Penelope Bray, a young and ambitious museum curator, starts working at the Bayeux Tapestry Museum and is not happy about her fate. She dreamed of working at the Louvre, studying Egyptian antiquities, living in bustling Paris, but instead she would have to be bored in a backwater and admire the embroidered image of the exploits of William the Conqueror, who conquered England, day after day. However, Penelope is not in danger of boredom. Someone is trying to kill her boss, the director of the museum, the director of the Louvre assigns Penelope a secret mission, and together with his friend, a frivolous Parisian journalist, and another local journalist, who also has tender feelings for her, Penelope begins hunting for the lost three meters of Tapestry, which depicts the finale of William's campaign, capable of to erase the entire history of the English crown. What does the death of Princess Diana, the secret negotiations of the British King Edward VIII, who once abdicated the throne, and the order of General von Choltitz to take the Tapestry to Germany at the end of the occupation of Paris in 1944 have to do with this? Most immediately, Penelope will have to solve these riddles, as well as many others — sometimes with a risk to her health. Adrian Goetz is a renowned French art historian, lecturer at the Sorbonne, member of the Academy of Fine Arts, director of the Marmottan Library at the Academy, and a brilliant writer. The Mystery of the Royal Tapestry is the first novel about the adventures of museum curator Penelope Bray, for which Goetz received the prestigious Arsene Lupin Detective Award (2007). Here, ancient history is always nearby, invariably hiding secrets that can change the familiar modernity of an entire continent beyond recognition, and at times seriously threaten life. For the first time in Russian!