Historical

Manhattan, June 1926: to get herself noticed, chorus girl Fenella Quist plants a lie in the papers — 'the Follies girl who spins straw into gold' — and bootlegger king Lucius Ormsby, who owns her theatre and her father's debts, locks her in a loft full of straw: gold by dawn, three nights running, or her father goes in the Hudson. The gorgeous fae spinner Gilt climbs out of her dressing-room mirror and spins it for her — for a price each night — and when she has nothing left, he takes a wager: guess his true name by Midsummer Eve, or belong to the fae court under Times Square for a hundred years.

Chicago, 1927: barnstorming wing-walker Opal Kincannon steals back her own biplane to escape her wedding to bootlegger Augie Strand — and a cyclone drops her, plane and all, onto the Wicked Witch of the East in the candy-bright Land of Oz. The dead witch's silver shoes leap onto her feet: they will carry their wearer home in three heel-clicks once they wake under the Green Moon in seven nights. The only man in Oz who understands them is the Wizard himself — Oscar Diggs, a gorgeous, silver-tongued Omaha stage magician who drifted in by balloon ten years ago, has faked godhood in the Emerald City ever since, and wants those shoes more than he has ever wanted anything.

Hong Kong, Mid-Autumn Festival 1962: Josephine Kwok, the colony's most expensive society matchmaker — who sells destiny, believes in none of it, and was jilted at the altar seven years ago — is publicly humiliated when the bride she matched drops the groom's hand mid-toast. That same night a gorgeous god falls out of the moon onto her balcony: Lian, apprentice of the Old Man Under the Moon, exiled for a crime he won't name, whose fall snapped one hundred and eight red threads of fate across the city. He can see every thread; she knows every heart in Hong Kong society. To save her name and his life they must retie all 108 before the next full moon.

Italy, spring 1955: Corrado Lanza, a Neapolitan ex-factory test driver four years into a six-year stretch for a getaway job, is bought out of Poggioreale prison by Don Ignazio Ruffo to drive the Don's red barchetta in the Mille Miglia — sixteen hundred kilometres of open road, Brescia to Rome and back in one day, while every policeman in Italy stands on the route as a crowd marshal. While the country's cops watch the race, the Don's crew will empty a Rome jeweller's vault of the Varano emerald 'La Lacrima', and Corrado's car has to carry it north through the mountain passes. If it doesn't reach Brescia, his kid brother Gennaro, riding locked in the boot of the Don's killer's Aurelia, goes into Lake Garda.

Malta, summer 1565: Pietru Azzopardi, a harbour diver chained to a Hospitaller galley oar for selling silver he salvaged from a Knights' wreck, is unchained the day the Ottoman armada lands — because the Order needs men who can swim messages through enemy water and fight knife-to-axe beneath the surface at the Senglea stake-palisade. Hold the harbour until the relief fleet comes and he walks free; desert or fail and his sister, who put her own neck up as his surety, hangs from the walls of Birgu.

Venice, Carnival 1665: by decree of the Council of Ten, any Murano glassmaster who leaves the lagoon is hunted down and killed — and the secret hand behind Murano's finest mirrors is Isotta Ballarin, a woman no guild will let sign her own glass. When a golden French courtier offers her Paris, a fortune and her own name, she slips away masked through Carnival — straight into the gondola of Zorzi Carrer, the Ten's most beautiful assassin, sent to bring her home or bury her.

Havana, the last five nights of 1958. Disgraced ex-cop Ciro Albarrán is working as a house detective at the mob-owned Hotel Flamingo Real, trying to pay off a $12,000 gambling marker when the croupier turns up dead in the rooftop pool. His orders are simple: find the killer—or, better yet, recover the owner’s stolen ledger and give the mob a Cuban to hang before New Year’s. But the easiest man to frame is Ciro himself.

Soleil-sur-Mer, Riviera, summer 1962: broke Marseille card sharp Zaza Delorme steals a kiss from playboy casino heir Aurelio Castelmar so she can lift his room key. What she takes instead is his family's three-hundred-year-old Luck. Now every roulette wheel spins her way, falling crates miss her, and her debts look payable. The Luck only moves to whoever starts a kiss, so Aurelio has one way to win it back: seduce her until she lets him kiss her first.

Born with a monster’s heart, Hyun-ryeong walks the line between life and death – where mystery, romance, and dark secrets await in Exchanged Heart.

A heart-reading matchmaker in Joseon helps troubled couples – until a girl haunted by faceless ghosts forces him to confront love and the supernatural.