Charles Vincent seems to have it all—a beautiful wife, two successful children, and a well-paying career. Yet happiness remains out of reach. He is trapped in a loveless marriage and his job is simply a paycheck. But his life changes forever one night as he drives along the Normandy coast, heading to their lavish château for the weekend. In one terrifying moment, Charles falls asleep at the wheel and veers off the road, plunging thirty feet down the face of a rocky cliff.
Miraculously, Charles survives. After gathering the courage to climb to safety, he starts to walk—bruised, bloody, and desperate for help. In the dark of night, he happens upon a cabin where he meets the kind and beautiful Aude Saint-Martin. They have an instant connection, and as she nurses him back to health, Charles begins to discover the passion he’s been missing for so many years.
In the aftermath of the crash, Charles has a startling realization: He doesn’t have to go back. He could simply choose to disappear, to walk away from his old life. When his car is discovered, he’ll be presumed dead, washed away at sea. If he stays with Aude, he has a chance at a fuller, happier life that he didn’t know was possible. It all seems too good to resist. But Aude has secrets of her own, and before long their pasts catch up to them, threatening everything they have fought to build.
What would happen if you were given a chance to walk away from everything in your life and start over with a blank slate, and you had a split second to decide? In Without a Trace, Danielle Steel tells an irresistible story of the risks two people are willing to take in exchange for a chance at the life they’ve always wanted.
Charles Vincent seems to have it all—a beautiful wife, two successful children, and a well-paying career. Yet happiness remains out of reach. He is trapped in a loveless marriage and his job is simply a paycheck. But his life changes forever one night as he drives along the Normandy coast, heading to their lavish château for the weekend. In one terrifying moment, Charles falls asleep at the wheel and veers off the road, plunging thirty feet down the face of a rocky cliff.
Miraculously, Charles survives. After gathering the courage to climb to safety, he starts to walk—bruised, bloody, and desperate for help. In the dark of night, he happens upon a cabin where he meets the kind and beautiful Aude Saint-Martin. They have an instant connection, and as she nurses him back to health, Charles begins to discover the passion he’s been missing for so many years.
In the aftermath of the crash, Charles has a startling realization: He doesn’t have to go back. He could simply choose to disappear, to walk away from his old life. When his car is discovered, he’ll be presumed dead, washed away at sea. If he stays with Aude, he has a chance at a fuller, happier life that he didn’t know was possible. It all seems too good to resist. But Aude has secrets of her own, and before long their pasts catch up to them, threatening everything they have fought to build.
What would happen if you were given a chance to walk away from everything in your life and start over with a blank slate, and you had a split second to decide? In Without a Trace, Danielle Steel tells an irresistible story of the risks two people are willing to take in exchange for a chance at the life they’ve always wanted.
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August 1, 2022
In Allen's wrap-up to the "Black Girls Must Die Exhausted" trilogy, Tabitha Walker balances new motherhood, new job possibilities, new friendship issues, and an ultimatum from boyfriend Marc about their relationship, and she's beginning to wonder if she really believes that Black Girls Must Have It All (75,000-copy paperback and 20,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Central Places, a debut from journalist Cai, Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, IL, for a big-deal job in Manhattan but is returning home to introduce star-worthy fianc� Ben to her hectoring parents and ignored friends; she also reconnects with laidback Kyle, the only person who ever understood her. DeFino moves from The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (And Their Muses) to Varina Palladino's Jersey Italian Love Story, which features a widow whose mother and daughter conspire to get her dating again (50,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Harper's Back in a Spell, puissant witch Nineve Blackmoore has been abandoned at the altar by her fianc�e and ends up on an awkward and ultimately antagonistic first date with nonbinary townie Morty Gutierrez (angry that her family wants to buy out his pub); then Morty unexpectedly starts acquiring magical powers. In Lipman's genre-blending Ms. Demeanor, big-deal lawyer Jane Morgan loses both career and social life after a busybody neighbor reports her for having hot sex on the rooftop of her New York apartment building, then faces more trouble when the neighbor winds up poisoned and leaves a note implicating Jane (100,000-copy first printing). From Pen/Faulkner finalist Salesses, The Sense of Wonder stars Won Lee, the first Asian American in the NBA, whose seven-game winning streak wins him the moniker "The Wonder"--all witnessed by sportswriter Robert Sung and studio producer Carrie Kang, with whom Won launches a relationship (50,000-copy first printing). In debuter Shroff's The Bandit Queens, a young Indian woman named Geeta is suspected of killing her long-vanished husband, which proves beneficial--no one wants to cross her--and then uncomfortable as other women push her for advice on getting rid of their husbands. After surviving his car's plunge off a cliff in Normandy, Charles Vincent, Steel's latest protagonist, is nursed back to health by a kind woman he stumbles across in a nearby cabin and realizes that he could vanish from his unhappy life Without a Trace. In Zigman's Small World, Joyce invites sister Lydia to move into her Cambridge apartment (if only temporarily) when Lydia returns east from California, but the two divorcees find their relationship disrupted by memories of their deceased sister (60,000-copy first printing).
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