by Erica Vipond (Author)
In this striking and suspenseful story of love, mothers, and memory, Starling Darling is Lucia's journey to reclaim what's hers and let go of what's not. Can she find a way toward an unwritten future by forgiving her mother without abandoning herself?
"I never wanted to be a mother."
Lucia Starling's mother says the unforgivable. Five years later, Lucia must contend with the past when her estranged mother Rowan, a prominent museum curator in New York City, has died. After being bequeathed Rowan's 18th-century jade necklace with a handwritten letter, Lucia is desperate to escape her grief by fleeing to Italy.
What begins as a journey of heartache becomes a logistical nightmare. While in Rome, worlds collide during a tense encounter between Lucia and two strangers, Oliver Str?m and Victor Hedlund. The result afterward is catastrophic; her hotel room is burglarized-and with it, her passport alongside Rowan's necklace.
As Lucia quickly devises a plan to find both before they're lost on the black market forever, she runs into Oliver in the last place she'd ever expect. Forming a tenuous alliance, they voyage on a daring mission to catch the culprit, soon learning that Lucia's stolen necklace is only the beginning.