The Magnolia Palace by Fiona Davis

 

Publisher: Dutton

Publication date: January 25th 2022

Pages: 368 pages

New York City, 1920 Twenty-one year old Lilian Carter has just lost her mom after the terrible Spanish flu of 1919. Since a few years, she is modeling for painters,, with statues based on her figure gracing landmarks from the Plaza Hotel to the Brooklyn Bridge. and she lives in a single room. But her life changes when one day she walks downstairs to go out and sees the lifeless body of the wife of her landlord through a door cordoned off by police. As they are questioning everyone in the building, they also question her about her relationship to her landlords. She is in a bit of a crappy situation, as her landlord recently made romantic gestures to her that they would find her way for her to pay her missed rent. Now she is the main suspect in a murder, her name is in all the papers and goes on the run. She is seen accidentally as someone else applying for a private secretary job at the Frick mansion in New York. And this is her chance to hide, as apparently no one knows who she is under her real name.  She becomes the private secretary of the demanding Helen Frick, the daughter of the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, but during her stay there she becomes a bit too much in an intertwining web of  romance and family drama, stolen jewels, that starts to mess with the situation she run away from, and her life is again in danger..

 Fifty years later, model Veronica Webb is trying to make it as a model, which lands her someday from London to the Frick Collection in New York for a modeling shoot.one of New York City’s most impressive museums. But when she gets fired is dismissed from the Vogue shoot taking place at the Frick Collection, she finds herself in the locked up museum during a citywide power outage, She stumbles messages that will lead her and Joshua, who is locked up in the museum too on a hunt that could not only solve Veronica’s financial woes, but could finally reveal the truth behind a decades-old murder in the infamous Frick family...

As in all her previous books, this newest book also takes place in a historic and well known building in New York City. In the previous book the stories took place in The Dakota building, Grand Central Station,  the Chelsea Hotel and the New York Public Library. This time Fiona Davis takes the reader into the Frick Mansion (now the Frick Collection) into a bedazzling and breathtaking story. The storyline is, also as in her previous books, fantastic. The characters of Lillian and the Frick family and their staff really came alive in this book and takes the reader in a time travel back to 1919.  The story starts thrilling and during Lillian's time working as Helen's secretary, things get more and more thrilling, untill Lillian cover is blown and her whole world shatters in pieces. But fifty years later, Veronica is putting back the pieces, and I really liked how this set some things straight and how it wrapped up this brilliant story. I really love the books by Fiona Davis, and this book is just another jewel in her book collection, don't miss out this book when it comes out the first month of 2022!!