believe the wiped glass. And she doesn't believe in a bottle of 1961 that keeps turning up at auctions it shouldn't. Between a forger who has been dead for two years, an auction house with a celebrated director, and two more bodies staged as accidents, Viveka and Hugo have one evening — one public tasting — to pour the truth.