"PI Mac Reilly, the star of TV's Mac Reilly's Malibu Mysteries, and his fiancée, Sunny Alvarez, are looking forward to spending June at Chez La Violette, a villa they've rented in St. Tropez. Sunny arrives first, only to discover that they've been scammed, along with a number of others who thought they were renting a fancy house on the French Riviera, among them Belinda Lord, the estranged wife of a Russian mobster, and widower Billy Bashford, a Texas rancher, and his eight-year-old daughter, Laureen. After Mac arrives, Sunny and Mac decamp to the nearby Hôtel des Rêves, where they help protect Belinda from her nasty husband and become entangled in some art thefts in St. Tropez. An enchanting subplot involving the cute but realistic Laureen, who befriends an abandoned 11-year-old boy staying at the hotel, lifts an escapist eclair into something more substantial" -- from author's web site