The Seventh Unicorn

It is almost a sub-genre altogether – those stories piecing together clues to find missing artifacts, treasures, or manuscripts. Most are Indiana-Jones-type chases to the finish, but author Kelly Jones keeps a slower pace in pursuing a medieval tapestry in “The Seventh Unicorn.”
The six real-life tapestries – The Lady and the Unicorn set – hang in a Paris museum, and Jones uses imagination to weave a fictional seventh tapestry. Her What if? tale stitches together historical facts and flights of fancy in constructing, hiding, and finding a priceless work of art.
In the world of artifact chasing, the women are always beautiful and the men are ruggedly handsome – Jones pens it no differently. Alex Pellier is a curator at the Cluny Museum in Paris, whose wealthy husband died in an accident. She runs into her art-school flame, who gives up teaching to return to Paris to resume painting.
They barely have time to talk over old times when she discovers evidence that indicates the existence of another tapestry, and since Jake has never gotten over his thing for Alex, when she asks for his help, he can’t put the paints away quick enough.
The clues appear amazingly, as though Alex is walking through the story with a shopping cart. She looks down on the floor and spots a torn page with a poem written hundreds of years ago. She opens a book and finds two drawings signed with the same marking as the famous tapestries. Workmen are knocking down a wall, and – what do you know? There is the missing tapestry hidden among the masonry.
Despite its lack of urgency – or perhaps because of it – “The Seventh Unicorn” dances along quite nicely, and finishes with a satisfying flourish. It’s a story with a heart, and it beats steadily from start to finish.

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