Base Notes

Margot Crane can identify over three thousand aromatic compounds. She can tell you what soap you used this morning, what you ate for lunch, and whether you're nervous. She is very good at her job and she is about to lose her studio. Two hundred and three thousand pounds in debt after a conglomerate gutted her contract, Margot flies to Positano with forty thousand euros of vintage oud on her lap to compete for a commission that could keep her afloat. The residency is two weeks. The competitors are Edouard Pelletier, a sixty-one-year-old French perfumer who irons his own shirts and has nothing left to prove, and Leo Vance, an independent from New York whose heart accord Margot has written about in print and whose base note she cannot identify. That has never happened to her before. For fourteen days, Margot works through a partition wall from a man she can hear but not read. She can smell his soap, his laundered cotton, the top notes and the heart of whatever he is building. But the base, the part of a fragrance that tells you who someone actually is, comes back blank. Every time. The competition has a fee that could change her life. The proximity has a cost she did not budget for. And the answer to why she cannot read Leo Vance is closer than she thinks, built into the architecture of her own formula, hiding in the one place a perfumer's nose cannot reach. Base Notes is a novel about work and want and the specific chemistry of two people who found the same raw material from different directions. It is a love story told through the nose of a woman who would rather profile your cologne than admit she is falling for you.