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Fiona Davis's stunning debut novel pulls readers into the lush world of New York City's glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors lived side-by-side while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success in the 1950s, and where a present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a dark secret buried deep within the Barbizon's glitzy past. When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren't: plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn't belong--a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she's introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that's used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the possibility of romance. Over half a century later, the Barbizon's gone condo and most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of Darby's involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman's rent-controlled apartment. It's a combination too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby's upstairs neighbor, to resist--not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose's obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed.
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Darby comes to New York City's Barbizon Hotel for Women to stay while she attends classes to become a secretary. It's 1952 and Darby doesn't have much on her plate of worth for women of this time: she's plain and she's poor, and she's spent her youth being cruelly bullied by her mother. Secretarial school isn't going well, and the fashion models she meets at the hotel are as brutal as her mother. And then she meets the hotel maid, Esme, and Esme introduces Darby to the vibrant world of jazz, and for the first time, Darby starts to live life. But there's another side to the jazz world that's dark, and we know this will not end well.
There's another storyline here, with Rose, an investigative reporter in present-day, looking into the Barbizon Hotel and Darby and Esme, and that's intriguing, too.
Mystery. Adventure. But the real draw of the story is the Barbizon Hotel and the women of the 1950's. A fascinating tale.