Book picks similar to
Hotel Moscow by Talia Carner


historical-fiction
fiction
russia
mystery

The Room on Rue Amelie


Kristin Harmel - 2018
    But war is looming on the horizon, and as France falls to the Nazis, her marriage begins to splinter, too.Charlotte Dacher is eleven when the Germans roll into the French capital, their sinister swastika flags snapping in the breeze. After the Jewish restrictions take effect and Jews are ordered to wear the yellow star, Charlotte can’t imagine things getting much worse. But then the mass deportations begin, and her life is ripped forever apart.Thomas Clarke joins the British Royal Air Force to protect his country, but when his beloved mother dies in a German bombing during the waning days of the Blitz, he wonders if he’s really making a difference. Then he finds himself in Paris, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and he discovers a new reason to keep fighting—and an unexpected road home.When fate brings them together, Ruby, Charlotte, and Thomas must summon the courage to defy the Nazis—and to open their own broken hearts—as they fight to survive. Rich with historical drama and emotional depth, this is an unforgettable story that will stay with you long after the final page is turned.

A Cape May Diamond


Larry Enright - 2012
    I’ll never forget that day. The Vietnam War had ended with the fall of Saigon that April, and the world was mired in one of its worst recessions ever. Unemployment in the United States was nearly nine percent, inflation even higher, and leadership lacking. The Watergate scandal had cast a smear across American politics, resulting in Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 to avoid impeachment, and his successor’s immediately pardoning him to close the book on an unhappy chapter in U.S. history.It was not a good time for anyone and a particularly hard time for the old Victorian town of Cape May. The crown jewel of the New Jersey shore had fallen into neglect and disrepair and was dying a slow death. Once the elegant summer home to presidents and kings, it had become the last refuge of the deposed.That’s where I met Tom Ryan. Tom was a king, or so he would have you believe, but unlike Richard Nixon, when Tom was dethroned, he wasn’t sent home with a slap on the wrist. He was sent to prison. He was a convicted draft dodger, but one of the lucky ones released early by President Ford as part of his mass clemency after Nixon’s pardon. The problem was, Tom had nowhere to go when he got out, so he took the money his dad mailed to him and spent it on a bus ticket to get as far away as possible to a place where nobody cared who he was or what he had done, a place where nobody cared about anything. That place was Cape May.As hard a time as it was for everyone, it was harder for me because that was the day I met Tom Ryan. I should have turned and walked away. I knew it when he first looked at me, but I didn’t, not my first mistake, but one that would make Monday, May 19th, 1975 the hardest day of my life. This is the story of how Tom Ryan and I met and how things never quite work out the way you think. You might find a love story in here somewhere. You might not. You might find a message hidden in one of the nickel pop bottles collected by the beachcombers from some of the most beautiful white sand beaches in the world. You might even find a little mystery, but life is a mystery, isn’t it?

Carrie's Run


Andrew Kaplan - 2013
    CIA operations officer Carrie Mathison barely escapes an ambush while attempting a clandestine meeting with a new contact, code-name Nightingale. Suspicious that security has been compromised, she challenges the station chief in a heated confrontation that gets her booted back to Langley.Expert in recognizing and anticipating behavioral patterns—a skill enhanced by her bipolar disorder she keeps secret to protect her career—Carrie is increasingly certain that a terrorist plot has been set in motion. She risks a shocking act of insubordination that helps her uncover secret evidence connecting Nightingale with Abu Nazir, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Determined to stop the terrorist mastermind, she embarks on an obsessive quest that will nearly destroy her.Filled with the suspense and plot twists that have made Homeland a must-watch series, this riveting tale reveals the compelling untold backstories of the series' main characters and takes fans deeper into the life and mind of one brilliant female spy.

As Good as True


Cheryl Reid - 2018
    After a night of rage and terror, Anna Nassad wakes to find her abusive husband dead and instinctively hides her bruises and her relief. As the daughter of Syrian immigrants living in segregated Alabama, Anna has never belonged, and now her world is about to erupt.Days before, Anna set in motion an explosive chain of events by allowing the first black postman to deliver the mail to her house. But it’s her impulsive act of inviting him inside for a glass of water that raises doubts about Anna’s role in her husband’s death.As threats and suspicions arise in the angry community, Anna must confront her secrets in the face of devastating turmoil and reconcile her anguished relationship with her daughter. Will she discover the strength to fight for those she loves most, even if it means losing all she’s ever known?

The Silver Music Box


Mina Baites - 2017
    For Paul, with love. Jewish silversmith Johann Blumenthal engraved those words on his most exquisite creation, a singing filigree bird inside a tiny ornamented box. He crafted this treasure for his young son before leaving to fight in a terrible war to honor his beloved country—a country that would soon turn against his own family.A half century later, Londoner Lilian Morrison inherits the box after the death of her parents. Though the silver is tarnished and dented, this much-loved treasure is also a link to an astonishing past. With the keepsake is a letter from Lilian’s mother, telling her daughter for the first time that she was adopted. Too young to remember, Lilian was rescued from a Germany in the grips of the Holocaust. Now only she can trace what happened to a family who scattered to the reaches of the world, a family forced to choose between their heritage and their dreams for the future.

The Same Sky


Amanda Eyre Ward - 2015
    Unable to conceive, she’s trying desperately to adopt but her destiny is quickly altered by a young woman she’s never met.Fearless thirteen-year-old Carla Trujilio is being raised by her grandmother in Honduras along with her four year old twin brothers. Her mother is sending money home from Texas where she’s trying to make a better life for her family, but she only has enough to bring one son to her. When Carla’s grandmother dies, Carla decides to take her fate into her own hands and embarks on a dangerous journey across the border with Junior, the twin left behind.Two powerful journeys intersecting at a pivotal moment in time: Alice and Carla’s lives will be forever and profoundly changed. Heartbreaking, emotional, and arresting, this novel is about finding the courage to trail blaze your own path in life with faith, hope and love, no matter the struggle or the tragedy.

Stories We Never Told


Sonja Yoerg - 2020
    Why should she care if Harlan springs a new “friend” on her? After all, Jackie has everything she ever wanted: a loving husband and a thriving career. Still, she can’t help but be curious about Harlan’s latest. Nasira Amari is graceful, smart, and young. Worse, she’s the new member of Jackie’s research team. For five years, Harlan enforced rules limiting his relationship with Jackie. With Nasira he’s breaking every single one. Why her? Fixated by the couple, Jackie’s curiosity becomes obsession. But she soon learns that nothing is quite what it seems, and that to her surprise—and peril—she may not be the only one who can’t let go.

The Lines We Leave Behind


Eliza Graham - 2018
    As she tries to make sense of her recent past, she recalls very little.But she still remembers wartime in Yugoslavia. There she and her lover risked everything to carry out dangerous work resisting the Germans—a heroic campaign in which many brave comrades were lost. After that, the trail disappears into confusion. How did she come to be trapped in a living nightmare?As she struggles to piece together the missing years of her life, she will have to confront the harrowing experiences of her special-operations work and peacetime marriage. Only then can she hope to regain the vital memories that will uncover the truth: is she really a violent criminal…or was she betrayed?

The Summer Guest


Alison Anderson - 2016
    The young Chekhov himself cannot outshine Zinaida as she urgently explores life, science, art, family, and love, her passion defying death.” — Helen Simonson, New York Times bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand“In an enchanting era-spanning novel, Anderson crafts a literary mystery that goes beyond the limits of time.” — Entertaiment Weekly, “Must List”When a family from Moscow rents a cottage on young, blind Ukrainian doctor Zinaida Lintvaryova's rural family estate in the summer of 1888, she develops a deep bond with one of their sons, a doctor and writer of modest but growing fame called Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Intelligent, curious, and increasingly introspective as her condition worsens, Zinaida keeps a diary chronicling this extraordinary friendship that comes to define the last years of her life.In the winter of 2014, Katya Kendall’s London publishing house is floundering-as is her marriage. Katya is convinced that salvation lies in publishing Zinaida’s diary, and she approaches translator Ana Harding about the job. As Ana reads the diary, she is captivated by the voice of the dying young doctor. And hidden within Zinaida’s words, Ana discovers tantalizing clues suggesting that Chekhov—who was known to have composed only plays and short stories—actually wrote a novel during his summers with Zinaida that was subsequently lost. Ana is determined to find Chekhov’s “lost” manuscript, but in her search she discovers it is but one of several mysteries involving Zinaida’s diary.Inspired by fragments of historical truth, The Summer Guest is a transportive, masterfully written novel about an unusual, fascinating friendship that transcends the limits of its time and place. It’s also a contemporary story about two compelling, women, both of whom find solace in Zinaida and Chekhov as they contemplate all that’s missing in their own lives.

Too Close


Natalie Daniels - 2018
    Then she is assigned to work with Connie, a wife and mother accused of a despicable crime. Connie is suffering from dissociative amnesia—or at least seems to be.Now it is up to Emma to decide whether Connie can stand trial for her sins. But there is something about Connie that inexorably pulls Emma into her orbit. Perhaps it is the way she seems to see right through Emma, speaking to Emma’s deepest insecurities about her life, marriage, and her own tragic past. And soon Emma begins to understand how Connie’s complicated marriage and toxic relationship with her beautiful best friend Ness could have driven Connie to snap—or maybe, she is simply getting too close to a woman who is unforgivable…Alternating between the two women’s points of view, before and after Connie’s breakdown, Too Close is a masterfully written page turner about the powerful—yet dangerous—closeness between women.

The Winters


Lisa Gabriele - 2018
    But all is not as it appears at the Asherley estate. The house is steeped in the memory of Max’s beautiful first wife Rebekah, who haunts the young woman’s imagination and feeds her uncertainties, while his very alive teenage daughter Dani makes her life a living hell. She soon realizes there is no clear place for her in this twisted little family: Max and Dani circle each other like cats, a dynamic that both repels and fascinates her, and he harbors political ambitions with which he will allow no woman—alive or dead—to interfere.As the soon-to-be second Mrs. Winter grows more in love with Max, and more afraid of Dani, she is drawn deeper into the family’s dark secrets—the kind of secrets that could kill her, too. The Winters is a riveting story about what happens when a family’s ghosts resurface and threaten to upend everything.

The Italian Party


Christina Lynch - 2018
    Newly married, Scottie and Michael are seduced by Tuscany's famous beauty. But the secrets they are keeping from each other force them beneath the splendid surface to a more complex view of ltaly, America and each other.When Scottie's Italian teacher--a teenager with secrets of his own--disappears, her search for him leads her to discover other, darker truths about herself, her husband and her country. Michael's dedication to saving the world from communism crumbles as he begins to see that he is a pawn in a much different game. Driven apart by lies, Michael and Scottie must find their way through a maze of history, memory, hate and love to a new kind of complicated truth.Half glamorous fun, half an examination of America's role in the world, and filled with sun-dappled pasta lunches, prosecco, charming spies and horse racing, The Italian Party is a smart pleasure.

Playing with Fire


Tess Gerritsen - 2015
    The first time Julia Ansdell picks up The Incendio Waltz, she knows it’s a strikingly unusual composition. But while playing the piece, Julia blacks out and awakens to find her young daughter implicated in acts of surprising violence. And when she travels to Venice to find the previous owner of the music, she uncovers a dark secret that involves dangerously powerful people—a family who would stop at nothing to keep Julia from bringing the truth to light.

Yesternight


Cat Winters - 2016
    In 1925, Alice Lind steps off a train in the rain-soaked coastal hamlet of Gordon Bay, Oregon. There, she expects to do nothing more difficult than administer IQ tests to a group of rural schoolchildren. A trained psychologist, Alice believes mysteries of the mind can be unlocked scientifically, but now her views are about to be challenged by one curious child.Seven-year-old Janie O’Daire is a mathematical genius, which is surprising. But what is disturbing are the stories she tells: that her name was once Violet, she grew up in Kansas decades earlier, and she drowned at age nineteen. Alice delves into these stories, at first believing they’re no more than the product of the girl’s vast imagination. But, slowly, Alice comes to the realization that Janie might indeed be telling a strange truth.Alice knows the investigation may endanger her already shaky professional reputation, and as a woman in a field dominated by men she has no room for mistakes. But she is unprepared for the ways it will illuminate terrifying mysteries within her own past, and in the process, irrevocably change her life.

The Phantom Tree


Nicola Cornick - 2016
    Except Alison knows better… The woman is Mary Seymour, the daughter of Katherine Parr who was taken to Wolf Hall in 1557 as an unwanted orphan and presumed dead after going missing as a child.The painting is more than just a beautiful object from Alison’s past – it holds the key to her future, unlocking the mystery surrounding Mary’s disappearance, and the enigma of Alison’s son.But Alison’s quest soon takes a dark and foreboding turn, as a meeting place called the Phantom Tree harbours secrets in its shadows…