Over the Edge: A Melissa Craig Mystery

English crime writer Melissa Craig, seen before in A Little Gentle Sleuthing , is researching her next novel near the Cevennes mountains in the south of France while her friend Iris Ash teaches an art workshop at a friend's estate. Within days, two bodies are found at the foot of a nearby cliff and the feisty heroine is soon hard at work ferreting out the murderer. Although Rowlands's cozy mystery features a secondary cast with two English women named Rose Kettle and Dora Lavender and such other genre staples as a some dour Germans, suave Frenchmen and a plodding gendarme, both characterization and charm are scant here. At center stage is a plot that twists back to the Nazi occupation and beyond, to the local Camisards' religious conspiracy of the late 17th and 18th centuries. The likable Melissa competently unravels the complicated tangle of decades-old resentments and present-day sorrows that led to the deaths before she and Iris head back to the Cotswolds. (May)