by Katy Hays
First published 2022
Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City hoping to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she gets assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum filled with medieval and Renaissance art. Ann joins a tight circle of researchers: Patrick Roland, the unpredictable curator who studies tarot history; Rachel Mondray, his beautiful associate; and Leo Bitburg, who tends the museum's garden of medicinal and poison plants. Ann wants to escape her troubled past in rural Washington and win approval from her new colleagues. She goes along with their unusual theories about fortune-telling, thinking it's just academic interest. Patrick believes ancient divination can predict the future. When Ann finds a lost deck of 15th-century Italian tarot cards, she becomes the center of a dangerous contest involving power, friendship, and ambition. Then someone dies unexpectedly. Everyone becomes a suspect. As events spiral beyond control, Ann must figure out whether the tarot cards can reveal not just the past, but her own future.
Genres: fiction, art, historical-fiction, crime, contemporary, art-history, dark-academia, academic
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotional, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: dangerous-contest, found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, Washington
Period: 15th-century, Contemporary
387 pages · Hardcover · Atria Books