The Normadie Affair: A Henry Wadsworth Mystery

September 1935. The most beautiful ship in the world sails for Le Havre - and not everyone aboard will reach it. She is the pride of France: a floating palace of glass and gold, of grand salons longer than the Hall of Mirrors and a dining room that outshines Versailles. For five days the Normandie will carry the cream of two continents across the Atlantic in a splendor the world has never seen. Henry Wadsworth - Harvard art professor, scion of an old New England family, a man long practiced at the art of appearing to be what he is not - boards expecting only a pleasant crossing shepherding an art collection destined for an exhibition at the Louvre. He could not be more wrong. A man lies half-dead in his office back in Cambridge. Among the Normandie's treasures sits an unremarkable antique writing desk - and someone aboard will kill to possess what has lain hidden inside it for a century and a half. As Europe slowly drifts toward war again, two intelligence services have followed that secret onto the ship, into a world of dîners dansants and champagne sipped beneath towering pillars of Lalique glass, where nothing is quite what it seems. And gliding back into Henry's life, lovelier than he remembered, comes the woman he loved in his youth - though what she wants from him may have nothing to do with love at all. Trapped between a killer, a conspiracy, and a truth he has spent a lifetime carefully sidestepping, Henry will find that the most glittering voyage of his life has become the most dangerous - and that before France comes into view, every soul aboard the Ship of Light may be playing a part in a game far older and deadlier than he could ever have suspected. A whodunit of glamour, espionage, and the heart, set aboard the legendary ship that embodied an age.