THE BEQUEST

Trying to save an endangered friend, a young American historian rushes around Europe trying to uncover a link between the court of Catherine de’ Medici and a priceless emerald from the New World.

Isabel Henley leaps at the chance to continue her historical studies by joining the graduate program at St. Stephens in Scotland, far away from her estranged family and her married professor/lover in Boston. She’s also eager to study with Madeleine Grangier, “French feminist extraordinaire,” and reconnect with Rose Brewster, the “beautiful wunderkind” who set the bar for Isabel in college in both scholarship and social success. But when she arrives, she learns that Madeleine has just died in a fall, and while it’s been written off as an accident, there are some who find her death suspicious. Isabel throws herself into the challenges of research—her topic is the women of Catherine de’ Medici’s court—and breaking into the department’s social hierarchy. Rose welcomes her with open arms, and she finds herself drawn romantically to another professor. Then Rose goes missing, and a suicide note is discovered. Weeks later, Isabel finds a hidden recording from Rose that reports she is being held against her will and urges Isabel to take over her research into a little-known Renaissance-era Italian family that may have been the owners of a priceless emerald, current whereabouts unknown. This research takes Isabel to Genoa, Florence, and Paris, always with the sense that Rose’s captors are breathing down her neck as she works desperately to uncover the mystery of the Falcone family and the emerald, unsure of whom to trust. There’s an academic bent to the mystery; this one will appeal to lovers of Dan Brown and Elizabeth Kostova and other mysteries of old documents and historical figures.

For lovers of history mysteries: a less robust Da Vinci Code, less complex The Swan Thieves.