Vicky Van

A man is stabbed at a supper party in a fashionable little house just off Fifth Avenue, and the hostess — young, charming, known to everyone and to nobody — walks out of the room and is not found. Wells lost most of her hearing to scarlet fever at six and turned out roughly a hundred and seventy books; she wrote detective stories to rules she codified herself, and the solution here depends on a fact hidden in plain sight from the first page. Sixty plates of New York street life and interiors by Everett Shinn and Childe Hassam, 1879 to 1925, place the supper party and the vanished hostess in the city that made them possible.