The Last Time I Saw Paris

The Last Time I Saw Paris is Elizabeth Adler’s 2001 expatriate-romance novel and a clean example of the format she made her late-career trademark: a recently single American woman inherits something complicated in Europe, moves there to deal with it, and slowly accepts a life she did not plan. Lara Lewis, a recently widowed Texan, learns that her husband had a Paris apartment, a Loire Valley chateau, and a daughter she had never met. She goes to Paris to sort the legal mess and ends up sorting her own life instead.

Adler’s strength is sensory atmosphere, and The Last Time I Saw Paris is one of her better outings on that count. The early Paris chapters are tactile (the cafe terraces on rue de Buci, the inherited apartment’s shutters, the bistro habits Lara slowly adopts), and the Loire-Valley sections give the second-act romance an actual setting rather than a postcard. The romance plot is exactly what the dust jacket promises: charming, well-paced, no surprises. The grief plot is more interesting than the romance, and the daughter subplot is handled with more care than the genre usually allows.

Recommended for fans of Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun) or Joanne Harris (Five Quarters of the Orange), and for readers looking for books like The Last Time I Saw Paris in the late-life-Paris-romance shelf. Four stars and one of Adler’s reliable comfort reads.