The Velvet Room

The summer of 1925. The champagne is bootleg, the marble is white, and every smile hides a secret.

At the Marivell Hotel — the brightest jewel on the coast — the rich come to confess their sins and call it conversation. They do it in a private salon paneled in oxblood velvet, and they do it in front of Iris Larkin, the house stenographer, because a lady with a notebook is a piece of furniture. She takes their dictation. She bills it to the room. And she remembers every word a guest wishes she would forget.

Iris learned young that the world decides whose word counts before it ever hears the words — that a servant who is also a woman can speak the plain truth in a clear voice and be heard by no one at all. Her father, a court stenographer, was ruined by exactly that lesson. So she has made herself invisible, because a person nobody watches is free to watch everyone.

Then, at the stroke of midnight during the glittering Midsummer Masque, the celebrated soprano La Calanthe sings four bars of an aria and falls dead among the masked dancers. The doctor calls it her heart. Iris knows better. She saw the room before any of them had a story — a laugh on the offbeat, a shawl worked with a hundred eyes, a clock-watcher, a man writing it all down. One of those gestures belonged to a killer.

Behind every gilded mask, a guest is hiding something, and one of them has already murdered to keep it quiet. As the orchestra plays on and the suspects close ranks, Iris must read the truth written between the lines — before the killer decides she has heard too much.

The Velvet Room is a jazz-age mystery of masks, music, and murder, told in a voice as sharp as a wiretap and as elegant as the marble it moves across. Perfect for readers who love clever heroines, glittering settings, and secrets that cut.

Listen closely. The truth is on the page.