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Art historian Camille Leray has done well in her career at an upscale auction house as a specialist in French sculpture. She has been singularly focused on the work of an artist named Constance Sorel, who is mostly known as the “muse” as a more famous male artist named Boisseau. Camille is passionate about, almost obsessed with, Sorel’s work and aims to bring more attention to her.
When a statue thought to be Sorel’s lost masterpiece is found and put on sale at Camille’s auction house, she loses her job when she makes a scene about it not being Sorel’s. She can’t share one vital piece of information that makes her reaction make sense: Camille has a gift of sorts, which allows her to enter a piece of art and see its past, feel emotions about it, know about those who created it or owned it. This secret gift has given her a lot of advantages in her work, but now it has ruined her career.
When she gets the opportunity to go to a gorgeous old estate in France to assess statues that may have been sculpted by Sorel, Camille jumps at it. It could save her career.
What complicates matters, at the same time as making the opportunity more enticing, is who owns the estate: the family of Maxime Foucault. She has been fascinated by Maxime for years and hoped for a relationship with him. Now she will be staying at the old chateau with him as she does her work.
It seems that she could achieve everything she had ever wanted: prestige, wealth, love with a man she has admired. But things are not as they seem at the estate. Camille will have to be very careful as she navigates layers of secrets and temptations.
The Estate has many of the elements that satisfy me in a book: a gothic feel, mystery and secrets, intrigue, magical realism, references to Arthurian legend (the chateau is in Brittany, near the forest of Broceliande). I enjoyed the book and how the elements came together. I found myself talking to our heroine, urging her to do or not do certain things, because the stakes were high. I’m not sure I loved all of it (and some didn’t quite work the way I wanted it to or thought would be best), but it was overall a good read.
Rated: High. Profanity includes 15 uses of strong language, a few instances of moderate profanity, about 15 uses of mild language, a dozen uses of British profanity, and about 20 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes references to it and a few brief scenes with limited detail.
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
