Set on the French Riviera, Camille Aubray's The Girl from the Grand Hotel begins as a beach read--and what a beach!--then evolves into a glossy-fearsome thriller partly based on true events.
It's 1939, and 20-year-old New Yorker Annabel has just lost her parents. Without benefactors, she's forced to drop out of Vassar, so she takes an administrative job at a Côte d'Azur hotel managed by her French uncle. Her employment coincides with the August arrival of famous faces: Hollywood is in town for the planned first-ever Cannes Film Festival. The film community is well aware of Adolf Hitler's advances elsewhere in Europe--as Annabel puts it, the festival was pointedly conceived as "a gathering for peace, freedom, and goodwill." But things turn dark after she finds the dead body of a guest: a German tennis star who refused to join the Nazi Party.
The Girl from the Grand Hotel skips the big reveal of a traditional thriller, presumably so Aubray (Cooking for Picasso) can hew to actual events; her supporting cast is a who's who of Hollywood greats who were real-life participants in the pre-festival activities. Readers who like the pageantry of galas and the upstairs-downstairs tensions of Downton Abbey should swoon at this breathtakingly imagined novel. As for its somber turn, novelist-screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald, for whom Annabel is playing amanuensis, saw it coming: "Our French Riviera is lousy with spies this summer. Real spies, Annabel, not just our Hollywood spies--who are amateurs compared to these guys." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer