How Did We Get Here?

Senator Ren Barry’s in trouble. He just voted to kill the green-energy bill he co-authored—a bill that represents his life’s aspirations—to keep the oil billionaire who funded his campaign from talking.

His wife, Melinda Conway, doesn’t know about the oil billionaire, but she knows there’s a muckraking journalist threatening to break the news that her runaway daughter—the one they buried nine years ago—is not quite as dead as Ren told reporters. And the girl is blackmailing them for $1.5 million, another detail Melinda hasn’t yet gotten around to sharing with her husband.

Kierkegaard said life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. In HOW DID WE GET HERE?, the lives of Ren and Melinda unspool over four decades to reveal the thwarted ambitions, thorny romances, and tangled family relationships that have sabotaged their dreams. as they each struggle to outrun the past and reach the life they always meant to be living.

Funny, heartbreaking, and full of surprises, HOW DID WE GET HERE? suggests that the past may be much closer than it appears in life’s rearview mirror.

The Sticking Place

London, 1944. As the Allies prepare to invade occupied France, desperate to turn the tide of the war, Hitler boasts that he will destroy England first. Rumors abound of the Nazis’ new Vengeance Weapons: forty-ton rockets and bombs that fly by themselves. Super weapons that have been the stuff of science fiction—until now.

Is it a hoax? Even Britain’s best scientists can’t decide, but the Allies can’t afford to gamble. The success of the invasion hangs in the balance, and every tick of the clock brings Hitler’s threat one second closer.

Enter American Catherine Stearns who has finagled a job as a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park, home of the Enigma codebreakers. Fresh out of Vassar, she’s eager to escape the shadow of her famous father and write her name large. When the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service taps her to be his back channel at Bletchley, gathering information on the Nazis’ new weapons, Catherine seizes the chance to make her mark. Soon, she’s trading secrets in London’s dark corners, smuggling files, and breaking all the rules. But each time she solves one part of the puzzle, the Germans add a new piece.

In her quest to unravel the V-weapons riddle, she encounters two men who will shape her destiny: Paul Girard, the Alsatian agent she depends on for intel from Berlin, a man waging his own secret war; and Trevor Fox, the daredevil RAF pilot whose amorous interest both fascinates and frightens her.

When a document surfaces that has profound global implications, Catherine must find a way to trick the Nazi High Command into divulging the truth about their ultimate plan, armed with nothing more than her courage and wits.