The Curator of Broken Things, Full Trilogy

Book excerpt: THE CURATOR OF BROKEN THINGS TRILOGY is a fast-paced family-saga that takes place over a century and across four continents. Multiple narrative threads take the reader through love, betrayal, and espionage in a story that spans from the last days of the Ottoman Empire to Paris of the Roaring Twenties to the prewar French Riviera to the World War II Allied landing in North Africa and to modern-day Paris and Los Angeles. In this trilogy, three generations of a family’s secrets are unearthed that might bring it together or tear it apart. Book 1: From Smyrna to Paris. With her twins in college and her ex-husband off to a younger pasture, Cassie is resigned to a disappointing life in Los Angeles, until she reluctantly returns to Paris to visit her ailing father. There, she discovers the existence of an estranged aunt, a woman of many secrets who lives in a beautiful house in Paris’s exclusive Cité des Fleurs. Dumbfounded by what she learns, Cassie sets out on a quest to understand her family’s past and make sense of her father’s cold indifference toward her. In Paris, as the truth about her failed marriage begins to take form, Cassie fights with her family, grapples with French idiosyncrasies and her own, and attempts to resist the charms of a good-looking Parisian who rides a vintage motorcycle. Book 2: Escape to the Côte d' Azur. A family flees Paris at the dawn of the Second World War, haunted by secrets that threaten to rip them apart. Seventy years later, Cassie, in modern-day Paris, finds herself alone frantically trying to confront her hostile relatives. Meanwhile, puzzled by the advances of a charming Frenchman, she struggles to cope with the demands of her manipulative ex and gain an understanding of her true self. Book 3: Resistance in Algiers. Amidst he chaos of the Second World War, and having taken refuge in North Africa, Cassie’s parents and grandparents enter the French Resistance. As the Nazi threat tightens its noose, they find love and risk their lives and one another’s. In modern-day Paris, Cassie, now on the cusp of a surprising and disorienting love interest, has to conquer her fear of failure and success. When the last shocking piece of her family’s puzzle comes into her possession, Cassie must unburden herself from several generations of family secrets.