The Curtain Falls

When vintage dealer Nora Blackwell receives a call from a precise, recently retired textile conservator, she expects an interesting acquisition. What she finds, hidden in the lining of an extraordinary 1920s beaded coat, is something far more consequential: a fragment of musical manuscript, signed with two initials and a single sentence in French.

Ce que j'ai composé ne mourra pas avec moi. What I have composed will not die with me.

The manuscript belongs to Élise Lavigne, a French composer who vanished in occupied Paris in 1943 and whose music was believed entirely lost. The coat belongs to Iris Calloway - one hundred and one years old, living in a Northampton memory care facility, and the only person alive who knew Lavigne personally.

Following the thread from Millbrook to Northampton to the archives of Lyon to the streets of Paris, Nora, with her Labrador retriever Gatsby leading the way, her journalist partner Marcus at her side, and a chain of remarkable women guiding her toward the truth, gradually assembles the full picture. She is able to complete the seven-song cycle hidden across a coat, a manuscript, and decades of faithful keeping. And a composer whose disappearance was not what history assumed.

Warm, quietly suspenseful, and deeply felt, The Curtain Falls is a story about the things we carry, the people who keep them safe, and the room - inside every life - where nothing truly dies.