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By Patricia Park. 2024
A Korean American teen tries to balance her dream to become a chef with the cultural expectations of her family…
when she enters the competitive world of a TV cooking show. A hilarious and heartfelt YA novel from the award-winning author of Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim and Re Jane."Park&’s novel delivers authentic characters who will make you laugh…and cry. Not to be missed!" --Ellen Oh, author of The Colliding Worlds of Mina LeeJackie Oh is done being your model minority.She&’s tired of perfect GPAs, PSATs, SATs, all of it. Jackie longs to become a professional chef. But her Korean American parents are Ivy League corporate workaholics who would never understand her dream. Just ask her brother, Justin, who hasn&’t heard from them since he was sent to Rikers Island.Jackie works at her grandparents&’ Midtown Manhattan deli after school and practices French cooking techniques at night—when she should be studying. But the kitchen&’s the only place Jackie is free from all the stresses eating at her—school, family, and the increasing violence targeting the Asian community.Then the most unexpected thing happens: Jackie becomes a teen contestant on her favorite cooking show, Burn Off! Soon Jackie is thrown headfirst into a cutthroat TV world filled with showboating child actors, snarky judges, and gimmicky &“gotcha!&” challenges.All Jackie wants to do is cook her way. But what is her way? In a novel that will make you laugh and cry, Jackie proves who she is both on and off the plate.Patricia Park's hilarious and stunning What&’s Eating Jackie Oh? explores the delicate balance of identity, ambition, and the cultural expectations to perform.By Catherine Con Morse. 2024
A reserved Chinese American teen at a Southern performing arts boarding school comes into her own under the tutelage of…
a glamorous new piano teacher. A moving coming-of-age-novel from a debut novelist about first love, adolescent angst, and academic pressures.&“Compellingly readable. Make room in the boarding-school book canon for a new classic.&” - Jeff Zentner, award-winning author of In the Wild Light and The Serpent King"A moving, highly virtuosic, and heart-rending portrait of an aspiring teen pianist trying to find her way...it made me feel seen." - Patricia Park, author of Imposter Syndrome and Other Confession of Alejandra Kim and What&’s Eating Jackie Oh?Claire Wu isn&’t sure that she has what it takes to become a successful concert pianist. It&’s the fear of every student at Greenwood School for the Performing Arts: becoming a washed-out performer who couldn't make it big. And Claire's no Rocky Wong, the ace pianist at their boarding school.Then Dr. Li shows up. She&’s like no other teacher at Greenwood: mysterious, sophisticated, fascinating. Under Dr. Li&’s tutelage, Claire works harder and dreams bigger than ever. And her crush Rocky finally seems interested. Maybe she&’ll even be "Chinese enough" to join the elusive Asian Student Society.Everything is falling into place until eerily personal notes about Claire&’s bond with Dr. Li appear. Claire starts to feel the pressure. But she isn't the only one. Everyone is feeling the strain. Especially Rocky, whose extreme perfectionism hides something more troubling.As the Showcase tension crescendos, Claire must decide if she&’s ready to sink or swim. Only then can she discover who she really is and learn if she&’s ready to give her all for a shot at greatness.The Notes is a powerful and poignant debut YA novel from award-winning writer Catherine Con Morse about dealing with academic pressures, falling in love for the first time, and finding yourself.By Rachel Khong. 2024
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own…
destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?"Mesmerizing"—Brit Bennett • "A page turner.&”—Ha Jin • &“Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft"—Andrew Sean Greer • "Traverses time with verve and feeling."—Raven LeilaniReal Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao&’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?By Wenyan Lu. 2024
&“The title character&’s wry, sad, and insightful inner voice is the star here. Her meditations on grief, death, love, and…
duty are full of poetry and longing. Perfect for literary-fiction fans, especially those who enjoyed other extraordinary novels about ordinary people.&” —Library Journal, starred reviewDebut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman&’s midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China, for fans of Yiyun Li and Julie Otsuka. The Funeral Cryer long ago accepted the mundane realities of her life: avoided by fellow villagers because of the stigma attached to her job and underappreciated by her husband, whose fecklessness has pushed the couple close to the brink of breakup. But just when things couldn't be bleaker, she takes a leap of faith—and in so doing, things start to take a surprising turn for the better. Dark, moving and wry, The Funeral Cryer is both an illuminating depiction of a &“left behind&” society—and proof that it's never too late to change your life.By Mariko Turk. 2024
★ "By turns funny, heartbreaking, and beautiful, [I'll Be Waiting for You] deftly handles the complexities of grief, the possibilities…
of the universe, and the power of belief." – Booklist, starred reviewPerfect for fans of the tearjerker You've Reached Sam, this emotional will-they-won't-they romance follows Natalie and Leander, two teens who navigate love, loss, and everything in between during a fateful summer internship. Natalie and Imogen are inseparable, and wildly different—Imogen is infuriatingly humble and incredibly intelligent, while Natalie is brave, jumping into danger and new adventures. Still, one thing ties them together: their love of the supernatural. Every summer, they vacation with their parents at the famously haunted Harlow Hotel. Imogen is a true believer, while Natalie sees ghost stories as nothing but pure fun. Then, Imogen suddenly passes away from an undiagnosed heart condition that no one saw coming, and Natalie is left to take on the summer before senior year alone. Without Imogen, Natalie throws herself into her senior project. Her passion is still horror, so she plans to spend her summer back at The Harlow Hotel recording fun fake footage that will get her on the teen ghost hunting show of her dreams. And her plans would be a lot less complicated if Leander, her irritatingly attractive arch rival from school, wasn&’t working on his senior project at the very same hotel. The longer Natalie stays at the Harlow Hotel, the more she realizes that Leander might be helpful for her project. After all, she could use an extra hand to help record her fake footage. But, when strange things start happening at the Harlow, Natalie wonders, could there really be something to these ghosts after all? Readers of Emily X.R. Pan, Nina LaCour, and Dustin Thao will fall for this story that explores what it means to believe—in ghosts, in the people you love, and in yourself. ★ "Told via Natalie&’s witty and organic first-person voice, this exhilarating novel is many things: an homage to a lost friend, a spine-tingling ghost tale, and a sweet, budding love story." – Publishers Weekly, starred reviewBy Zyta Rudzka. 2021
A Holocaust story as fascinating and compelling as it is terrifying and puzzling—a book about aging and war crimes, pain…
and pride.In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two sisters, Leokadia and Helena, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing because both of them were imprisoned as children in Auschwitz during World War II. At the center is Helena, who at the age of 12 was saved from extermination by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, the real-life Nazi officer and physician who was known as the &“angel of death&” for the experiments he conducted on prisoners, including twins and siblings.This is a story both provocative and disturbing about the fear that lingers in victims. Was the sisters&’ relationship with the executioner a desperate attempt to save their lives, or perhaps they harbor a hideous pride and sense of superiority over other prisoners? Rudzka&’s extraordinary writing turns unsettling questions about memory and survival into art.By Liselle Sambury. 2024
After her private school is rocked by a gruesome murder, a teen tries to find the real killer and clear…
her brother's name in this psychological thriller perfect for fans of The Taking of Jake Livingston and Ace of Spades . Sunny Behre has four siblings, but only one is a murderer. With the death of Sunny's mother, matriarch of the wealthy Behre family, Sunny's once picture-perfect life is thrown into turmoil. Her mother had groomed her to be the family's next leader, so Sunny is confused when the only instructions her mother leaves is a mysterious note: "Take care of Dom." The problem is, her youngest brother, Dom, has always been a near-stranger to Sunny...and seemingly a dangerous one, if found guilty of his second-degree murder charge. Still, Sunny is determined to fulfill her mother's dying wish. But when a classmate is gruesomely murdered, and Sunny finds her brother with blood on his hands, her mother's simple request becomes a lot more complicated. Dom swears he's innocent, and although Sunny isn't sure she believes him, she takes it upon herself to look into the murder—made all the more urgent by the discovery of another body. And another . As Sunny and Dom work together to track down the culprit, Sunny realizes her other siblings have their own dark secrets. Soon she may have to choose: preserve the family she's always loved or protect the brother she barely knows—and risk losing everything her mother worked so hard to buildBy Lynn Marie Taylor. 2024
An Edinburgh police detective is summoned to the island of Malta, in this gripping and atmospheric murder mystery set in…
the Victorian era. It is the summer of 1880, and DI Sam McQueen has been called away from the gray, damp streets of Edinburgh to investigate a case on the oppressively hot Mediterranean island of Malta. The local police chief is distinctly unwelcoming toward the interloper—but has no choice in the matter, since Admiral Collingwood&’s wealthy widow insists that her husband&’s fatal fall from the roof of their villa was no accident. Fortunately, McQueen gets help from a police physician and the resourceful daughter of a newspaper editor—support he will need as he tangles with local aristocrats, unearths secrets and conspiracies, and is faced with more suspicious deaths that may or may not be connected to the late admiral . . .By Jeffery Deaver. 2003
NOW A MAJOR TELEVISION EVENT FROM NBC, STARRING RUSSELL HORNSBY, ARIELLE KEBBEL, AND MICHAEL IMPERIOLI. The follow-up to Jeffery Deaver&’s…
massive bestseller The Bone Collector (also a feature film starring Angelina Jolie and Denzel Washington) The Stone Monkey is a &“simply outstanding&” (San Jose Mercury News) addition to the Lincoln Rhyme series.Recruited to help the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs manage to track down a cargo ship headed for New York City carrying two dozen illegal Chinese immigrants, as well as the notorious human smuggler and killer known as &“the Ghost.&” But when the Ghost&’s capture goes disastrously wrong, Lincoln and Amelia find themselves in a race to track him down before he can find and murder the two surviving families from the ship, who have vanished into the labyrinth of New York City&’s Chinese community. As Rhyme struggles to locate the families, aided by a quirky policeman from mainland China, Sachs finds herself forming a connection with one of the immigrants that may affect her relationship with her partner and lover.By Hanna Pylväinen. 2023
FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDAn epic love story in the vein of Cold Mountain and The Great Circle,…
about a young reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter in the nineteenth century Arctic Circle In 1851, at a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, a Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse tries in vain to convert the native Sámi reindeer herders to his faith. But when one of the most respected herders has a dramatic awakening and dedicates his life to the church, his impetuous son, Ivvár, is left to guard their diminishing herd alone. By chance, he meets Mad Lasse’s daughter Willa, and their blossoming infatuation grows into something that ultimately crosses borders—of cultures, of beliefs, and of political divides—as Willa follows the herders on their arduous annual migration north to the sea.Gorgeously written and sweeping in scope, Hanna Pylväinen's The End of Drum-Time immerses readers in a world lit by the northern lights, steeped in age-old rituals, and guided by passions that transcend place and time.By Anuradha Roy. 2010
“This is why we read fiction at all” raves the Washington Post: Family life meets historical romance in this critically…
acclaimed, “gorgeous, sweeping novel” (Ms Magazine) about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else, marking the signal American debut of an award-winning writer who richly deserves her international acclaim.On the outskirts of a small town in Bengal, a family lives in solitude in their vast new house. Here, lives intertwine and unravel. A widower struggles with his love for an unmarried cousin. Bakul, a motherless daughter, runs wild with Mukunda, an orphan of unknown caste adopted by the family. Confined in a room at the top of the house, a matriarch goes slowly mad; her husband searches for its cause as he shapes and reshapes his garden. As Mukunda and Bakul grow, their intense closeness matures into something else, and Mukunda is banished to Calcutta. He prospers in the turbulent years after Partition, but his thoughts stay with his home, with Bakul, with all that he has lost—and he knows that he must return.By Suzanne Park. 2024
"With pitch-perfect humor, endearing insights and wonderfully relatable characters, One Last Word is a smart and breezy read about taking…
hold of the life you want and refusing to let go. An absolute delight." -Allison Winn Scotch, bestselling author of Take Two, Birdie Maxwell What would you say to your meddling parents, your ex-best friend, your toxic boss, or your high school crush if you didn't have to face the consequences? Sara Chae is the founder of One Last Word, an app that allows you to send a message to anyone you want after you pass. Safeguards are in place so the app will only send when you're definitely, absolutely, 100% dead, but when another Sara Chae dies and her obituary is posted online, Sara discovers that drafted messages she had drunkenly uploaded on one night have been released -one each to her emotionally charged mother, to her former best friend who ghosted her, and to her unrequited high school crush, Harry Shim. Still reeling from this disaster, Sara finds out she's been accepted into a venture capital mentorship program- and that the mentor she's been assigned to is none other than Harry, who's now a major VC superstar. With her life going from uncertain to chaotic overnight, Sara has to deal with the havoc that ensues and reopen wounds from the past to find a true path forward. A pitch-perfect homage for fans of Annabel Monaghan, Alisha Rai, and Jenny Han, One Last Word is an empowering, laugh-out-loud story about a woman who learns to speak up and fight for what she wants in life and loveBy Cecile Pin. 2023
This program includes a multicast narration. "Aoife Hinds, Ioanna Kimbook, and Ainsleigh Barber perform this stunning debut historical novel, which…
follows three orphaned Vietnamese refugees." - AudioFile Magazine "A deeply humane and genre-defying work of love and uncompromising hope."—Ocean Vuong A boldly imagined debut novel about three Vietnamese siblings who seek refuge in the UK, expanding into a luminous meditation on ancestry and love There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies—everything in between is speculation. After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Thanh, and Minh begin a perilous journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight. In the years that follow, Anh and her brothers resettle in the UK and confront their new identities as refugees, first in overcrowded camps and resettlement centers and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality and raging anti-immigrant sentiment. Anh works in a clothing factory to pay their bills. Minh loiters about with fellow unemployed high school dropouts. Thanh, the youngest, plays soccer with his British friends after class. As they mature, each sibling reckons with survivor's guilt, unmoored by their parents' absence. With every choice they make, their paths diverge further, until it's unclear if love alone can keep them together. Told through lyrical narrative threads, historical research, voices from lost family, and notes by an unnamed narrator determined to chart their fate, Wandering Souls captures the lives of a family marked by war and loss yet relentless in the pursuit of a better future. With urgency and precision, it affirms that the most important stories are those we claim for ourselves, establishing Cecile Pin as a masterful new literary voiceBy David Baldacci. 2024
Set in the tumultuous year of 1968 in southern Virginia, a racially-charged murder case sets a duo of white and…
Black lawyers against a deeply unfair system as they work to defend their wrongfully-accused Black defendants in this courtroom drama from #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci. Jack Lee is a white lawyer from Freeman County, Virginia, who has never done anything to push back against racism, until he decides to represent Jerome Washington, a Black man charged with brutally killing an elderly and wealthy white couple. Doubting his decision, Lee fears that his legal skills may not be enough to prevail in a case where the odds are already stacked against both him and his client. And he quickly finds himself out of his depth when he realizes that what is at stake is far greater than the outcome of a murder trial. Desiree DuBose is a Black lawyer from Chicago who has devoted her life to furthering the causes of justice and equality for everyone. She comes to Freeman County and enters a fractious and unwieldy partnership with Lee in a legal battle against the best prosecutor in the Commonwealth. Yet DuBose is also aware that powerful outside forces are at work to blunt the victories achieved by the Civil Rights era. Lee and DuBose could not be more dissimilar. On their own, neither one can stop the prosecution's deliberate march towards a guilty verdict and the electric chair. But together, the pair fight for what once seemed impossible: a chance for a fair trial and true justice. Over a decade in the writing, A Calamity of Souls breathes richly imagined and detailed life into a bygone era, taking the reader through a world that will seem both foreign and familiarBy Claire Jimenez. 2023
A powerful novel that's "hilarious, heartbreaking, and ass-kicking" (Jamie Ford) about a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island who discovers…
their long‑missing sister is potentially alive and cast on a reality TV show, and sets out to bring her home. Winner of the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction · Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize · March Indie Next Pick · Belletrist, Phenomenal, Page & Pairing, and Readers Digest book club pick The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen‑year‑old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman's hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left eye is instantly recognizable. Could it be Ruthy, after all this time? The years since Ruthy's disappearance haven't been easy on the Ramirez family. It's 2008, and their mother, Dolores, still struggles with the loss, Jessica juggles a newborn baby with her hospital job, and Nina, after four successful years at college, has returned home to medical school rejections and is forced to work in the mall folding tiny bedazzled thongs at the lingerie store. After seeing maybe‑Ruthy on their screen, Jessica and Nina hatch a plan to drive to where the show is filmed in search of their long‑lost sister. When Dolores catches wind of their scheme, she insists on joining, along with her pot-stirring holy roller best friend, Irene. What follows is a family road trip and reckoning that will force the Ramirez women to finally face the past and look toward a future—with or without Ruthy in it. What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a vivid family portrait, in all its shattered reality, exploring the familial bonds between women and cycles of generational violence, colonialism, race, and silence, replete with snark, resentment, tenderness, and, of course, love. A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Elle • USA Today • Today.com • Ms. Magazine • Good Housekeeping Bustle The Week • Goodreads Bookriot Pop Culturely SheReads Litreactor Electric Lit • The Mary Sue • People Español • Zibby Mag • Debutiful • Her Campus Best Books of March by Shondaland Ms. Magazine • Popsugar • Bookriot • Debutiful • Powell's Book Blog • TIME 100 must-read book of 2023 • Booklist Top 10 debut of 2023By Terah Shelton Harris. 2023
A compelling debut that glows with bittersweet heart and touching emotion, deeply interrogating questions of family, redemption, and unconditional love…
in the sweltering summer heat of Savannah, as two people discover what it means to truly forgive. It's been eight years since Sara Lancaster left her home in Savannah, Georgia. Eight years since her daughter, Alana, came into this world, following a terrifying sexual assault that left deep emotional wounds Sara would do anything to forget. But when Sara's father falls ill, she's forced to return home and face the ghosts of her past. While caring for her father and running his bookstore, Sara is desperate to protect her curious, outgoing, genius daughter from the Wylers, the family of the man who assaulted her. Sara thinks she can succeed-her attacker is in prison, his identical twin brother, Jacob, left town years ago, and their mother are all unaware Alana exists. But she soon learns that Jacob has also just returned to Savannah to piece together the fragments of his once-great family. And when their two worlds collide-with the type of force Sara explores in her poetry and Jacob in his astrophysics-they are drawn together in unexpected waysBy Carys Davies. 2020
The Sunday Times (London) Novel of the Year &“Luminous…a writer to watch—and to savor.&” —Oprah Daily From the award-winning author…
of West and The Redemption of Galen Pike, a &“sublime&” (The Toronto Star) and propulsive novel that follows an Englishman seeking refuge in a remote hill town in India who gets caught in the crossfire of local tensions.In this &“jewel of a novel&” (The Observer), Hilary Byrd flees his demons and the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in England for a former British hill station in south India. Charmed by the foreignness of his new surroundings and by the familiarity of everything the British have left behind, he finds solace in life&’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where, after a chance meeting, the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla take Hilary under their wing. The Padre is concerned for Priscilla&’s future, and as Hilary&’s friendship with the young woman grows, he begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems. A &“skillful drama of well-meant misunderstandings and cultural divisions&” (The Wall Street Journal), The Mission House boldly and imaginatively explores postcolonial ideas in a world fractured between faith and nonbelief, young and old, imperial past and nationalistic present. Tenderly subversive and meticulously crafted, it is a deeply human story of the wonders and terrors of connection in a modern world.By Charlene Carr. 2024
A sweeping multi-generational story about motherhood, race and secrets in the lives of three women, perfect for readers of Brit…
Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and David Chariandy’s Brother When 24-year-old Kareela discovers she’s pregnant with a child she isn’t sure she wants, it amplifies her struggle to understand her place in the world as a woman who is half-Black and half-white, yet feels neither.Her mother, Evelyn, fled to Canada with her husband and their first-born child, Antony, during the politically charged Jamaican Exodus of the 1980s, only to realize they’d come to a place where Black men are viewed with suspicion—a constant and pernicious reality Evelyn watches her husband and son navigate daily.Years later, in the aftermath of Antony’s murder by the police, Evelyn’s mother-in-law, Violet, moves in, offering young Kareela a link to the Jamaican heritage she has never fully known. Despite Violet’s efforts to help them through their grief, the traumas they carry grow into a web of secrets that threatens the very family they all hold so dear.Back in the present, Kareela, prompted by fear and uncertainty about the new life she carries, must come to terms with the mysteries surrounding her family’s past and the need to make sense of both her identity and her future.Weaving the women’s stories across multiple timelines, We Rip the World Apart reveals the ways that simple choices, made in the heat of the moment and with the best of intentions, can have deeper repercussions than could ever have been imagined, especially when people remain silent.By Benjamin Alire Sáenz. 1995
"Sentimental and ferocious, upsetting and tender, firmly magic-realist yet utterly modern. . . Sáenz is a writer with greatness in him." —San…
Diego Union TribuneWith Carry Me Like Water, Benjamin Alire Sáenz unfolds a beautiful story about hope and forgiveness, unexpected reunions, an expanded definition of family, and, ultimately, what happens when the disparate worlds of pain and privilege collide.Diego, a deaf-mute, is barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas. Diego's sister, Helen, who lives with her husband in the posh suburbs of San Francisco, long ago abandoned both her brother and her El Paso roots. Helen's best friend, Lizzie, a nurse in an AIDS ward, begins to uncover her own buried past after a mystical encounter with a patient.This immensely moving novel confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing together the stories of people who come to recognize one another from former lives they didn't know existed— or that they tried to forget.By Karen Brooks. 2018
From acclaimed author Karen Brooks comes this intriguing novel rich in historical detail and drama as it tells the unforgettable…
story of Queen Elizabeth's daring, ruthless spymaster and his female protégée.In Queen Elizabeth's England, where no one can be trusted and secrets are currency, one woman stands without fear. Mallory Bright is the only daughter of London's most ingenious locksmith. She has apprenticed with her father since childhood, and there is no lock too elaborate for her to crack. After scandal destroys her reputation, Mallory has returned to her father's home and lives almost as a recluse, ignoring the whispers and gossip of their neighbors. But Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster and a frequent client of Mallory's father, draws her into his world of danger and deception. For the locksmith's daughter is not only good at cracking locks, she also has a talent for codes, spycraft, and intrigue. With Mallory by Sir Francis’s side, no scheme in England or abroad is safe from discovery. But Mallory's loyalty wavers when she witnesses the brutal and bloody public execution of three Jesuit priests and realizes the human cost of her espionage. And later, when she discovers the identity of a Catholic spy and a conspiracy that threatens the kingdom, she is forced to choose between her country and her heart. Once Sir Francis's greatest asset, Mallory is fast becoming his worst threat—and there is only one way the Queen’s master spy deals with his enemies…