In Jazz Age Paris, Harris Stuyvesant is looking for a young woman who seems to have dropped out of sight at the end of March. It's now August, and her family is very worried. Harris has a past as an FBI agent, and a friend recommended him to Phillipa Crosby's family to track her down.
Paris isn't new territory for him, but he hasn't been there in a while, and he didn't previously spend his time looking into the darker corners of the Paris art world. As he looks for Phillipa--Pip, as he knew her briefly back in February--the same three names keep cropping up--Man Ray, Didi Moreau, and a distinguished war hero mostly known simply as le Comte. Pip was drawn into the surrealist art world, whose artists react to the brutality of the Great War by challenging all social norms and bringing dreams and nightmares to life.
As he works his way through the evidence, he learns that Inspector Emile Dussaint of the Paris police has more than thirty unsolved missing persons cases over the last two years, and is looking for a pattern among them. Harris begins to fear that he may be right, and that Pip may be part of the pattern. But along the way, he also finds he has to dig into rather than forget his own past. He's still reeling from the events of three years ago, when his own dreams were exploded, and both an old friend and an old love prove to figure in his investigation. He needs the talents of one, and the other is now attached to the same surrealist art world that has seemingly swallowed Pip.
Historical and fictional characters are blended smoothly, without clumsy name-dropping, and Harris and other major and minor characters have those characters beautifully unfolded before us. It's an absorbing, compelling mystery.
Recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
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