"It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes. Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice...

"Everybody knows that in 1938, runaway heiress artist Juliette Willoughby perished in an accidental studio fire in Paris, alongside her masterpiece Self Portrait As Sphinx. Fifty years later, two Cambridge art history students are confounded when they stumble across proof that the fire was no accident but something more sinister. What they uncover threatens the very foundation of Juliette’s aristocratic family and revives rumors of the infamous...