Penelope Bruy, a young and ambitious museum curator, begins work at the Bayeux Tapestry Museum and is unhappy with her fate. She dreamed of working at the Louvre, dealing with Egyptian antiquities, living in bustling Paris, but instead, she will have to endure boredom in a provincial town and admire the embroidered depiction of the feats of William the Conqueror, who conquered England, day after day. However, Penelope is not in danger of boredom. Someone is trying to kill her boss, the museum director, the director of the Louvre entrusts Penelope with a secret mission, and together with her friend, a lighthearted Parisian journalist, and another local journalist who has developed tender feelings for her, Penelope begins a hunt for the lost three meters of the Tapestry, which depict the end of William's campaign, capable of rewriting the entire history of the English crown. What do the death of Princess Diana, the secret negotiations of King Edward VIII of England, who once abdicated the throne, and General von Hoth's order to transport the Tapestry to Germany at the end of the occupation of Paris in 1944 have to do with this? The most direct connection, and Penelope will have to unravel these mysteries, as well as many others – sometimes at the risk of her health.
Adrian Goetz is a renowned French art historian, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, a member of the Academy of Fine Arts, the director of the Marmottan Library at the Academy, and a brilliant writer. "The Mystery of the Royal Tapestry" is the first novel about the adventures of museum curator Penelope Bruy, for which Goetz received the prestigious detective award "Arsène Lupin" (2007). Here, ancient history is always close, invariably concealing mysteries that can drastically change the familiar modernity of an entire continent and occasionally pose a serious threat to life.
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