The Art Deco Vanity
A glamorous hotel. A vanished heiress. A beautiful object with the wrong name engraved on it.
Antiques appraiser Susan Stewart arrives at Manhattan's legendary Halcyon Hotel to value a collection of Art Deco treasures before its grand reopening.
One silver-gilt vanity case stops her cold.
The initials LV have been cut over an older monogram. Behind the mirror is a hidden compartment containing a photographic negative that has remained concealed for nearly a century. And the hotel's records tell a story that no longer makes sense.
Then the historian who discovered problems in the collection's provenance is found dead.
The trail leads back to 1926, when the Halcyon was filled with wealthy guests, private transactions, carefully guarded reputations, and a young cloakroom attendant named Cecily Rowe who carried a camera and noticed far more than anyone realized.
Susan has an unusual gift. Certain objects can give her fragments of the lives they once knew.
But memory is not evidence.
To uncover what happened, Susan must follow what can be proved: altered records, coded envelopes, hidden photographs, financial transactions, and a collection built around a story someone desperately wanted the world to believe.
Because the vanity case did not belong to the woman history says it did.
The photographs were credited to the wrong hands.
And someone in the present is willing to kill to keep a ninety-eight-year-old lie intact.
THE ART DECO VANITY is an atmospheric dual-timeline historical mystery filled with antiques, murder, hidden histories, 1920s Manhattan glamour, and a touch of the unexplained.
Perfect for readers of Simone St. James, Susanna Kearsley, and Kate Morton who love mysteries where the past refuses to stay buried. Book Three in The Objects Remember Mysteries.
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