The Seventh Unicorn

A beautiful, ambitious 30-something widow searches for a lost (and possibly apocryphal) medieval tapestry—and, with a little less self-awareness, for true love—in Jones's absorbing, thoroughly satisfying debut. Outside Lyon, France, a convent is slated to become a hotel, its nuns shipped off to a nursing home. But might the ancient convent's contents fetch enough at auction to save the nuns' way of life? American-born Alex Pellier, a curator at Paris's Cluny Museum, is doubtful, until she discovers two drawings that seem to point to the existence of a seventh medieval unicorn tapestry to join the set of six in the Cluny. Enlisting the help of an old art school flame, Jake Bowman, Alex tracks the tapestry down and agrees to help the nuns sell it. The legend behind the tapestries—a star-crossed love between a rich young woman and a lowly tapissier —fascinates Alex, whose marriage to rich Thierry was never happy. Jake fascinates Alex, too, and she fascinates him. With all this longing and tension—professional, romantic, sexual—how could the story go wrong? It doesn't. Agent, Julie Barer. (Oct.)