Ilium

Ilium is an espionage novel that moves from London to Mallorca, Croatia, Paris and Cap Ferret. Its narrator is a young Englishwoman who grew up unhappy in London, dreaming of escape, pretending to be someone else, and fixated on a locked private garden. On the eve of her twenty-first birthday, at a party near that garden, she meets its new owner, Marcus. He is charismatic, mysterious and thirty-three years older, and he sweeps her off her feet. Soon they marry at his finca in Mallorca, and she has finally slipped into a new role, though at what cost is unclear. On their honeymoon in Croatia, Marcus tells her there is a favor she can do for him, as part of a plan already in motion. The favor is for her to pose as an art advisor to a family at Cap Ferret, where Marcus asks her simply to listen. A helicopter takes her to a remote, heavily guarded and luxurious compound on a spit of land in the Atlantic. It is ruled by the enigmatic and charming patriarch Edouard, with his wife Dasha, their children Nikki and Felix, and a shifting cast of guests. Some seem suspicious and some intriguing, and perhaps none are what they appear, just as she is not. The novel by Lea Carpenter follows a long-planned, high-stakes CIA and Mossad operation that needs only the right asset to be completed.