Let me sum that up a bit: this novel is set at the Cloisters, a place I've visited and enjoyed, and the characters are mostly museum professionals.
Sounds like something I'd love, right?
Then you can imagine just how badly these characters were written for me to have profoundly disliked this mess.
I'll whip through a summary here. Ann, the PoV, gets to the Met and learns the guy she was going to be working under has had to go off to Italy, so there is no position for her anymore. Coincidentally, a guy comes into the office of the woman talking to Ann and needs a new person to help out at the Cloisters. He offers the spot to Ann and off they go. Ann also meets the older girl she'll be working with, who is a rich, gorgeous, highly intelligent blonde named Rachel. Ann and Rachel will be doing research for Patrick, the guy who offered Ann a spot. He's the curator of the Cloisters and working on an exhibit based on divination. He's obsessed with the tarot.
Ann soon falls in with their little crowd. Rachel and Patrick are a not-so-secret couple. Leo, the gardener, is quickly interested in Ann and they become a thing.
Then Ann discovers a set of tarot cards bought by Patrick actually is much older than they seem. They have false fronts revealing an original design behind, and Ann has a paper that links them to a famous Renaissance family, proving tarot was used for divination a lot earlier than scholars thought. She shares this with Rachel and they sneakily leave Patrick out and work on an article about the cards themselves.
Patrick turns up dead. Leo is arrested. Ann begins to have other suspicions and digs into Rachel's past, then realizes she's the actual killer. Rachel set up Leo but the evidence is too circumstantial to charge him with murder. Ann also realizes Rachel killed her parents and sets Rachel up to die the same way. Ann publishes the article on her own and gets a full-time assistant curator position.
So let's look at the horrible cast.
Ann is definitely suffering some grief from her father's death. He was a natural linguist, but worked as a janitor in the university she ended up attending, picking up scraps of papers in different languages in the trash of the buildings he cleaned and teaching himself and Ann new languages that way. She has a definite passion for her field, but her specific area is very limited, which is why she wasn't accepted at any schools. She's caught up in the NYC museum world and tries hard to keep up with Rachel. She and Leo have a decent thing, but Rachel gets in the way of that and Ann ends up choosing Rachel and their work over Leo. After Patrick's death, Ann learns that Leo has been stealing from the Cloisters and she's pretty upset about it, but she's the only one. I wasn't a big fan of how she stole one of the tarot cards from Patrick, made her discovery, and then kept it to herself to further her own career. She was always a boring character, but that made her really unlikeable. I liked her a little more as the story went on. She made sure Leo was held accountable for the thefts. She confronted Rachel about her murderous habits and she put Rachel in the same situation Rachel put herself and her parents in, leaving her life in the hands of fate. The biggest surprise for me in this book wasn't that Rachel was the killer, but that Ann also was a killer. She's the one who did the hit and run that killed her father. There were no hints at this at all, so it comes out of left field pretty well. Her father was still alive and urged her to flee so it wouldn't ruin her life any more than his death already would. So her grief over him makes a lot of sense, because she's also carrying around the guilt of his death. Though it was explained that there wasn't any avoiding it. His car broke down in a very dangerous spot of road and he was likely going to be hit by someone. It just ended up being her. While I do like that Ann got back at Rachel and punished her for murdering people, as there was no way the legal system was going to be able to, I don't like that Ann got where she wanted to in life in such a duplicitous manner. If you're looking for morality, it's not in this book.
Rachel is barely a likeable character ever. Typical spoiled rich girl involved with a man too old for her. She's never had friends, which is kind of a sign there's something wrong with her. Rich people usually at least have hangers-on. All she's capable of seeing is how she can get what she wants. She sets her parents up to have a boating accident, though she also could have died in it. She just happens to live. Her roommate in college committed suicide and there's no way of proving she did anything, but she likely did. She gets involved with Patrick to further her career and then, before Ann is there, sleeps with Leo for fun. Then she's not content to let Ann end up with Leo without messing with that. She gets Ann to keep the secret of the cards and work on the article behind Patrick's back, even though he owns the deck. I'm not sure she's ever supposed to be likeable or relatable. She may be written this way on purpose.
Then there's Leo. The author thinks so little of him that he doesn't even rate a solid physical description. I think tall and lanky are about all she gave him. Leo is a wannabe playwright, who grows poison plants at the Cloisters, keeps cuttings from them and sells them in some of the NYC street markets. Illegally. He also is revealed to be a thief and then tells Ann that Rachel helped him out with this. He puts no sense of value on historical objects and for that, I'm glad he got caught. I never liked him. He wasn't portrayed as the bad boy so much as an asshole almost all the time. He was okay in his earliest scenes but quickly went downhill. He's even happy to be doing jail time for his thefts, because he sees it as writing time.
Patrick is a caricature. Older professor who likes the younger girls. Naturally he's hooking up with one of his researchers, Rachel, but I'm sure he's done it before. He doesn't seem to ever really do much within his field. He obsesses over the tarot and does ritualistic readings in the Cloisters library.
The other characters are the Cloisters themselves, the world of academic and museum scholarship, and the tarot. All are handled equally poorly. Most of the book is set in the Cloisters, but the descriptions don't really take you there. They made me remember a few things from my visit, but I never felt truly there. Academia is mostly represented by rejections (true) and the poorly-written section on a symposium. I wanted so much more from characters who should have all been scholars. And the tarot was treated the worst. Ann has zero interest in and then all of a sudden feels this mystical connection and then it's like overnight she learns everything about it. Really badly written.
So yeah, way to take a good premise and setting and turn it into a boring, shitty book. The only thing I really enjoyed was the reveal that Ann killed her dad. I'm impressed with how I did not see that coming. A few things made me happily remember New York City and the Cloisters, but that doesn't mean the author handled them well. Just means it doesn't take much to trigger good memories.
Skip this one.
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