by Jeffrey Ford
First published 2004
Piero Piambo commands the highest fees among New York's society portraitists in 1893. When the mysterious Mrs. Charbuque offers him an unusual commission, he accepts despite the strange terms. He must paint her portrait without ever looking at her, questioning her from behind an ornate screen while she remains hidden. She promises to double his already substantial fee if the finished work captures her true likeness. As their sessions progress, Mrs. Charbuque tells him about her bizarre childhood in a frozen landscape, where she helped her obsessed father study snowflakes as divine language. Her stories weave through fame and despair, mixing reality with phantasm. Meanwhile, women across the city begin dying mysteriously, blood streaming from their eyes like tears. Piambo grows convinced these deaths connect to his enigmatic client and his impossible task. The deeper he ventures into her world, the more his sanity fractures under the weight of secrets that may cost him everything.
Genres: art, 20th-century, crime, adult-fiction, dark-fantasy, 19th-century
Vibes: dark, emotional, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: deception, unreliable-narrator
Setting: New York
Period: 1893
326 pages · Paperback · Tor Books
Content warnings: mental-illness