Cover Art (c) Roger Kopman. People often ask me, "How did Mrs. Duchesney become a famous Paris sleuth?" I tell them it should have been easy to predict that Francine Robinsworth Duchesney would find success doing something unexpected of a young woman from a small town in the American Midwest. For you see, she had never been what others in that part of the world might call normal. When I came to Paris in search of Mrs. Duchesney, a person described to me as the legendary Paris Sleuth Extraordinaire, I did not imagine her to be the unassuming little woman seated alone on a bench in Parc Montsouris. There was nothing extraordinary about this vaguely fashionable bundle of clothes, whose face was hidden beneath a hat and eyeglasses. Born with an exceptional curiosity, in a small town jam-packed with well-preserved century-old mysteries, where indiscretions lined cellars and attics like jars of last year's apricots, Francine found no lie was so well constructed, no secret so well kept, no treasure so deeply buried that she could not discover it. My interviews with Mrs. Duchesney would be the focus of my first year in Paris. After that, I was completely seduced by the woman and the city, forgetting the reason I had come there and finding new reasons to stay.