Madame Valenne

Paris, before Hastings, before Chicago, before any of it: a woman arrives at the Gare du Nord with one suitcase, three false names, and several thousand pounds' worth of stolen jewellery sewn beneath the lining — by the time she reaches the Hôtel Saint-James, Veronica Lakewood no longer exists and in her place stands Madame Valenne, widow, traveller, no forwarding address; in a hotel salon near the Parc Monceau she meets the people who will shape the next years of her life — Dolores Vega, a Cuban singer with a mended green dress and a lover too honest for Paris; Armand Séguret, a melancholy thief watching from the fireplace; and Emilio Vargas, dark, elegant, and dangerous, a man who looks at women as if they were jewels temporarily misplaced; when a midnight knock draws her into a world of stolen papers, opera boxes, hidden curtains, and a powerful woman whose missing hour holds the key to everything, what unfolds is the story Veronica never told anyone — the Paris chapter that made her who she became and the one she spent years trying to forget; Madame Valenne is an original Golden Age–style mystery about reinvention, survival, and the discovery that the most dangerous thing a woman on the run can do is stop running long enough to care about someone.