MORE THAN WORDS

An heiress grieves her seemingly perfect and successful father until she learns he was hiding some devastating secrets.

Nina Gregory grew up idolizing her father. After her mother died in a car accident when Nina was young, her father raised her by himself while running a ritzy hotel business in New York City. His standards were exacting, and he taught her that the Gregory name was the most important thing she owned. Nina loves her job as a speechwriter for mayoral candidate Rafael O’Connor-Ruiz, but she knows that eventually she’ll take over her father’s company. Her life seems mapped out in front of her—her boyfriend, Tim, is the son of her father’s best friend and business partner, and she knows that one day they'll get married and have children. But she can’t ignore the passion she feels for her job in politics—or the passion she feels for Rafael. When her father dies, Nina realizes she’ll have to take over the company long before she’s ready. She gives up her speechwriting gig and devotes herself to understanding the Gregory Corporation. In the course of her research, she discovers that her father wasn’t the perfect, upstanding man she always assumed he was, and his relationship with her mother wasn’t the dream it looked like from the outside. Shattered by the realization that her father was flawed, Nina starts to wonder if she should really follow in his footsteps. Does the path he set for her still make sense, or should she follow her passions even if that means risking everything? An heiress with multiple homes and romantic prospects may not seem like an inherently sympathetic figure, but Santopolo (The Light We Lost, 2017) manages to turns Nina into a well-rounded character. Despite a life of privilege that sometimes blinds her to the ways others, like Rafael, have struggled, she wants to use her power and money to do good things. Nina’s struggle to decide between two men, one of whom represents her old life and the other who represents what she could be if she took a chance, is propulsive and compelling. The depiction of Nina’s grief for her father is vividly raw, made more real by her eventual understanding that he was an imperfect human being.

Full of drama, scandal, and romance, this is sure to delight fans of Santopolo’s The Light We Lost