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"Rich both in twists and period detail, this tale of big-city ambition is impossible to put down."-People

Fiona Davis´s stunning debut novel pulls readers into the lush world of New York City´s glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where in the 1950s a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors lived side by side while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success, and where a present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a dark secret buried deep within the Barbizon´s glitzy past.

When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren´t: plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn´t belong-a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she´s introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that´s used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the possibility of romance.

Over half a century later, the Barbizon´s gone condo and most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of Darby´s involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman´s rent-controlled apartment. It´s a combination too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby´s upstairs neighbor, to resist-not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose´s obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed.

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Fiona Davis is the national bestselling author of The Dollhouse, The Address, and The Masterpiece. She lives in New York City and is a graduate of the College of William and Mary in Virginia and the Columbia Journalism School.

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