A savvy Los Angeles thriller about art, power, and gender, set in the world of Still Lives, a Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine selection
Brenae Brasil is a rising star at the most prestigious art school in the country, and her path to celebrity is all but assured. Until she is found dead on campus, just after completing a provocative documentary about female bodies, coercion, and self-defense.
Maggie Richter’s return to LA and her job at the Rocque Museum was supposed to be about restarting her career and reconnecting with old friends. With mounting pressure to keep the museum open, the last thing she needs is to find herself at the center of another art world mystery. But when she uncovers a number of cryptic clues in Brasil’s video work and investigates the artist’s final days, Maggie begins playing a very dangerous game with some very influential people. And the closer she gets to the truth, the more lies she threatens to expose.
Maria Hummel, praised for her “genius for layering levels of meaning” (BBC), has brought us back to her provocative noir Los Angeles with this haunting investigation into power and the art world.

Inspired by the stories told by her father about his German childhood and letters between her grandparents that were hidden in an attic wall for fifty years, Motherland is a novel that attempts to reckon with the paradox of the author’s father-a product of her grandparents’ fiercely protective love-and their status as passive Nazi-sympathizers known as Mitläufer.
At the center of Motherland lies the Kappus family: Frank is a reconstructive surgeon who lost his beloved wife in childbirth. Two months later, just before being drafted into medical military service, Frank marries a young woman charged with looking after the surviving baby and his two grieving sons. Alone in the house, Liesl attempts to keep the children fed with dwindling food supplies, safe from the constant Allied air attacks and the tides of desperate refugees flooding their town. When one child begins to mentally unravel, Liesl must discover the source of the boy’s infirmity or lose him forever to Hadamar, the infamous hospital for “unfit” children.
Bearing witness to the shame and courage of Third Reich families during the devastating final days of the war, each family member’s fateful choice leads the listener deeper into questions of complicity and innocence, and to the novel’s heartbreaking and unforgettable conclusion.

Kim Lord is an avant garde figure, feminist icon, and agent provocateur in the L.A. art scene. Her groundbreaking new exhibition Still Lives is comprised of self-portraits depicting herself as famous, murdered women-the Black Dahlia, Chandra Levy, Nicole Brown Simpson, among many others-and the works are as compelling as they are disturbing, implicating a culture that is too accustomed to violence against women.
As the city’s richest art patrons pour into the Rocque Museum’s opening night, all of the staff, including editor Maggie Richter, hope the event will be enough to save the historic institution’s flailing finances.
Except Kim Lord never shows up to her own gala.
Fear mounts as the hours and days drag on and Lord remains missing. Suspicion falls upon the up-and-coming gallerist Greg Shaw Ferguson, who happens to be Maggie’s ex. A rogue’s gallery of eccentric art world figures could also have motive for the act, and as Maggie gets drawn into her own investigation of Lord’s disappearance, she’ll come to suspect all of those closest to her.