Sofia is in a rut. Her dissertation work is stalled, and her life seems to be one gray day after another. When an elderly scholar, Monsieur Charles Vinson, invites her to his house in Villeneuve-les-Avignon for the summer, cataloging his dead father's papers and writing, she jumps at the offer. There, she spends her days flipping through relics of the past century, burrowing deeper into the troubled history of the Vinson family. In the process, she uncovers secrets both innocuous and dangerous--and will, perhaps, find her own work worth doing.