9 New Novels to add to Reading List This August –– Summer Reads 2020

Never come to Hellfire House without wearing a mask.

It was one of the rare rules in a joint without any. The only rule the master of the club did not mind following. He blended in with the sea of suits and white masks that arrived every other night, switching appearances from crowd to crowd. A bartender one moment, a dealer at the card tables the next.

Only his face remained the same, half-masked and haunting. Like a prince who relished the bloody crown on his head, and the ghosts that came with it. A face almost hardened by beauty, though glints of youth ran deep beneath soft black eyes. It always shocked new guests, to see him. The master of the House was rumored to be a dragon of a man. A monster. A magician who had no mercy for fools.

Only those who dared slur the word boy in his face understood how true those rumors were.

To the rest, he played the devil on all shoulders, leading patrons to his bar and game tables, guiding them toward his enchanted smoke lounge to drown in curated memories. The warmth of first love, the heady rush of triumph, the immense joy of dreams come true. The master kept a selection of sensations, and one hit of the pipes delivered magic the people came crawling to his house to taste.

They had no idea the show that was in store for them.

The master of the House sipped his short glass of scarlet whiskey in peace, tapping along the wide black strip over his brass knuckles. He’d long since manipulated his attire, sitting casually at a card table and savoring the mayhem. Raucous cheers erupted from the next table as dice rolled out across the surface. Smiling Hellfire girls in black blazers and masks of lace denied patrons begging for a dance. Loudest of all, the dealer’s crisp shuffling of the black cards with teeth-white numbers before she doled out hands to players at the table.

“No, no more,” one moaned. “I can’t.”

“Sure you can, chap.” A young man in a white thorn-edged mask cheerfully pressed him back in his seat. “We can’t leave. Haven’t even finished your drink, yet.”

His drunken friend’s mouth puckered under another gulp. “Think it’s true, the drink?Magician’s Blood, the menu said.”

“Think you have power, now?” Thorn Mask laughed, leaning back to appraise the club. “Here, you take your magic where you can get it. You wear a mask. You flip a card, smoke a memory. Or you look up . . . at her.”

The master’s fingers tightened around his glass, just as the lights dimmed. Dancers cleared the floor under the hush of music, shifting from smooth, steady beats to a racing rhythm loud as thunderous applause.

Right on cue.

The band’s worth of instruments he’d charmed for the night started up a wild entry tune of drums, the thick trill of trumpets. Chatter ceased and backs straightened as a beam of light speared toward the ceiling. A panel slid open over the dance floor.

And the chandelier descended.

Strings of crystals dangled along tiered rims of rose gold, cutting sharply into a jewel-set swing where a masked showgirl sat. A throne of glittering jewels, casting luminous lace across the walls and the ground and the audience taking her in. Her brown skin glowed against her corset, red as her gem-studded mask. Arms stretched out, she crossed and extended her legs in smooth lines all the way down, until her heels touched the lacquered black dancefloor. With the hint of a smile, she rose from her throne and stalked forward, thrusting a hand up with a snap.

Darkness engulfed the room.

Hoots and hollers rang at the drop of the beat, before a glimmer of her form reappeared in the shadows. The room pulsed at her command, matching the spike of heartbeats the master sensed throughout the club.

The smirk on his lips matched the girl’s as she arched her back to the raw stretch of the melody. She thrived under the attention, like a wildflower under the sun. A star finding the night.

His star.

“I’ll be damned.” The drunk at the card table breathed in awe, as the girl’s palms began brightening with a molten glow. “Nothing like an academy girl.”

“Worth the trip, right?” His friend clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“I didn’t know they could be magicians like . . . this.”

The master smothered a dark scoff under a sip of whiskey. The girl showed off good tricks—improvised and bettered from his basic crowd-pleasers. Treating the ceiling like a sky and showering comets from it, casting an elaborate shadow show of dancing shades over the floor, shifting every candlelight in the room to different colors to the beat of the music.

But always the performer, she preferred to be front and center. Teasing her power just enough to make the audience want more of her magic, more of her.

He wet his lips as flames shot from her hands, arcing over her head and around her body. The fire’s melody bent to her every movement, and she gave everything to it. If she wasn’t careful, she’d overexert herself like she did most nights, never knowing when to stop. How to pull back.

Careful never was her strongest suit.

Sparks fell before her, sizzling on the ground. Unafraid, she sauntered down her stage of flames with slow swaying hips and a firelit smile.

“Magicians like this are best kept a secret,” Thorn Mask went on. “And besides, the work is far too scandalous for a lady. Only clubs will take them.”

“What a shame. Imagine going up against the likes of her at the competition.”

The master paused, drawing his gaze back to his glass.

“Not this again. That flyer was nothing but a joke.” Thorn Mask slapped the table with a groaning laugh. “A prank.”

The drunk sloppily patted around his coat, pulling from his breast pocket a dirty, scrunched ball of paper. “It’s real. They’re all over the academies, in Deque and New Crown and—”

“A prank,” repeated Thorn Mask, unfolding the flyer anyway. “It has to be. No one’s been to that city in ages, it would never open itself to such games.”

“That makes it all the more interesting, don’t you think?” As another roar of cheers erupted around them, the friend sipped his drink smugly. “Imagine if she entered, the city might implode.”

“Right. As if that would ever happen.” Thorn Mask leered. “Competition would eat a creature like her alive.”

“Because she’s . . . ?”

With an impish lift of his brow, the man in the thorny mask flicked the flyer off the table and returned to his forgotten spread of cards. “Let’s get on with the game, shall we?”

Before he could gesture at the dealer, the master suddenly appeared at their table, snatching the young man’s wrist in a biting grip. The man yelped as the force knocked over his drink, and sent a stream of hidden cards spilling out from his sleeves.

“What’s this?” The master bent toward the ground and picked up a couple, entirely too calm. “Cheating in my house?”

The man froze, recognition dawning at the brass knuckles alone. “Where did you—I-I mean,” he sputtered, patting frantically at his sleeve. “That’s impossible. Those aren’t mine, I swear.”

“Then where did they come from?”

Sweat dripped from his temple, his face paler than the white of his mask. “I emptied my pockets at the door. Honest.”

Honest. That was the best he could do? The master almost laughed.

“You want to know the price cheaters pay in my joint?” His question offered no mercy. Only deliverance, served on ice. “Memories.”

“No, please!” The man’s lip trembled. “I didn’t, I-I’ll do whatever you want!”

“This is what I want.” The master rose from the table with the jerk of his wrist. The cheat flew to the ground in a gasp as he gripped at the invisible chain-like weight around his neck. Sharp, staccato breaths followed the master as he dragged his prisoner toward the smoke dens.

The man screamed, but no one heard him. No one saw, no one cared. All eyes fell on the star of the show as she searched for a dance partner to join her. The drunken friend, noticing nothing amiss, raised his half-full glass of Magician’s Blood to his lips before waving his hand high like the others. The man thrashed harder, only to feel his cries smothered and deeper in his throat. His form, invisible at the sweep of the master’s hand.

With a disdainful glance, the master chuckled. “You’re only making this more difficult for yourself. One memory won’t kill you.”

At once, he paused. The lights blinked around them, the air grown still. Dim and hazy, as though locked in a dream.

He thought nothing of it until he caught the movements of the patrons—their arms raised and waving slowly, increment by increment. Their cheers dulled and stretched into low, gravelly roars, as if the sound were wading through heavier air. Against time itself.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

The sound of her voice slithered around him, stopping the master in his tracks. The man quieted. Sweat soaked his pale face, his chest heaving. The showgirl stood in their path, every stare in the room still locked on the spotlit floor where she’d been. As though she’d never left.

Impressive.

Her red corset glinted as she cocked her hip and pointed at the man on the floor. “I choose him.”

She could never let things be easy.

“Kallia,” he growled, warning.

She smiled. “Jack.”

“Pick another. He’s a cheater.”

Honora was never late.

Everyone who arrived before the Holtzfall Heiress was unfashionably early. Everyone who arrived after her was embarrassingly tardy.

But this morning was a notable exception. There wasn’t a person in the city who could afford to be late when Mercy Holtzall called. Especially Nora. Especially not on the first day of the Veritaz trials.

This morning Mercy Holtzfall, matriarch of the Holtzfall family for the last half of a century, would begin the process of determining which of her grandchildren was meant to be her one true heir. And, honestly, Nora wouldn’t put it past her grandmother to disqualify her outright if she was even a minute late to breakfast.

Punctuality after all, was after all a virtue. And wasn’t that the whole point of the Veritaz trials? For each of them to prove they were more virtuous than their competitors?

And so Nora was sacrificing her planned detour home to the change of clothes that awaited her there in favor of making it to the mansion before the sun finished rising. Obviously, in an ideal world she would have arrived both on time and wearing shoes. But even Nora couldn’t have everything, no matter what the papers liked to say.

As Nora turned into Konig Street the metal grating on the front of a corner kiosk slid upwards with a startling clatter, revealing the owner inside, surrounded by thick bundles of freshly printed newspapers. He moved with practiced speed, arranging the morning editions so their sensationalized headlines faced out to entice passers-by.

The front page of the Herald caught Nora’s eye as the kiosk owner slid it into place. It was a large picture of her sitting at one of the small tables at Rik’s, taken just a few hours ago. Her head was thrown back in laughter, one hand resting on Friederich Lotze’s shoulder as if to say, “Oh, Freddie dear, you’re too much,” a flute of champagne loosely dangling from her other hand. A diamond the size of a cherry glinted on her finger and the thin strap of her effervescent dress slid off one shoulder, carelessly displaying her skin. Nora pulled up the same strap absently now. She looked carefree in the photograph only because she had taken a lot of care to appear that way when she had seen the camera pointed her way. The headline was printed in fresh ink above it:

Cheers to Better Days ahead for the Holtzfall Heiress.

Nora waited for it: the rush of satisfaction that usually came when she saw herself on the cover of the papers. The intoxication that came with control and attention. It didn’t come. She still felt as sober as ever in the cool morning light.

Grief-Stricken Holtzfall Heiress Drowns Her Sorrows.

Well, Nora plucked The Gazette out of the rack next to the Herald, that was definitely another take on things. There was a photo of her sipping from a frothy coupe with the blur of the brass band at Café Bliss behind her. She was still wearing her Lussier heels in that picture, kicked up brazenly amidst the chaos. She must have left them at Aschen’s Lounge then.

Her fingers flicked through the rest of the city’s illustrious publications rapidly as the kiosk owner set them out. She was on the cover of most of them, naturally. A Holtzfall on the front page always had papers flying off the newsstands before the ink was even done drying.

Especially since the murder.

For a week, everything else had dropped off the front page and the same picture had graced every newspaper in the city under a series of revolving headlines.

Nora’s mother’s lifeless body…

Shock in the City as Verity Holtzfall Found Dead!

Lit by police headlights….

New Suspect in Heiress’s Mugging gone Wrong!

And the flash of journalists’ greedy cameras.

Mugger confesses when jewels found in his possession! Oskar Schuld admits to stabbing of Verity Holtzfall!

It had moved papers a mile a minute. And when they ran out of things to print about Verity Holtzfall, they turned their lenses on Nora.

A New Heiress to be chosen! Who is the worthiest of them all?

Grieving Holtzfall Heiress Not Seen Since Mother’s Funeral!

Driven Mad by Grief: Honora Holtzfall Unfit to Compete in the Veritaz?

They had nagged at her, those headlines, as she sat a hundred floors up from where the photographers were camped on the street, waiting for the grieving daughter to make a scene of herself.

Fine. If they wanted a scene, Nora would give them the whole show.

She had chosen a dress made of bright rippling streams of gold fabric all sewn into waves that hugged her body outrageously. It was scandalously sheer with a tendency to slip dangerously around her shoulders, hinting at a mishap that would never happen thanks to the charms sewn into the lining. The shoes were Charles Lussier one of a kind, made from enchanted stained glass, designed so everyone would stare as she danced, waiting to see if they would shatter. Her makeup exaggerated the desert born features, inherited from her father’s foreign side of the family. And the brightest red lipstick in her arsenal made her look like she couldn’t possibly be in trouble, she was trouble personified. And then she had stepped out to show them that she was not beaten.

She saw now it was a fruitless effort. There was only one thing that would show them she wasn’t beaten. And that was winning the Veritaz.

Spoiled Honora Holtzfall Gloats as Heirship Comes within Reach.

That headline was the Bullhorn’s. Obviously. They always either had a jab or a lie about a Holtzfall that they were eager to print. This time it was both.

They had a picture of Nora wrapped in a white mink stole which she had also abandoned somewhere in the course of the night, smirking knowingly into a camera. It was printed next to the same old photograph every paper had run to death now. Her mother sprawled in an alley, her own white coat stained with blood. Pictures were worth a thousand column inches when paired like that. Nora seeming to be celebrating only days after her mother’s body went into the ground.

Well to the Bullhorn’s disreputable credit at least they stuck to their Holtzfall bashing agenda even in the face of tragedy.

“Does this look like a library to you?” The kiosk owner had finished laying out the papers and magazines for the day, and he was eyeing up the steadily increasing stack of newspapers in Nora’s hands with the sort of suspicion that suggested that he didn’t recognize her from the front of those same papers. “Choose one and move along.” He snapped his fingers at her impatiently.

Nora realized her fingers were already smudging the ink of the pile of papers she was holding. She couldn’t exactly put them back, but equally she wasn’t tacky enough to have money on her. She sighed, working the small ruby ring off her finger. The papers were all 1 zaub a piece, the ring had cost her just over 10,000 zaub. “Here,” she said, “This should cover it.”

She tucked the newspapers under her arm and continued down the wide avenue to her Grandmother’s house. Before she was out of earshot she heard him call after her, “If this is tin and glass then I’d better not see your face around here again.” For the first time since her mother died Nora felt a real laugh bubble up on her lips. She gestured with one of the papers over her shoulder, flashing her face on the front page at him.

“Well then there’d be a lot of papers you’d have to stop selling.” She called back before rounding the corner.

Sheetal got up and moved to the window. She stared at the great dark sky that arced over everything like an infinite ocean, taking in the uncountable coruscating stars, and wished as hard as she could. Her palms pressed against the glass, she wished and wished, fiery desires that left her lips as soft song—a call to the sidereal melody.

She swam in the night’s glittering waves, feeling them flow in and out of her with each breath, nourishing her. It felt so good to sing for herself, with no one listening, no one judging.

As she watched, beyond the window, the faces of the stars came into focus. Most were from outside the royal court, the commoners, if such a thing could be said of stars, but the court was present, too. Sheetal picked out Nani, Nana, Charumati, Padmini, Kaushal, and even Rati.

She pored over their features, all glorious, all serene. She took in the way they flared against the heavens, both person and ball of flame.

If she reached out, she could almost touch them …

Their song came to her gradually, silence ripening into something more. She could be among them, could ascend to her rightful place in the constellation. In the sky. In the cosmos, where everything was born of the play of shine and shadow, fire and frost.

Here, there was no pain, no disappointment. No estranged boyfriends, no dying dads. No self-doubt.

“Join us.”

In that moment of dream and dance, Sheetal wanted nothing more.

She lifted a hand to the heavens. Someone, she wasn’t sure who, reached out in return, and once their fingers met, Sheetal stepped through a door dark as night. Her mortal eyes fluttered shut, and when she opened them again, she was the sky.

No, that was wrong. She wore the sky, had wrapped it about her like shadow-stained silk. She danced with it, within it, spinning softly, so softly, a sway here, a slow turn there. She whirled and floated, twirled and dipped, changed places with partners, and changed again.

She breathed her family, sang their story. Their flesh was her flesh, their skin her skin.

Here, there was no question of being liked, only of belonging.

The light, the song, laced itself through her, knitting her to the nakshatra. With luminescent eyes, she saw the spirits of the stars passing over the sky, blazing across millennia. She saw the beginning and the end, and she swirled past everything in between.

Stars were born; stars died. A sun blinked out; a black hole loomed. Below, in the mortal realm, a queen conquered; a fool felled a king. An artist painted; an assassin slew. How fast, how brief, these mortal lives. A twinkle of a star’s lifespan.

Yet they smoldered with a fire all their own, these humans. They raged with passion and creativity, nurtured by the dust of the stars, the glistening marrow of silver bones.

Humans needed stars, Sheetal thought as she watched her mother in orbit, and stars needed humans. They were all part of the great drama, the slow and continuous spiral of creation and destruction, and they all played their roles.

A single streak of white cloud marred an otherwise perfect blue sky as Rachel Krall drove her silver SUV on a flat stretch of highway toward the Atlantic Ocean. Dead ahead on the horizon was a thin blue line. It widened as she drove closer until Rachel knew for certain that it was the sea.

Rachel glanced uneasily at the fluttering pages of the letter resting on the front passenger seat next to her as she zoomed along the right lane of the highway. She was deeply troubled by the letter. Not so much by the contents, but instead by the strange, almost sinister way the letter had been delivered earlier that morning.

After hours on the road, she’d pulled into a twenty-four-hour diner where she ordered a mug of coffee and pancakes that came covered with half-thawed blueberries and two scoops of vanilla ice cream, which she pushed to the side of her plate. The coffee was bitter, but she drank it anyway. She needed it for the caffeine, not the taste. When she finished her meal, she ordered an extra-strong iced coffee and a muffin to go in case her energy flagged on the final leg of the drive.

While waiting for her takeout order, Rachel applied eye drops to revive her tired green eyes and twisted up her shoulder-length auburn hair to get it out of her face. Rachel was tying her hair into a topknot when the waitress brought her order in a white paper bag before rushing off to serve a truck driver who was gesticulating angrily for his bill.

Rachel left a larger than necessary tip for the waitress, mostly because she felt bad at the way customers hounded the poor woman over the slow service. Not her fault, thought Rachel. She’d waitressed through college and knew how tough it was to be the only person serving tables during an unexpected rush.

By the time she pushed open the swinging doors of the restaurant, Rachel was feeling full and slightly queasy. It was bright outside and she had to shield her eyes from the sun as she headed to her car. Even before she reached it, she saw something shoved under her windshield wiper. Assuming it was an advertising flyer, Rachel abruptly pulled it off her windshield. She was about to crumple it up unread when she noticed her name had been neatly written in bold lettering: Rachel Krall (from the Guilty or Not Guilty podcast).

Rachel received thousands of emails and social media messages every week. Most were charming and friendly. Letters from fans. A few scared the hell out of her. Rachel had no idea which category the letter would fall into, but the mere fact that a stranger had recognized her and left a note addressed to her on her car made her decidedly uncomfortable.

Rachel looked around in case the person who’d left the letter was still there. Waiting. Watching her reaction. Truck drivers stood around smoking and shooting the breeze. Others checked the rigging of the loads on their trucks. Car doors slammed as motorists arrived. Engines rumbled to life as others left. Nobody paid Rachel any attention, although that did little to ease the eerie feeling she was being watched.

It was rare for Rachel to feel vulnerable. She’d been in plenty of hairy situations over the years. A month earlier, she’d spent the best part of an afternoon locked in a high-security prison cell talking to an uncuffed serial killer while police marksmen pointed automatic rifles through a hole in the ceiling in case the prisoner lunged at her during the interview. Rachel hadn’t so much as broken into a sweat the entire time. Rachel felt ridiculous that a letter left on her car had unnerved her more than a face-to-face meeting with a killer.

Deep down, Rachel knew the reason for her discomfort. She had been recognized. In public. By a stranger. That had never happened before. Rachel had worked hard to maintain her anonymity after being catapulted to fame when the first season of her podcast became a cultural sensation, spurring a wave of imitation podcasts and a national obsession with true crime.

In that first season, Rachel had uncovered fresh evidence that proved that a high school teacher had been wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife on their second honeymoon. Season 2 was even more successful when Rachel had solved a previously unsolvable cold case of a single mother of two who was bashed to death in her hair salon. By the time the season had ended, Rachel Krall had become a household name.

Despite her sudden fame, or rather because of it, she deliberately kept a low profile. Rachel’s name and broadcast voice were instantly recognizable, but people had no idea what she looked like or who she was when she went to the gym, or drank coffee at her favorite cafe, or pushed a shopping cart through her local supermarket.

The only public photos of Rachel were a series of black-and-white shots taken by her ex-husband during their short-lived marriage when she was at grad school. The photos barely resembled her anymore, maybe because of the camera angle, or the monochrome hues, or perhaps because her face had become more defined as she entered her thirties.

In the early days, before the podcast had taken off, they’d received their first media request for a photograph of Rachel to run alongside an article on the podcast’s then-cult following. It was her producer Pete’s idea to use those dated photographs. He had pointed out that reporting on true crime often attracted cranks and kooks, and even the occasional psychopath. Anonymity, they’d agreed, was Rachel’s protection. Ever since then she’d cultivated it obsessively, purposely avoiding public-speaking events and TV show appearances so that she wouldn’t be recognized in her private life.

That was why it was unfathomable to Rachel that a random stranger had recognized her well enough to leave her a personalized note at a remote highway rest area where she’d stopped on a whim. Glancing once more over her shoulder, she ripped open the envelope to read the letter inside:

Dear Rachel,

I hope you don’t mind me calling you by your first name. I feel that I know you so well.

She recoiled at the presumed intimacy of the letter. The last time she’d received fan mail in that sort of familiar tone, it was from a sexual sadist inviting her to pay a conjugal visit at his maximum-security prison.

Rachel climbed into the driver’s seat of her car and continued reading the note, which was written on paper torn from a spiral notebook.

I’m a huge fan, Rachel. I listened to every episode of your podcast. I truly believe that you are the only person who can help me. My sister Jenny was killed a long time ago. She was only sixteen. I’ve written to you twice to ask you to help me. I don’t know what I’ll do if you say no again.

Rachel turned to the last page. The letter was signed: Hannah. She had no recollection of getting Hannah’s letters, but that didn’t mean much. If letters had been sent, they would have gone to Pete or their intern, both of who vetted the flood of correspondence sent to the podcast email address. Occasionally Pete would forward a letter to Rachel to review personally.

In the early days of the podcast, Rachel had personally read all the requests for help that came from either family or friends frustrated at the lack of progress in their loved ones’ homicide investigations, or prisoners claiming innocence and begging Rachel to clear their names. She’d made a point of personally responding to each letter, usually after doing preliminary research, and often by including referrals to not-for-profit organizations that might help.

But as the requests grew exponentially, the emotional toll of desperate people begging Rachel for help overwhelmed her. She’d become the last hope of anyone who’d ever been let down by the justice system. Rachel discovered firsthand that there were a lot of them and they all wanted the same thing. They wanted Rachel to make their case the subject of the next season of her podcast, or at the very least, to use her considerable investigative skills to right their wrong.

Rachel hated that most of the time she could do nothing other than send empty words of consolation to desperate, broken people. The burden of their expectations became so crushing that Rachel almost abandoned the podcast. In the end, Pete took over reviewing all correspondence to protect Rachel and to give her time to research and report on her podcast stories.

The letter left on her windshield was the first to make it through Pete’s human firewall. This piqued Rachel’s interest, despite the nagging worry that made her double-lock her car door as she continued reading from behind the steering wheel.

It was Jenny’s death that killed my mother [the letter went on]. Killed her as good as if she’d been shot in the chest with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

Though it was late morning on a hot summer’s day and her car was heating up like an oven, Rachel felt a chill run through her.

I’ve spent my life running away from the memories. Hurting myself. And others. It took the trial in Neapolis to make me face up to my past. That is why I am writing to you, Rachel. Jenny’s killer will be there. In that town. Maybe in that courtroom. It’s time for justice to be done. You’re the only one who can help me deliver it.

The metallic crash of a minibus door being pushed open startled Rachel. She tossed the pages on the front passenger seat and hastily reversed out of the parking spot.

She was so engrossed in thinking about the letter and the mysterious way that it was delivered that she didn’t notice she had merged onto the highway and was speeding until she came out of her trancelike state and saw metal barricades whizzing past in a blur. She’d driven more than ten miles and couldn’t remember any of it. Rachel slowed down, and dialed Pete.

No answer. She put him on auto redial but gave up after the fourth attempt when he still hadn’t picked up. Ahead of her, the widening band of blue ocean on the horizon beckoned at the end of the long, flat stretch of highway. She was getting close to her destination.

Rachel looked into her rearview mirror and noticed a silver sedan on the road behind her. The license plate number looked familiar. Rachel could have sworn that she’d seen the same car before over the course of her long drive. She changed lanes. The sedan changed lanes and moved directly behind her. Rachel sped up. The car sped up. When she braked, the car did, too. Rachel dialed Pete again. Still no answer.

“Damn it, Pete.” She slammed her hands on the steering wheel.

The sedan pulled out and drove alongside her. Rachel turned her head to see the driver. The window was tinted and reflected the glare of the sun as the car sped ahead, weaving between lanes until it was lost in a sea of vehicles. Rachel slowed down as she entered traffic near a giant billboard on a grassy embankment that read: WELCOME TO NEAPOLIS. YOUR GATEWAY TO THE CRYSTAL COAST.

Neapolis was a three-hour drive north of Wilmington and well off the main interstate highway route. Rachel had never heard of the place until she’d chosen the upcoming trial there as the subject of the hotly anticipated third season of Guilty or Not Guilty.

She pulled to a stop at a red traffic light and turned on the car radio. It automatically tuned into a local station running a talkback slot in between playing old tracks of country music on a lazy Saturday morning. She surveyed the town through the glass of her dusty windshield. It had a charmless grit that she’d seen in a hundred other small towns she’d passed through over her thirty-two years. The same ubiquitous gas station signs. Fast-food stores with grimy windows. Tired shopping strips of run-down stores that had long ago lost the war with the malls.

“We have a caller on the line,” the radio host said, after the final notes of acoustic guitar had faded away. “What’s your name?”

“Dean.”

“What do you want to talk about today, Dean?”

“Everyone is so politically correct these days that nobody calls it as they see it. So I’m going to say it straight out. That trial next week is a disgrace.”

“Why do you say that?” asked the radio announcer.

“Because what the heck was that girl thinking!”

“You’re blaming the girl?”

“Hell yeah. It’s not right. A kid’s life is being ruined because a girl got drunk and did something dumb that she regretted afterward. We all regret stuff. Except we don’t try to get someone put in prison for our screw-ups.”

“The police and district attorney obviously think a crime has been committed if they’re bringing it to trial,” interrupted the host testily.

“Don’t get me wrong. I feel bad for her and all. Hell, I feel bad for everyone in this messed-up situation. But I especially feel bad for that Blair boy. Everything he worked for has gone up in smoke. And he ain’t even been found guilty yet. Fact is, this trial is a waste. It’s a waste of time. And it’s a waste of our taxes.”

“Jury selection might be over, but the trial hasn’t begun, Dean,” snapped the radio announcer. “There’s a jury of twelve fine citizens who will decide his guilt or innocence. It’s not up to us, or you, to decide.”

“Well, I sure hope that jury has their heads screwed on right, because there’s no way that anyone with a shred of good old-fashioned common sense will reach a guilty verdict. No way.”

The caller’s voice dropped out as the first notes of a hit country-western song hit the airwaves. The announcer’s voice rose over the music. “It’s just after eleven A.M. on what’s turning out to be a very humid Saturday morning in Neapolis. Everyone in town is talking about the Blair trial that starts next week. We’ll take more callers after this little tune.”

TODAY

Saturday, June 16

7:15 a.m.

“Just tell me where she is, and we can take this down a notch.” Kerri took a breath, let it out slowly. “I’ll lower my weapon. You have my word. All I want is your cooperation.”

Her palms were sweating. Arms shaking from maintaining the firing stance for so long. She didn’t trust this bastard, but she damned sure hadn’t followed him here to do this.

Now she had a situation.

The lieutenant would say desperation had driven her over the edge, and he wouldn’t be wrong. Her new partner would shake his head and wonder how she ever dared to judge him.

Kerri blinked. She had gone too far. She knew this. Too late to change that now. Swallowing the lump of uncertainty rising in her throat, she stared at the man in her crosshairs. Way too late.

He laughed. Blood trickled from his swollen, no doubt broken nose. She’d punched him hard. As if to underscore the thought, her right hand throbbed mercilessly. Anger tightened her lips. Not hard enough, or he wouldn’t be so smug right now. The son of a bitch.

“You should know by now, Detective Devlin, that you can’t touch me. I will ruin you,” he warned, the words nasally sounding. He swiped at the blood spatter staining his pale-blue polo. “Your career with the Birmingham Police Department is over.”

Like she needed anyone to point out that glaringly obvious detail. With every fiber of her being, she wanted to kill him. The urge simmered in the deepest part of her soul. She knew what this bastard had done. She had evidence, by God. Maybe not enough for a trial conviction, but it was something. For now, that could wait. This was far more important . . . more urgent.

She was the one who laughed this time. “Can’t you tell by now I don’t care? As long as I take you all the way down first, I can live with whatever comes second.”

He smiled at her, the expression incongruent with his bleeding and damaged face. “But you do care about that sweet little daughter of yours, don’t you? I would hate to see her have to pay for your mistakes, Detective.”

Kerri flinched. A new rush of fury lashed through her, more at her reaction than at his threat. “Just fucking tell me what I need to know.” She twitched the barrel of her Glock .40 cal. “Or I swear to God I will put a bullet right between your eyes.”

He stared at her for one, two, three beats; then he said, “Go ahead. Shoot me.”

Shit.

Maybe he’d seen her arms shake or spotted that goddamned flinch. Either way, he’d called her bluff.

No turning back now.

Her hand tightened on the grip. Forefinger curled around the trigger. “You think I won’t?”

He lunged at her.

She instinctively twisted to the right.

His body crashed into her left shoulder, sending her off balance.

She slammed backward onto the floor. The weight of his body landing on top of her forced the air from her lungs.

Weapon?

Adrenaline roaring, she locked the fingers of her right hand tighter around the butt of the Glock.

She still had her weapon. Relief trickled through her.

With every ounce of might she possessed, she punched with her left fist, aiming for the throat. He stretched his upper body to one side, ensuring the blow jammed impotently into his shoulder.

She yanked her arm back, aimed again . . . he backhanded her.

Blocking out the pain, she rammed her knee toward his groin. He dodged the move. Grabbed at the Glock with one hand and her hair with the other.

No. No. No!

She twisted her right arm, fought to wrench the barrel of the weapon from his desperate grasp. His grip tightened. His face distorted with rage. She bucked and rotated her body, used her free hand to clutch at his throat, his eyes, whatever she could reach. He slammed her head against the floor. Again. And again.

The room spun. She felt her wrist crack from the pressure of him trying to rip the Glock from her grasp.

She . . . could . . . not . . . allow . . . him . . . to . . . take . . . it . . .

Her head hit the floor again, harder this time.

Her eyes rolled back. She blinked. Shook herself. His weight ground into her waist.

Another thwack of her head . . .

The blast of a bullet discharging from her weapon exploded in the room.

She gasped.

Darkness clawed at her.

She fought to stay conscious. Tried to rise up.

Where was he . . . ?

The room shifted out of focus. Started to spin. She closed her eyes to slow the whirling sensation.

The darkness swallowed her, dragging her down . . . down . . . down . . .

There was sound.

She stopped falling . . . fought against the darkness still swaddling her.

The sound came again. Rattling . . . vibrating.

There was pain.

Kerri tried to open her eyes once more.

More of that vibrating.

Her eyes cracked open, and pain exploded behind them. She squeezed them shut and groaned.

That damned rattling started again, and this time she recognized it was her phone. She opened her eyes and turned her head despite the pain and stared at the black device lying on the wood floor. A moment was required before her brain got the message through to her arm that she had to reach for the phone in order to answer it.

Her partner’s face flashed on the screen. Falco. There was something . . .

Shit!

She sat up. The room spun, and her head exploded with more of that searing pain. When she dared to open her eyes again, she stared at the man slumped facedown on the floor, one of her legs trapped beneath his thighs.

“Jesus Christ.” She scrambled free of his weight.

The room whirled again. She grabbed her head and closed her eyes until the spinning stopped, and the pain leveled out. Another groan hissed past her lips.

That damned vibration erupted once more. She couldn’t deal with that right now. She forced her eyes open. Slowly, she crawled on all fours until she was within reach of him. She touched his neck, checked for a pulse.

Nothing.

He was dead.

Fuck.

Where was her weapon?

She hoisted herself to her feet, staggered around the body. Didn’t see the damned thing.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

The Glock had to be under him.

Using her right foot, she pushed, swaying drunkenly on her left, until she rolled him onto his back. The hole in his upper chest and all the blood told her the bullet had likely gone in at an upward trajectory and pierced a major artery.

He was dead.

She’d killed him.

Reaching down, she was relieved that her weapon lay just outside the widening ring of blood. She snatched it up and shoved it into her waistband.

Her phone started rattling again. This time she grabbed it and managed to hit the necessary button. “Devlin.”

“Where the hell are you?” Rather than wait for her answer, Luke Falco, her partner, said, “They’ve found something, Devlin. Another body, possibly female. This case is busting wide open. You need to be here. You need to be here now.”

The case.For ten days the investigation into a double homicide had been leading them deeper and deeper into the past and giving them nothing but the occasional fragment of information. Now, suddenly the dozens of scattered pieces were coming together.

She stared at the dead man on the floor. He was one of those pieces.

A new rush of cold, hard reality gushed through her.

Fuck! She touched the back of her head gingerly with her free hand. She didn’t feel any blood, but it hurt like hell. She winced and drew her hand away. Focus! The case. Falco. Jesus Christ, this was a mess.

“Sorry.” She swallowed back the rising panic. “I got caught up in something.” She closed her eyes to block the body from her field of vision. “Text me the address. I’m on my way.”

“Hurry, Devlin. I’ve got a feeling about this.”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ll be there soon.” She ended the call and shoved the phone into her back pocket.

What the hell should she do? Call it in? If she did . . . a new kind of foreboding slunk around her chest.

She held her aching head and fought the urge to cry. Too damned late for that. He was dead.

Okay. Okay. She had killed him. Regardless of whether she had intended to do so, he was dead, and it was her bullet that had initiated the cause of death.

She needed to think. To figure this out.

She thought of her daughter. Oh God. If Kerri went to jail, Tori . . .

She banished the thought, steadied herself. “I can’t do this right now.”

She had to go. Falco and the search team were already at the scene. She was supposed to be there. She could deal with this later. Claim temporary insanity for leaving the scene.

She stared at her hands and checked her clothes to ensure there was no blood on her. Clean.

After turning too quickly, she stumbled and almost fell rushing to the door. She closed the door behind her and moved a little more slowly across the porch and down the steps, her hands searching her pockets for her keys. If she had to go back in there . . .

She climbed into her Wagoneer and thanked God when the keys were in the ignition.

Summoning every ounce of resolve she possessed, she started the engine and shifted into drive, only then remembering to fasten her seat belt. Considering the way her head throbbed and the need to vomit along with the loopy feeling, she probably had a concussion, but that was another of those situations she couldn’t do anything about at the moment.

She held on to the steering wheel with both hands and drew in a deep breath, then another. She could straighten this out later. “It was an accident.”

The words rang hollowly in the air around her.

He’d attacked her. The weapon had discharged.

Accidental shooting. Maybe even self-defense. He had threatened her and her daughter.

What the hell had she been thinking, confronting him in the first place? Had she really expected the bastard to come clean with her? She was a better cop than this. Goddamn it.

She was losing it . . . or maybe she’d already lost it.

A body that’s been submerged in water undergoes a different kind of decomposition; harsher in some ways, kinder in other’s—or so I’ve been told. We Moons wouldn’t know about that. We choose fire when our time comes, and scatter our ashes on land that has been in our family for more than two centuries. Mine are there now too, mingled with the dust of my ancestors.

Can it really only be weeks that I’ve been gone? Weeks hovering between worlds, unable to stay, unwilling to go, tethered by regret and unfinished business. The separation feels longer, somehow. And yet, it is not my death I dwell on today, but the deaths of two young girls—Darcy and Heather Gilman—nearly eight years ago now. They’d been missing nearly three weeks when their bodies were finally pulled from the water. It was a ghastly thing to watch, but watch I did. They were dragging my pond, you see, convinced they would find what they were looking for. And why not, when the whole town was looking in my direction? Because of who I was—and what I was. Or at least what they imagined me to be.

Memory, it seems, does not die along with the body. It’s been years since that terrible day at the pond, and yet I remember every detail, replaying again and again, an endless, merciless loop. The police chief in his waders, his men with their boat. The M.E.’s van looming nearby, its back doors yawning wide in anticipation of new cargo. The bone-white face of a mother waiting to learn the fate of her girls. Whispers hissing through the crowd like electric current. And then, the telling shrill of a whistle.

A hush settles over us, the kind that carries a weight of its own—the weight of the dead. No one moves as the first body appears, the glimpse of an arm in a muddy brown coat, water pouring from the sleeve as the sodden form is dragged up onto the bank. A bloated, blackened face, partly obscured by hanks of sopping dark hair.

They’re careful with her, handling her with a tenderness that’s gruesome somehow, and agonizing to watch. They’re preserving the evidence, I realize, and a cold lick goes down my spine. So they can make their case. Against me.

A short time later a second body appears, and there comes a broken wail, a mother’s heart breaking for her darlings.
And that’s how it all unraveled, the awful day that set up all the rest. The end of the farm. And perhaps, the end of the Moons.

New York City, 1913

She had to tell Jack. 

He wouldn’t be pleased. 

As Laura Lyons returned from running errands, turning over in hear head the various reactions her husband might have to her news, she spotted the beggar perched once again on the first tier of the granite steps that led to her home: seven rooms buried deep inside the palatial New York Public Library. This time, the beggar woman’s appearance elicited not pity but a primal fear. It was certainly some kind of ominous sign, one that made Laura’s heart beat faster. A woman on the verge of ruin, alone and without any resources. Unloved.

The beggar’s black mourning gown was more tattered than it had been last week, fraying at the sleeves and hem, and her face shone with summer swear. Every few days for the past month, she’d taken up a spot off to one side of the grand entryway under one of the towering stone lions, one of which had been named Leo Astor and the other Leo Lenox, after two of the library’s founders, John Jacob Astor and James Lenox. Laura’s children had admired them right off, with Harry claiming Lenox as his pet and Pearl doing the same for Astor, neither caring that the sculptures has initially been mocked in the newspapers as a cross between a dachshund and a rabbit. Only last week, Laura had just barely prevented her son from carving his initials into the sinewy rump of Leo Lenox. 

The beggar woman shifted, finding what shade she could. The miserable-looking child who typically filled her lap was missing. Laura wondered where he was.

“Money or food, please, miss. Either will do.”

Laura reached into her shopping basket and pulled out two apples. One of the library’s employees would shoo the beggar away soon enough, and she was glad to have caught her in time, even if the act of offering the poor woman assistance was inspired, at least in part, by a ridiculous, superstitious bargain that existed only in Laura’s mind. As if extending a kindness to someone in need would smooth the conversation ahead. 

“Thank you, miss.” The woman tucked the fruit away in her pockets. “God bless.”

Laura hurried up the steps and into Astor Hall, pas the dozens of visitors milling about, their voices echoing off the marble steps, the marble floors, the marble walls. Even the decorative bases for the bronze candelabras were made from Carrara stone sliced from the Apuan Alps. The choice kept the building cool on steamy September days like this one, even if in winter it was like walking into an icebox, particularly in the evenings, when the library was closes and the furnaces only lightly fed. 

She turned left down the grand South-North Gallery, passing under a series of globed pendants of thick, curved glass that broke up the long lines of the coffered ceiling. About halfway down the hallway, she took a right, then another, before climbing up a narrow set of stairs that led to the mezzanine-level apartment where her family had lived for the past two years. 

Their seven private rooms formed a right angle that hugged a corner of one of the library’s two inner courtyards, the bedrooms and Jack’s study along one side, and the kitchen, dining room, and sitting room along the other. The open area that formed the crux of the right angle, and where the stairway emerged, had become the kids’s playroom, where Harry laid out his train tracks in one corner and Pearl parked her doll’s pram under the door of the dumbwaiter. When they first moved in, Jack had had to give them a stern warning when they were caught poking their heads inside the dark shaft, but soon enough the family had settled in and adjusted to their new surroundings.

The director of the library––Jack’s boss––had pointed out during their orientation how the classical architecture of the building followed a progression form hard materials to soft, starting with the stone entrance hall before yielding to the wood paneling of the interior rooms. Laura had done her part to stay true to the continuum, softening the hard floors with a mishmash of Oriental rugs and hanging thick drapes over the giant windows. On the fireplace mantle, she’d framed the newspaper article about tier unusual living arrangements, which had been written the year they moved in. 

She called out the children’s names as she headed to the kitchen, and the sound of their heavy stomping behind her brought a smile to her face. 

“Harry lost another tooth.” Pearl dashed in first, her eyes flashing with glee from scooping the news out from under her brother.

Laura would have thought living in a library would turn them into a couple of bookworms, but Pearl wanted nothing to do with stories unless they involved ghosts or animals. Harry was different, although he preferred not to read himself but rather to be read to, particularly from his worm copy of Maritime Heroes for Boys. Earlier that summer, when Jack quoted a line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Laura’s ear in a silly falsetto while she washed the dishes, Harry had demanded to know what it meant. At his bedtime, Laura had taken down the volume from the bookcase and read some of the poems aloud to him. Harry interrupted to ask questions about the more ribald phrases, which Laura dodged as best she could. Later, when she and Jack were lying next to each other in bed, they laughed quietly about their son’s natural––and thoroughly innocent––ear for the smuttier bits. 

Where pearl could be bossy, Harry was sweet, if sometimes dim when it came to the vagaries of human nature. When Laura dropped off the children at the school on Forty-Second and Second Avenue for the first time two years ago, Pearl had taken a moment to analyze the groups of school girls arrayed around the playground, figuring out the best approach, while Harry had recklessly stumbled over to some boys playing marbles, accidentally kicking several with his food in the process, which resulted in a hard shove and a quick rejection. 

Harry, at eleven, was older by four years, but Pearl was wiser, faster. Laura and Jack had discarded the original name they’d picked for their daughter––Beatrice––after she showed up with a white frost of fine hair covering her head, more like a little old lady then a baby girl. Her eyes weren’t the vivid blue of Laura’s but more a gray, and her features and coloring gave her an ethereal appearance. “Pearl,” Laura had said, and Jack had agreed, tears in his eyes. “Pearl.”

Six Weeks Earlier

They recognize me when I’m at CVS buying diet pills for my mom, the only kind that don’t make her lose her mind.

“Aren’t you Grace Turner?”

The woman is pleased with herself, a red flush climbing her neck and bursting proudly across her cheeks. Her companion is smaller, wiry, with narrow eyes, and I already understand that she’s the type who will need me to prove it somehow, as if I have anything left to prove.

“Grace Hyde,” I correct, smiling politely, humbly, before turning back to the staggering array of options in front of me. The one my mom likes has a cartoon frog standing on a set of scales on the box.

“Do you live around here now?” the first one asks hungrily. She’s already terrified that she’ll forget something when she recounts the story to her friends.

“I’m staying with my parents.” Maybe I’m in the wrong section.

“What was your last movie, anyway?” This from the smaller one, obviously. She’s scowling at me and I find myself warming to her. It’s hard to find a woman who still believes that the world owes her anything. Her friend, who has been shifting from foot to foot like she needs to take a piss, jumps into action.

“Your last film was Lights of Berlin. You were nominated for a Golden Globe but you’d already disappeared.”

“Top marks,” I say, forcing a smile before I turn around again. Then I put on a truly award-­worthy performance, this one of a former child star in a supermarket, dutifully shopping for all of her mom’s health care needs.

“Were you needed back at home?” The woman puts her hand on my shoulder, and I try not to flinch at the unsolicited contact. “I’m sorry. It’s just how you . . . you disappeared one day. Was it because your parents needed you?”

Her relief is palpable, hanging off each word. And there it is. Because not only has this woman recognized me despite my badly bleached hair, ten extra pounds, and sweatpants from Target, and not only have I validated her very existence merely by being in the same shitty store in the same shitty town as she is, but also, after a year of waiting, I have restored her faith in something that she might never be able to articulate herself. This woman can leave the weight management aisle today believing once again that people are inherently good and, even more important, that people are inherently predictable. That nobody on this planet would walk out of their own perfect life one day for no discernible reason. And all this on a Monday afternoon in Anaheim no less.

“Can you do the bit? From Lights of Berlin?” she asks shyly, and the way her mouth tugs up more on one side when she smiles reminds me suddenly of my dad.

I look down at the floor. It would be so easy to say the line, but the words get stuck at the back of my throat like a mothball.

“You have pasta sauce on your T-­shirt,” the smaller one says.

–––

I take the long route home, walking down identical streets lined with palm trees and fifties-­style suburban houses. My parents have lived here for nearly eight years now, and I still can’t believe that such a place exists outside of nostalgic teen movies and sub­urban nightmares. It’s the kind of town where you can never get lost no matter how hard you try, and I end up, as I always do, outside my parents’ neat, pale pink bungalow. It has a wooden porch in the front and a turquoise pool in the back, just like every other house on the street.

The smell of bubbling fat hits me as I step through the front door. My dad is cooking ham and eggs for dinner, with a couple of broccoli spears as a nod to my former lifestyle. I didn’t realize how badly they’d been eating until I came home, but it turns out there really are a lot of ways to fry a potato. I arrived back in Anaheim a vegan, but as I watched my dad carefully prepare me a salad with ranch dressing and bacon bits on my first night, I knew I couldn’t remain one for long.

My mom is watching TV on the sofa with a slight smile on her face, and I know without looking that she’ll be watching the Kardashians, or the Real Housewives of anywhere else on earth. She used to be a semi-­successful model back in England, but now she’s just skinny and tired for no reason since she rarely leaves the house. Instead she lives for these shows, talking about these women as if they are her friends. I try to apologize about the diet pills, and she just shakes her head slightly, which I take to mean she doesn’t have the energy to discuss it. It’s this new thing she’s doing, rationing her energy and refusing to spend it on anything that either displeases her or causes her stress. She’s selective with her energy but she’ll watch hours of the Kardashians each day.

I sit next to her, carefully avoiding the pink blanket that covers her lap. I tuck my legs underneath me, and my dad passes each of us a tray with a beanbag underneath so that we can eat from our laps. My mom’s tray has a watercolor picture of poppies on it, and mine has sleeping cocker spaniels. He takes a seat on the green corduroy armchair next to my mother, and I know that he will be watching her with an affectionate look on his face. The one that annoys her when she catches him doing it. Weakness has always repelled us both, which is somewhat ironic given my current state.

I eat the broccoli first from the head down to the stem, and I wish I hadn’t made such a thing about salt being the devil. It’s overcooked to the point of oblivion. I coat it in ketchup instead until it’s nearly edible, and then I start to cut the ham. The Kardashians break for a commercial, and my mom mutes the TV. It’s her way of beating the system—­she will never buy a mop just because some newly promoted advertising executive thinks she needs one.

I watch my mom push a piece of ham around her plate. We all know that she’s not going to eat any more than a third of it, but she keeps up the charade for my dad.

“Good day, everyone?” my dad asks, studying a cut on his thumb.

“Excellent,” I say, and my mom lets out a small laugh.

“Just sublime,” she says, before turning the volume back up. I stare out the window and watch my parents’ neighbor Mr. Porter arranging a Thanksgiving display at the end of his drive, soon to be replaced by an elaborate nativity scene. I already know he will back his car into each one at least three times before the New Year and will blame everyone else for it. At times like this, I can almost under­stand why my parents never left Anaheim. There’s a comfort to be found in the inevitability of it all.

I arrived on their porch nearly a year ago, with a camouflage duffel bag filled with all the things in the world I thought I couldn’t live without, most of which are now long gone. I was seven hours sober after six months that I remember only in gossamer fragments, and I saw how bad it had gotten in my parents’ faces before I ever looked in a mirror.

Despite what I told the women in CVS, I haven’t really been Grace Hyde since I was fourteen, so I had to work hard to make my return as seamless as possible for my parents. I observed their habits carefully before slotting myself into their schedule, drifting into their spaces only at breakfast and dinner, never in between. I even matched my rootless accent to theirs again, pulling back on my vowels wherever they did to remind them of who I was before we moved here. I, too, have learned how to worship at the altars of TV dinners and reality shows, all the while pretending to be like any other family deeply entrenched in the suburbs of Southern Cali­fornia.

In the middle of the day, when my dad is at work and my mom is painting her nails or watching QVC, I walk the streets of Anaheim, generally ending up at the same manicured park with a pink marble fountain in the center. I am rarely approached here when I go out, and if I am, I politely decline to take any photos. People in small cities are different—­they need less from you. I thought it would be hard to disappear, but it turns out it’s the easiest thing in the world. Whoever you may have been, you’re forgotten as soon as you pass the San Fernando Valley.

For my family’s part, they don’t question my presence. Awards season came and went, and we all pretended that my eight-­year career never existed. Maybe they’re respecting my privacy, or maybe they really don’t care why I’m here. Maybe I lost that privilege when I moved away, or that first Christmas I didn’t come home, or maybe it was all the ones after that. When I’m being honest with myself, I understand that I only came back here because I knew it would be like this—­that as much as I don’t know how to ask for anything, my family also wouldn’t know how to give it to me.