This one is fun--a young and desperate girl, a former artists' model, talks her way into a job as a private secretary at the Frick Mansion in 1919, and gets entangled in a whole mess of secrets, lies, and family drama.

Decades later, another young model, also desperate for money, is at the Frick Mansion (now a museum) and picks up on some clues concerning the prior scandal. It's an easy, enjoyable read, drawing parallels between two different time periods, and teaching some history lessons about the Frick family's accomplishments and dysfunctions.

As Fiona Davis explained in the author's note, she likes "to layer a fictional story over the scaffolding of historical facts" and that's just what she did here. The coincidences are perhaps a bit too strong to be entirely believable, and the story wraps up altogether too neatly--but it's satisfying to read a happy ending to the plot, the mystery solved and the enemies reconciled. (Sadly, some of the historical figures who were inspirations for this tale suffered much worse fates in real life.)

NOVEL: The Magnolia Palace

AUTHOR: Fiona Davis

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2022

IMAGE: book cover, Dutton