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by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore
A fearless fortune teller in 1920s Paris must use her powers to divine who she can trust when an exiled Romanov princess and her brother come to her seeking answers about a decades-old mystery…
Spirited Zina and her secretive grandmother, Baba Valya, own a tearoom on rue Daru in Paris, where they have lived quietly since Zina's mother's untimely death. By day, the women serve tea, mostly to members of the bustling Russian émigré community, but when dusk falls, they divine fortunes and perform séances for their loyal clientele.
Then the charming Princess Olga and her brother arrive, searching for knowledge about the disappearance of their father, the exiled Grand Duke, cousin of the last Tsar of Russia. Zina, eager to learn more about the spirit world and her powers, performs the séance. She is able to summon the Grand Duke, but to her horror, he starts to haunt the shop, and he seems to know something sinister about her mother's death.
As Zina delves into her family's hidden past, dark secrets are unearthed, threatening the home and tearoom Zina and her grandmother have worked so hard to build, not to mention their very lives.
"An ingenious literary magician, Gilmore effectively and elegantly conjures up Paris in the 1920s and its Russian émigré community, adding to her addictively readable gothic tale a dash of romance and a generous splash of spooky supernaturalism. Fans of Yangsze Choo's The Fox Wife (2024) and Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist (2014) will be equally enamored with this bewitching tale." —Booklist (starred review)
"Gilmore's latest historical horror will be another crowd-pleaser. For fans of menacing supernatural tales of family secrets, ghosts, possession, and intrigue, such as Alma Katsu's The Deep or Daphne Fama's House of Monstrous Women." —Library Journal
"A haunting, captivating gothic novel that will keep readers tight in its grip until the very last page." —Megan Chance, author of Glamorous Notions
"Salnikova Gilmore expertly balances historical detail, romance, and magic, weaving a tale that will make you truly believe in a world of spirits waiting just beyond the veil." —Morgan Ryan, author of A Resistance of Witches
This information about The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Olesya Salnikova Gilmore is the author of The Witch and the Tsar and The Haunting of Moscow House. Originally from Moscow, she was raised in the US and graduated from Pepperdine University with a BA in English/political science, and from Northwestern School of Law with a JD. She practiced litigation at a large law firm in Chicago for several years before pursuing her dream of becoming an author. She writes speculative gothic suspense and other dark fiction. She also loves exploring Eastern European history and folklore. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Tor.com, CrimeReads, Writer's Digest, and Washington Independent Review of Books, among others. She lives in a wooded, lakeside suburb of Chicago with her husband and two daughters.
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