A globe-spanning thriller of love and betrayal about a mysterious first lady with an explosive secret. Paris, 1974. Lara Orlov and her family arrive from Moscow at the height of the Cold War, thanks to her father’s position as a diplomat. The years pass, and Lara becomes more and more enamored with the City of Lights. As a teenager in Paris, she falls deeply in love with a fellow Russian expat: the passionate, intellectual Sasha, who opens her eyes to the ills of the Soviet Union. Decades later and across the globe, journalist Sofie Morse is taking some much-needed time off after several chaotic years covering Washington politics. But when she gets a call from the office of First Lady Lara Caine, her curiosity is piqued. Sofie, like the rest of the world, knows little about Lara—only that she was born in Soviet Russia and raised in Paris before marrying Henry Caine, the brash future president. After decades of silence, Lara is finally ready to speak candidly about her past: about her father’s work for the KGB and about her ill-fated relationship with Sasha—which may be long in the past, but which could have explosive ramifications for the future. As Sofie begins to write Lara’s biography, she can’t help but wonder: Why is Lara revealing such sensitive information? And why now? Caught in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, both Lara and Sofie must ask themselves what really matters—and confront their own power to upend the global political order.

Perfect for fans of Adam Silvera, this stunning novel, told through the lens of a guy in love with the cosmos (and maybe two girls), explores the complicated histories that bring us together and tear us apart. In the summer before eighth grade, Marco Suarez kissed his best friend Sally Blake. This was his first spark. And since then, whenever he’s thought about that moment, he’s traveled through a wormhole—of sorts—to relive those brief seconds when time sped up (or, rather, his view of time distorted) and he kissed her. And then, at the end of that year, she disappeared, leaving in that way that people sometimes leave—alive and well and somewhere out there but gone, nonetheless. She never even said why. And now in their senior year, Sally unexpectedly returns and Marco is shaken. Still, he holds tightly to his carefully choreographed life. A life that is full of reasons why first sparks don’t matter: Reason 1: He has a girlfriend. Her name is Erika Richards. Reason 2: He’s leaving on a full scholarship to college. Reason 3: He’s busy with his friends and making money to help support his family. But as Marco navigates the final days of high school, he learns that leaving home is never easy and a first spark is hard to ignore.

Cielo Drive cuts like a beautiful scar along the bottom of a V-shaped canyon in the hills of Bel Air, off of Benedict. In February, 1969, as she looked out on it from the red farmhouse at 10050 Cielo she and her husband Roman Polanski had just rented, Sharon had no way of knowing that she only had 6 months to live. On the night of August 9th, members of "The Manson Family" would invade that house and murder Sharon and three of her closest friends. But strangely, half a year earlier, she'd had a brush with a different killer. It happened after her younger sister Patti, then 11, looked across at the ominous Spanish-Moorish estate Sharon called "The Haunted House." In "Restless Souls," their remarkable memoir, Alisa Statmen and Brie Tate write that Patti then hiked down and across Cielo, walking up to No. 1436 Bella Drive. There, she encountered an open gate where white pillars bore the name: Falcon Lair. Once the home of Rudolf Valentino, it had been purchased in 1953 by the fabulously wealthy heiress Doris Duke. The wrought iron gates were open when Patti wandered inside. Suddenly, she heard, the caretaker yell, "This is private property!" Startled, she turned and lost her balance, skinning her knee, when just then, a black limo pulled in. A tinted window went down and a tall woman in back lowered her sunglasses to ask who she was. Once she ID'd herself as Patti, whose sister Sharon lived "across in the red barn," Doris knew that this wasn't just any child. She was the sibling of the hottest young star in town. So Doris snapped to the caretaker, "Stop being such an ogre and bring Patti in, so we can clean those scraps. And get me the Polanski's phone number." Later, the Duke staff was bandaging Patti's knee when Sharon arrived, "nervously chewing her lower lip" and apologizing to the blond billionaire who was the 3rd richest woman in the world behind Queen Elizabeth & Queen Juliana. But by then, Sharon Tate was Hollywood royalty herself; her husband Roman, coming off "Rosemary's Baby," was a kind of cinematic prince. So why was she nervous? What would make her bite her lip in the face of a woman whose caretaker's aggressive warning had caused her little sister to draw blood? Since Sharon was killed that summer, we'll never know. But one thing is clear: this wasn't the first time Sharon Tate had been pulled into Doris Duke's orbit. 2 1/2 years earlier, one of Sharon's closest friends, Eduardo Tirella, had been violently killed after Doris crushed him under a two-ton station wagon. At the time, all of Eduardo's friends suspected he'd been murdered. The brutal stabbing of Sharon Tate is the tragic tale of a young woman of great promise cut down in the prime of life. But the same could be said for Eduardo, whose own Hollywood career was just catching fire, when he told the possessive, heiress he was leaving her, just minutes before she ran him down outside the gates of her Newport, RI estate. Because she had the money and power, Doris Duke succeeded in effectively erasing his death from the narrative of her troubled life. For more than 50 years, the real truth behind what happened at Rough Point in 1966 has been hidden. Until now!