The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby

This fascinating novel from married couple Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos writing as Lloyd (People Like Her; The Club) contains enough twists and turns to keep it fresh and entertaining. The duo use several points of view to offer different perspectives, plus dual timelines to illustrate the unfolding of events dynamically. In the present, Caroline Cooper and Patrick Lambert, students at Cambridge working on their dissertations, discover a mystery surrounding a painting from the 1930s that was made by Juliette Willoughby, a rebel with a portentous secret. Around the time she made the painting, Juliette ran away to Paris with a married middle-aged painter. She spent months working on another masterpiece to show at the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938, only to remove it from the show after one night. Then she died tragically in a fire, and the painting was destroyed. Fifty years later, Patrick and Caroline investigate the circumstances of the fire and how it might tie in to a murder.