Ellen Crosby pours up another corking mystery with The Angels' Share, an intriguing blend of secret societies, Prohibition bootleg wine, and potentially scandalous documents hidden by the Founding Fathers, all of which yield a vintage murder.
When Lucie Montgomery attends a Thanksgiving weekend party for friends and neighbors at Hawthorne Castle, an honest-to-goodness castle owned by the Avery family, the last great newspaper dynasty in America and owner of the Washington Tribune, she doesn’t expect the festive occasion to end in death.
During the party, Prescott Avery, the 95-year old family patriarch, invites Lucie to his fabulous wine cellar where he offers to pay any price for a cache of 200-year-old Madeira that her great-great-uncle, a Prohibition bootlegger, discovered hidden in the US Capitol in the 1920s. Lucie knows nothing about the valuable wine, believing her late father, a notorious gambler and spendthrift, probably sold or drank it. By the end of the party Lucie and her fiancé, winemaker Quinn Santori, discover Prescott’s body lying in his wine cellar. Is one of the guests a murderer?
As Lucie searches for the lost Madeira, which she believes links Prescott’s death to a cryptic letter her father owned, she learns about Prescott’s affiliation with the Freemasons. More investigating hints at a mysterious vault supposedly containing documents hidden by the Founding Fathers and a possible tie to William Shakespeare. If Lucie finds the long-lost documents, the explosive revelations could change history. But will she uncover a three hundred-year-old secret before a determined killer finds her?
Release date:
November 5, 2019
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
336
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A nearly indestructible wine, it improves almost magically with fire and heat. Once upon a time the value of a barrel of Madeira was determined by the number of voyages it made secured in the holds of cargo ships that crisscrossed the oceans. Thomas Jefferson famously used to send his Madeira back to sea—to African ports or the distant Indies—if he decided there were not enough destination stamps on the barrels he’d ordered.
No other wine in the world requires at least half a century to fully mature or can live for two centuries and remain so potent and wonderfully drinkable. To taste Madeira—really old Madeira—is to taste history.
“I have a proposition for you, Lucie.” Prescott Avery’s pleasant baritone, breath hot with alcohol, was low in my ear even though no one else was around. Somehow he had managed to whisk me away from party crowds, rooms filled with laughter and chatter, the clink of china and glasses, and the beguiling beat of a samba.
“I thought we could discuss it over a glass of one of my old Malmseys,” he added.
Malmsey is the best Madeira in the world. Sweet, made from the malvasia grape, it comes from Madeira itself, a mountainous Portuguese island off the coast of North Africa with a reputation as a place of eternal spring.
No one turned down Prescott Avery, even though he always managed to make it seem as if he were doing you a favor when, in reality, you’d find out later it was the other way around. He meant to charm and flirt with me—I already knew that—but in five years, he’d be a century old. This was the harmless seduction of a sweet old man with hearing aids and a cane.
We were at an after-Thanksgiving neighborhood party in his magnificent home, alone in an opulently furnished room filled with museum-worthy art and bookcases lined with leather-covered books, no doubt all rare volumes or first editions. A fire flickered in a fireplace surrounded by an elaborately carved mantel of cream-colored Italian marble. My brain was already buzzy with alcohol, two deliciously lethal Caipirinhas that I had drunk too quickly in the past few hours. If Prescott wanted to make some kind of deal with me, I wanted to be clear-headed and have my wits about me.
“I’d love to try your Malmsey,” I said. “Maybe I could come by one day next week. Now that harvest is over and we’ve finished most of our cellar work, things have finally quieted down at the vineyard.”
Prescott made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “Actually, my dear, I was thinking about right now.”
I didn’t want to do this now. “What about the party? We really shouldn’t leave…”
He gave me a coy wink, cutting off my protests. “Nonsense. It’s my party, isn’t it? Besides, we won’t be gone long.”
It wasn’t actually his party. Prescott Avery II, his grandson, whom the family called Scotty, and Scotty’s Brazilian wife, Bianca, were hosting their annual Saturday-after-Thanksgiving celebration, a traditional feijoada dinner for about a hundred friends and neighbors. Normally the get-together was Atoka’s laid-back antidote to leftover turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, with its Brazilian comfort food menu of black bean and pork stew, garlic rice, fried manioc, collard greens, and sliced oranges. It was served with caipirinhas, Brazil’s potent national drink of muddled lime and a sugarcane hard liquor called cachaça. This year Prescott had insisted the gathering be held at Hawthorne, his home—or “the Castle” as everyone called it—rather than at Scotty and Bianca’s magnificent horse farm just down the road. And this year the vibe was anything but laid back.
A few caipirinhas in and word had gone around that Prescott had insisted that everyone in the family spend the night at the Castle so he could convene a board of directors meeting first thing the following morning at which he planned to share news about the future of Avery Communications. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was on his mind. For the last three years Prescott had watched his stepson Clayton relinquish his role as publisher of the Washington Tribune to his two grandchildren, Scotty and Alexandra. He had also witnessed their increasingly public feud over how the newspaper should be run. Clayton, caught up in an ugly divorce, had done little to tamp down or even discourage the bickering between his son and daughter until it had finally disintegrated into two warring camps at the Trib. This afternoon Alex and Scotty were barely speaking to each other and when they did, they were icily civil.
Maybe Prescott just wanted to get away from the taut-as-a-violin-string tension among his family, and needed an accomplice. Plus he had piqued my interest: what proposition?
“This must be important if you want to discuss it right now,” I said.
He didn’t bite. “Then let’s go, shall we? We can take the elevator. It will be easier for both of us.”
He indicated my cane with the tip of his. Mine was utilitarian, the consequence of a near-fatal automobile accident ten years ago and doctors who said I’d never walk again. His, crystal with a beautiful antique silver handle engraved with his family crest, was merely an aid to help with balance, though he often joked that it was his magic wand. He slipped his free hand under my elbow. His grip was surprisingly strong.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“My wine cellar. I thought you might like to see it since the little renovation was finished last month.”
Ah, the hook. I’d visited Prescott’s wine cellar before, though more often I’d seen photographs of it in the pages of glossy lifestyle or shelter magazines. “Wine by Design: The Twenty Most Beautiful Wine Cellars in the World” or “The Largest Private Wine Collections in America You’ll Never See.”
“I would.”
“Excellent. We’ll be back before anyone misses us.”
I doubted that. Clayton, Scotty, Bianca, and Alex had all been keeping an eagle eye on Prescott this afternoon, no doubt wondering about the news he planned to announce tomorrow morning. Our departure would not go unnoticed.
“What about Quinn? Why don’t I go find him?” I said. “I know he’d love to join us.”
Quinn Santori, my fiancé, was also the winemaker at my vineyard. If I got a private tour of Prescott’s newly renovated wine cellar without him, I’d never hear the end of it.
Prescott drew my hand through his arm and patted it. “Oh, he’ll give you up for a few minutes, my dear,” he said in a reassuring voice. “Besides, you’re the one I want to talk to. Only you, Lucie.” He laid an index finger over his lips like we were conspirators. I could read the message in his eyes.
Don’t tell anyone.
He led me down a long corridor lined with more paintings in ornate gilded or carved wooden frames that I knew for a fact were original Old Masters. Classical bronzes and marble sculptures that had once graced temples, palaces, and gardens in ancient Greece, Italy, or somewhere in the Middle East were subtly lit and so beautiful they took my breath away.
Then there was Hawthorne Castle itself, an honest-to-goodness castle with turrets, towers, crenellated walls—even a portcullis leading to an inner courtyard with a multi-tiered fountain in the center—built by Prescott’s father, Jock, in the 1800s as homage to his British wife, Lady Daphne, so she would not be homesick for her beloved England. Hawthorne also possessed a knight in a full suit of armor that stood guard in the foyer, a small garden maze modeled after Henry VIII’s maze at Hampton Court Palace, an orangerie, servants’ quarters, three swimming pools, a bowling alley, and dozens of formal rooms for entertaining where hand-woven silk and wool carpets from Morocco, Iran, China, and Turkey covered floors with elaborate inlaid borders of exotic wood. In total, the Castle had sixty rooms, including fifteen bedrooms, along with three Tudor-style guest cottages. In addition to the art on the walls, the high-coffered ceilings were painted with murals of hunting scenes and pastoral landscapes or cherubs and creatures from mythology; the intricate woodwork had been carved by craftsmen Jock had flown in from Italy.
“I’m sure you must never get tired of seeing these beautiful things,” I said. “I know I wouldn’t.”
“I don’t,” he said, “but to be honest, acquiring them is what really interests me. It’s more about the thrill of the hunt, if you know what I mean. Learning the provenance of each item—about the artist, the owners—traveling the world to find something so rare and exquisite, so sought after…” His voice trailed off.
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