Paramour's Daughter: A Maggie MacGowen Mystery »

Just a few hours before she is murdered, a foreign stranger claims she is a close relative of investigative filmmaker Maggie MacGowen. It is a truism that it's a wise child ...

Publishers Weekly

Edgar-winner Hornsby's enthralling seventh Maggie MacGowen mystery (after 2009's In the Guise of Mercy) takes the documentary filmmaker to France. Late one night in the parking lot of a Malibu, Calif., supermarket, an erratic old woman with "a pretty little accent" accosts Maggie, claiming that Maggie is her daughter, Marguerite. Later that same night, the woman turns up dead from a hit-and-run. During a visit to her mother in Berkeley, Maggie learns a 43-year-old secret from her mother, who tearfully confesses that "a beautiful young French scientist named Isabelle" had a baby, Marguerite, whom Isabelle gave up to Maggie's parents. In France, Maggie becomes the center of an inheritance controversy involving her birth mother's family, including cousins, an uncle, and a half-brother, each of whom has hidden motives. Murder follows a funeral at the family's palatial Normandy estate. Readers will almost be able to taste the food and drink the author so vividly describes. (Sept.)