Bees in the Butterfly Garden

The sheltered life Meg Davenport has known at a prestigious school is shattered when her estranged father, Skipjack, dies and the 18-year-old girl discovers that the riches he used to keep her in a life of luxury were illegally gotten. Meg scorns the traditional options—teaching or marrying—available to her in late-19th-century New York and inexplicably decides to follow in her con-artist father’s footsteps. In her attempts to bilk the family of two school friends out of their rumored fortune in hidden gold, she finds herself caught in a power struggle between Skipjack’s attractive protégé and surrogate son, Ian, and Brewster, another member of her father’s gang of thieves. Ian also is at odds with Skipjack’s religious fiancée, Kate, whose unwelcome morals had started to influence his mentor to go straight. In the middle of a growing romance between Meg and Ian, the author (the Great War series) uses a slow-moving, unlikely plot to touch on issues of abandonment, loyalty, faith, and life not always going the way you plan. Agent: Rachelle Gardner. (July)