Books

Dr Eleanor “Nell” Pascoe knows how to manage risk. At Penhaven Maternity Unit, she is the consultant obstetrician colleagues trust when labour stops following the plan. So when one unplanned night with Dr Owen Kersey leaves her pregnant, Nell does what she does best: decides what matters, makes a plan, and offers him an exit before he can ask...

For twenty-nine years, they have never once been in the same room.

Eleanor Vane has spent three decades as the most discreet solicitor in Holborn — the senior partner who never lies and never volunteers, who has closed other people’s worst weeks into boxes in a basement and quietly called it a life. Ray Bristow built a cold-storage empire so...

Gabriel Marchetti once made a decision he could defend to everyone except Mara Roth.

More than a decade ago, Mara trusted him during her father’s fight to recover the Valenti Archive. Gabriel used what she gave him, shaped the truth, and helped bury a valid claim. Mara built the rest of her career making certain powerful institutions could never...

Ilaria Sarno writes the contracts that keep Chicago’s four criminal houses from war. She is the sitting broker, the keeper of the Ledger, and the one woman every house is forbidden to claim. Until an old rule puts her own name on the page.

Maksim Sorokin arrives at the Table to settle a blood price and invokes living surety: ninety days of...

Lucia Sartori built a life her father’s criminal empire could not own: a Queens apartment paid for with her teacher’s salary, a classroom full of eighth graders, and rules no man gets to rewrite.

Then a retired Justice Department attorney walks into her school with a sealed inventory excerpt bearing her name. Her late father left behind an...

Petra Halloran is the most expensive person in every room she enters, and she stopped noticing a long time ago.

She founded Aria, the AI platform that turns a single sentence into a finished, professional piece of music, and spent twenty years turning three words from a conservatoire jury into the most talked-about company in London. Hands, not...

At Penhaven Maternity Unit, Dr Saira Roskilly has one rule: never let comfort sound like a promise. After years in tertiary neonatal care, she has returned to Cornwall determined to make every difficult conversation exact.

Rhys Calder has a different rule. As an advanced neonatal nurse practitioner and regional retrieval coordinator, he knows...

The burn was supposed to make the water safe. The men who lit it knew better.

Four days after tank cars left the rails above Kettle Fork, North Carolina, the smoke has cleared, the contractor has posted a notice, and every house in the hollow has been told the creek is fine.

Laurel Greer knows better, and she cannot prove it. She is the only nurse...

Whitcombe General’s A&E department survives on adrenaline, vending-machine coffee, and Priya Raman’s refusal to let anyone fall through the cracks — including herself. So when a billionaire’s donation saves her ward, and his name goes up in brass by the front doors, she reads it exactly for what it is: a rich man buying himself a clean...

Sofia Bellandi knows how to make a crisis disappear. When a hostile acquisition threatens Serra Fine Art Transit, she uses Bellandi money to buy the company time before anyone can stop her.

Matteo Serra has spent his life learning what Bellandi help costs. His family’s old debt made labor, loyalty, and even need feel like property. He’ll accept...

Camilla Orsini has spent months repairing Harbor Light Foundation after learning her father used its protected residences for criminal ends. Then she walks into a shuttered refuge house and finds a former beneficiary standing over a dead De Santis soldier.

The woman says she was defending herself. Camilla believes one thing immediately: no one is...

Tommy Nash builds glass towers by clearing away the old. It made him one of the wealthiest men in Britain, and it cost him the one house he never should have sold: 11 Alder Row, where he was born, and the mother he moved out of it twenty years ago, for her own good, until she stopped speaking to him.

He buys the house back. He does not tell the...

The river gave the town its dead back. It gave back one too many.

When the Nolichucky came out of the gorge, it took two streets, the elementary school, and the old cemetery on the bottom land where Ambrose Mill has buried its people for a hundred years. It took the courthouse annex too, and with it every plat, deed and death certificate in the...

Marisa Ferraro sells the world one promise: someone is awake so you don’t have to be.

Her company, Vigil, turned that promise into a fortune — night nurses, remote monitors, a control room over the Thames that never goes dark. She hasn’t slept through a full night in eighteen years, and she has never told a living soul why.

Theo Marchant can’t be...

Gia Marchetti was born into power, but not into the right to wield it. When a Commission ruling forces her to share control of four disputed cargo agreements with Adriano Orsini—the enemy heir fighting to reclaim his family’s seat—she sees a chance to prove she can command more than family loyalty and polite influence.

Adriano has the crews, the...

The ice came down the night Advent began.

By morning Balsam Hollow had no power, no road out, and no roof on the church that has carried its music for a hundred years. The Fraser firs that pay for this valley’s Christmas are lying broken in the rows. And Lorna Decker, choir director, tree farmer, and the woman who has quietly carried this town’s...

The water took her diner. The ground gave back a body.

Nora Keene buried a husband young and built her whole life back around a chrome-edged counter, a six-year-old girl, and a plan for everything. Then the Laurel River came up over its banks in the night and took the low streets, the mill floor, and the last thing she had. She has a camp kitchen...

Vittoria Sabatini buried a husband she did not mourn. Days later, the New York Commission gives her a new one: Luca Marchetti, the rival don everyone blames for putting Emilio in the grave.

The marriage is not mercy. It is a cease-fire.

Emilio left behind a black ledger filled with hidden routes, payments, killings, and names powerful men would...

Nadia Ellis finds people for a living. She’s the best in Britain at it — freelance, untraceable, hired through solicitors who never ask what she does with what she finds. She has no online footprint of her own. That isn’t modesty. That’s four years of practice.

Callum Marchant built the machine that made her career possible: a people-search...

Alessia DeLuca knows how to make powerful men agree to terms they think were their own. What she does not have is a title. When evidence of a stolen Bellandi transport seal leads her to Dante Bellandi, the rival family’s newly appointed underboss, their secret meeting ends in gunfire and two dead men.

The attack leaves both families with a...