The Perfume Collector

The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro tells the story of Grace Munro, who receives a mysterious inheritance from a woman she's never heard of, which takes her to Paris to uncover a story of lost perfumes and unknown family connections.
It's exactly the kind of book I needed this week and I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish.
It's a split timeline - Grace investigating her past in Paris in 1955, and her mysterious benefactor, Eva, whose story unfolds in England and across Europe in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.
I was generally more engaged in Grace's story, but they are closely intertwined and I never found myself wanting to skim to get through the book faster. I loved the development of Grace's relationship with Monsieur Tissot the French lawyer, as well as her breezy interactions with her friend Mallory from back home.
The story itself was indulgent at times and sordid at others, and I thought it built up over the course of the book brilliantly and in a very compelling way.
At root, it was very predictable, but I didn't care - though I did feel the ultimate conclusion seemed very rushed and I would have preferred to spend more time with Grace after all the reveals and her eventual decisions about what she wanted to do with her life going forward.
Really involving and highly entertaining, though!