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Hi reader,
Two days out now, and I want to give you the scene rather than the pitch, because this is the one that decides whether you're going to love this book.
Kira Deveraux, The Second Family, September 18. The Rowe Capital Series, Book Three.
Quick context if you're new to it: Sloane Marchetti has spent two years secretly building the case that will send her own father to prison. Elias Reyne was hired to find the family's leak and hand her over, and worked out inside four days that she's exactly who they think she is. He never told them, because his own name is buried one layer beneath the same structure she's about to burn down. Neither of them knows the other is lying. Then, three-quarters of the way through the book, that stops being true, all at once, in a pool house at midnight.
"You're in the structure," she said, and her voice had finally, at the very bottom, cracked, one hairline fracture. "You're not a bodyguard my father hired. You're a piece of it. You're one layer down under the family, in the money, guaranteed into the thing I'm about to. My file names you. I've been building the weapon for eighteen months and it has you in it. If I walk this in, I don't just burn my father. I burn you."
"Because you living matters more to me than me staying hidden," he said. "That's the whole of it. I did the math on the fourth day and it never changed: your file finished and walked in is the only thing that gets you out of this house alive, and your file finished and walked in is the thing that surfaces my name, and I chose you."
She doesn't believe him. Not yet. That's the part I won't spoil. If you missed the opening pages last week, where the two of them are still lying to each other, that letter is here.
A bonus scene exists for this one too. "The First Vanish" is Elias's origin, eight years before the book, the night that put his real name into the structure Sloane is now trying to destroy. Reply VANISH and I'll send it to you.
Still worth your time from two weeks ago. Jennie's The Auction House Affair and Kira's own Ashmarked to the Exiled Dragon and The Shatterfield are all out now. The letter that landed the morning after they shipped, with which one suits which mood, is here.
Clara, and this one's already moving. Common Ground at Mercy General, Book 4, arrives October 2, and the launch team already has their advance copies as of last Friday. If you'd rather read it now than wait, join Read It First and tick her name before the next one goes out.
Tick Jennie, Kira, or Clara, or all three: Read It First.
On the podcast. Story Worlds is on YouTube, opening with "Every Book Is a Doorway." Two people lying to each other for three hundred pages before either one tells the truth is its own kind of doorway. Watch here and subscribe to the channel here.
A question for this one. When two people have been lying to each other the whole book, do you want the truth to come out because one of them finally confesses, or because they get caught? Sloane and Elias's book answers it one specific way. Curious if you'd have written it differently. Hit reply.
Happy reading,
Jennie Wren Foster, Kira Deveraux and Clara Langford
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