Holing Up in Trémolat

 Le Vieux Logis is in the tiny village of Trémolat, a small cozy hotel on the banks of the Dordogne River. An ideal place to hole up while imagining life and events not far away in Taziac. The hotel and grounds are idyllic and the inventive cuisine of the Logis’s restaurant has been called by some “remarkable.” After my first dinner there, I thought so too. Though the foie gras served with champagne at the Élysée had been excellent, the foie gras served with a fig preserve at the Logis was the best I’d ever tasted, ambrosial. The delicious meal was accompanied by a Bergerac dry white-–magic caught  in a bottle. Amazingly, the wine had the same exquisite smell as the pergola grapes in the hotel garden.

Though the Logis doesn’t appear in The Paris Directive, it’s the sort of place the two retired French secret agents in my novel would have loved. Especially Emile Pellerin, who fancies himself a gourmand. In retirement, Pellerin and his friend Hubert Blond are hardly on vacation. They’ve opened a somewhat shady consulting business in Paris. Assignments like the tricky but lucrative one they’ve just received from an old friend at the Foreign Ministry have comfortably supported their expensive tastes. In fact pay much better than their old work at the DGSE. With luck, this new job may even provide enough for the elegant résidence secondaire at the top of their wish list. First, though, they must deal with the man from Berlin. If he’s as difficult as they’ve been told, it won’t be easy.