Dangerous Days

As America teeters on the edge of the Great War, steel magnate Clayton Spencer sits at his own dinner table and feels like a stranger in his own home. His wife Natalie cares too much about the crystal and too little about the man across from her. Their son Graham wants to enlist; his mother wants to keep him close. And in Clayton's munitions plants, German workers plot sabotage while he grapples with a question no one around him seems able to ask: what are we actually building toward? The real danger isn't the saboteurs in Clayton's factories but the slow erosion happening at his own table. When he meets Audrey, a woman who speaks plainly about war and duty and sees him clearly, he must confront what his marriage has become and what kind of man he wishes to be. Rinehart, the writer who invented the locked-room mystery, threads domestic disillusion through wartime tension and industrial intrigue, exposing how easily the structures we build, marriages, families, nations, can crack beneath the surface. For readers who love Edith Wharton, early twentieth-century literary fiction, or anyone fascinated by the question of what really happens behind closed doors when history comes knocking.