Not Like Paradise Series

One night at a dive bar in the East Village, best friends Jansen, Jason, Hersh, and Clint create a secret society. One with a fake past full of murders, ghosts, and family secrets. A joke, meant to freak out their school friends, who will no doubt fall for it. Because in the single-sex private schools of Manhattan’s über-wealthy Upper East Side, where GPAs and coke highs are through the roof, last night’s mind-numbing party is this morning’s eyeroll-inducingly exaggerated story, and relationships burn out faster than the cigarette between your fingers, induction to a secret society feels like a natural rite of passage. The eerie notes left in Jansen’s, Jason’s, Hersh’s, and Clint’s bedrooms are the first clue their joke has hit too close to a very real, and very hidden, history of Manhattan. In a secret room only blocks from their penthouses, the mystery, one that began with long-dead twins named Anabelle and Jonathan, starts to unravel. And after a cab chase, fruitless attempts at an impossible-to-crack code, and the offhand discovery of a book stacked on a desk in a backwater South Carolina bedroom comes the chilling realization their “joke” has also hit too close to home. Because as it turns out, murders, ghosts, and family secrets are the hidden history of their own parents.

Jansen has long resented her conceited parents, their money-and-social-standing-mean-everything attitudes, and the pretentious tennis-club and Hamptons-parties lifestyle they push on her. But after learning her mom, Scarlett, tried to murder Clint’s mom, Cindy, Jansen’s resentment turns to a hatred she has no idea how she’ll conceal. As she, Clint, Jason, and Hersh reel in the wake of their discovery, everything feels surreal to Jansen. The inane love lives of her school friends, nights out at Red Sulfur, the dangerous need for a high that continuously requires more and more stimulation to attain, and even the sordid past of the Circles of Eight. It is only with the boys she feels like her true self, especially in the world she and Jason have created when it’s just the two of them, a mystical yet very real Paradise, their “best ever.” But when a long-awaited revelation hits Jansen out of the blue, she snaps out of her foggy reverie and, along with Jason, throws herself deeper into uncovering the mysteries of the Circles of Eight. The trail leads away from her mom’s murder attempt fifteen years ago and takes Jansen and Jason back ten years earlier, to the childhood of Jason’s mom, Corinne. Despite warnings they are opening a treacherous Pandora’s box, Jansen and Jason set out to connect the clues littered across Corinne’s and the Circles’ intertwining pasts. An old diary hidden in a bookshelf, a boy named Robert, a letter that can’t be found, an unknown object of dire importance, a forgotten summer house in Vermont. And, ultimately, questions Corinne seems determined to leave unanswered.

Only four other people (besides Robert) know of the existence of what I took from the Mistress Suite that day, and three of them are dead. “...doesn’t know about Anabelle.” “It is coming true.” Words. Some written in a diary in 1973, others tidbits of whispered conversations. They’re the final puzzle pieces in the deeply hidden, never-recorded-in-the-Magic-8-Ball history of the Circles of Eight, a secret society whose current members may practically claw each other’s eyes out in their battle to reign as Master and Mistress, but whose past is built on witchcraft, betrayal, and murder. And those words are the only clues Jansen and Jason have. Warned away from the Vermont house but issued a challenge involving the biggest deception and illusion to ever hit the Circles, Jansen and Jason embark on a chase for answers and inspiration. From a tiny apartment in Paris to a nameless dance studio housed in a former Bowery flophouse, from the secret rooms of some of New York’s oldest buildings to the city’s exclusive and elusive underground club scene, and, finally, from a long-abandoned subway station to a deserted insane asylum, they, along with Hersh, Clint, Kella, and Taylan, attempt to rewrite the past, present, and future of the Circles...using spells, ghosts, and the Circles’ founders...mysterious twins Jonathan and Anabelle Townsend, thought dead for decades. In the aftermath, Jansen, Jason, and the others must come to terms with a new reality, test the boundaries of their friendships, and decide what the future holds. And Jansen and Jason must answer what could be the most defining question of their lives...what will Paradise look like now?