Lucie Richards is at a good, solid place in her life when she arrives at the Long Island mansion. An accomplished personal chef, she's been hired to lend her culinary talents to a very private, big- money business meeting. Neither the misadventures that befall her while she's there, nor her reluctant attraction to the owner of the mansion can throw her off her stride. But when Lucie befriends the elderly Frenchman who has traveled to New York to sell his winery, her life lurches unexpectedly off kilter: his strange gift of an old shoebox filled with French postcards from World War I plunges her into a century-old mystery and the search for a fabulous fortune.