Merging the atmosphere of Jess Walters’ Beautiful Ruins using the interesting historical backstory of Christina Baker Kline’s The Orphan Train, Deborah Lawrenson’s mesmerizing novel transports readers to a sunny Portuguese town with a shadowy past-where two women, decades apart, are drawn right into a dark game of truth and is situated that still haunts the shifting sea marshes.

Traveling to Faro, Portugal, journalist Joanna Millard hopes to flee an unsatisfying relationship and a stalled career. Faro is usually about 300 Times of Sunlight: A Book an enchanting city, as well as the seaside sights are enhanced by the business of Nathan Emberlin, a charismatic younger guy. But behind the crumbling facades of Moorish structures, Joanna soon realizes, Faro includes a seedy underbelly, its economy compromised by problem and wartime spoils. And Nathan has an ulterior motive for seeking her business: he is determined to find the truth including a child’s kidnapping that may have taken put on this dramatic coastline over two decades ago.

Joanna’s subsequent search qualified prospects her to Ian Rylands, an English expat who all cryptically insists she’ll find answers in The Alliance, a book compiled by American Esta Hartford. The book recounts an American couple’s knowledge in Portugal during World Battle II, and their entanglements both personal and professional using their German opponents. Only Rylands insists the book isn’t fiction, so that as Joanna reads deeper in to the Alliance, she starts to suspect that Esta Hartford’s story and Nathan Emberlin’s may indeed converge in Faro-where the past not only casts an extended shadow but nonetheless exerts an extremely present danger.