Death in the Dordogne

The February weather may be dark and dismal, but the locals provide plenty of color as ""a newly installed Englishman"" in rural southern France copes with odd neighbors (a secretive doctor, a reclusive Dutch woman, a goat-breeding English alcoholic) and odder fatal accidents in Louis Sanders's engaging debut, Death in the Dordogne, translated by Adriana Hunter. The genial narrator, lacking anything better to do, busies himself with investigating, and he turns up old grudges that lead to new crimes in the first of a series.