Lorraine: A Romance

The forests of Alsace-Lorraine, 1870. War is a whisper on the wind, but not yet a shout. Jack Marche, a young American wandering Europe, stumbles into something far more dangerous than a scenic tour when he encounters a mysterious man secretly mapping the roads and bridges. That man serves Lorraine de Nesville, a spirited French girl whose father builds balloons and whose family sits on a château perched above a region about to be swallowed by empire. Lorraine is no simpering heroine. She runs a network of watchers, a spider at the center of a web that senses the Prussian advance before any general. When Jack enters her orbit, the chemistry is immediate and dangerous. He's an outsider, American, unburdened by the ancient loyalties that make Lorraine's world go round. But he wants in. He wants her. And as the political clouds darken into war, what begins as a flirtation becomes a question of what one person will sacrifice for another, and for a homeland that may not exist by winter. Chambers writes historical romance with real teeth: the espionage is genuinely tense, the landscape becomes a character, and Lorraine herself is the kind of heroine who decides her own fate.