Spirited Aimée Leduc, a private investigator based in Paris, has been introduced to the Cao Dai temple by her partner, René, who urges her to learn to meditate as a counterbalance to her frenetic lifestyle. A Vietnamese nun asks her for a favor--to hand over a check and bring a package back to the temple. But this act of kindness ends in a stranger's death and leaves her with a bullet wound in the arm, a check for 50,000 francs and a trove of ancient...

The story of "Highway" Sanchez - bon vivant, world traveler, auctioneer - and his teeth is like Johnny Cash meets Robert Walser in Mexico. "I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I'm grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Euripides Lopez Sanchez, was given to saying, is character forming." Gustavo "Highway" Sanchez...

Jim Henderson is one of six guests summoned by the mysterious Edwin Carson, a collector of precious stones, to a weekend party at his country house, Thrackley. The house is gloomy and forbidding but the party is warm and hospitable - except for the presence of Jacobson, the sinister butler. The other guests are wealthy people draped in jewels; Jim cannot imagine why he belongs in such company. After a weekend of adventure - with attempted robbery...

Unable to decide which of her many collections to take to school, Hannah surveys her collections of buttons, shells, feathers, and other wonderful objects and comes up with a unique solution.

Hidden behind the Picassos and Vermeers, the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing, exists another world: the hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms, and cafeteria that are home to the museum's devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 people-along with a few ghosts. A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters,...

"A deeply evocative portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a daring visionary who created an inimitable legacy in American art and transformed the city of Boston itself. By the time Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her Italian palazzo-style home as a museum in 1903 to showcase her collection of old masters, antiques, and objects d'art, she was already well-known for scandalizing Boston's polite society. But when Isabella first arrives in Boston in 1861,...

" The Imperial Wife is a smart, engaging novel that parallels two fascinating worlds and two singular women. Irina Reyn writes beautifully of immigrants, art and the vagaries of love." --Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins Two women's lives collide when a priceless Russian artifact comes to light. Tanya Kagan, a rising specialist in Russian art at a top New York auction house, is trying...