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 Strm 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.