New York, 1904. The most beautiful hotel on Fifth Avenue has just opened its doors. It was built by one man, for one vision, with no corridor to anything.
It is about to be changed by two cousins who were never part of the plan.
When Henry Astor moves into Suite 819 of the St. Regis Hotel, he is a young man with a famous name and no idea what to do with it. When his cousin Charlotte arrives fifteen days later - carrying two trunks, a leather portfolio she won't let anyone touch, and the expression of a woman in flight - she is twenty-two, secretly running a holding company, and about to propose an alliance that will test everything the Astor name was built to protect.
He needs an alibi. She needs a front. Together, they need a corridor.
As Henry falls for a French artist whose paintings transform the hotel's walls, and Charlotte builds a clandestine investment circle with four women the world has underestimated, the cousins find themselves drawn into the orbit of Colonel Mann - the most feared gossip columnist in New York - and toward the night that will crack the Gilded Age open: the murder of Stanford White on a rooftop in June.
Set across two years in the hotel that Jack Astor built alone, The Regis is a novel about buildings and the people who make them breathe. About the distance between performance and truth. About a bartender who reads rooms, a housekeeper who sets the standard, a bellman whose excellence is both his weapon and his cage. About the women trapped inside gilded lives and the women picking the locks.
And about the question that echoes through every corridor in the series: is it better to build something magnificent alone, or something imperfect together?
The solo act is impressive. The corridor is everything.
The fifth novel in the series that began with Peacock Alley and The Hyphen Wars, The Regis can be read as a standalone - but for those who have walked the Waldorf-Astoria's three hundred feet of marble, who have watched Oscar open his notebook, who have dined with Monsieur Ritz, this is the book where the architecture becomes the argument, and the argument becomes the love.
