Who hasn't dreamed of a life in the perfect French chateau? When electronics magnate David Crown finds himself at the scene of a hate crime, his idyll in the Midi countryside abruptly ends. Against a backdrop of Gallic bonhomie and summer's languid ripening, David, his bookish girlfriend Rowena, and his demented mother Miriam struggle to make a home of a gilded Mansard as it swiftly devolves into a web of mishap and murder. With deftness and compassion, Casper Silk entwines the destinies of a village thrust into the new millennium, a teenager convicted of a firebombing, and a man struggling, at midlife, to cross a border and seize his dreams. "In this well-crafted literary novel, the author captures the myriad nuances of a mid-life crisis and brings to life an idyllic village in the French Midi only to haunt it with dark forces. The perfect chateau proves no refuge for protagonist David Crown. Amid a hail of firebombs and truffles, his world comes tumbling down." David Liss