L.K. Bowers

A festival of light. A death in the crowd. A town where celebration can hide old secrets. Every year, Menton's famous Lemon Festival transforms the French Riviera town into a spectacle of colour, music, tourists, and golden fruit beneath the Mediterranean sun. But when a death occurs during the festivities, the celebration is shattered. Commandant Julien Ferrand and his team are called into an investigation where nothing is as simple as it first appears.
Among festival workers, local families, visiting strangers, business interests, and old rivalries, Ferrand must uncover who had a reason to turn Menton's brightest event into the scene of a crime. As the investigation moves from crowded streets and decorated floats to quiet back rooms, private conversations, and the hidden tensions beneath the town's public face, Ferrand discovers that the Lemon Festival is not only a celebration.
It is also a stage - and someone has been using it to conceal the truth. In a place where reputation matters, memories linger, and every witness seems to have seen only part of the story, Ferrand must follow the smallest inconsistencies before the killer disappears back into the crowd. Atmospheric, elegant, and suspenseful, Death at the Lemon Festival is the second book in The Menton Mysteries, a French Riviera police procedural series featuring Commandant Julien Ferrand.
Perfect for readers who enjoy European crime fiction, realistic investigations, coastal settings, slow-burning suspense, character-driven mysteries, and stories where beauty and danger exist side by side. Death at the Lemon Festival can be read as a standalone mystery, while continuing the larger story of Commandant Julien Ferrand and the secrets hidden along the French Riviera.