Susan Richards Shreve starts her story with a literal and literary explosion of such force that it almost knocks you off the page. The four McWilliams children—Sam, the oldest, at seven, and younger siblings Charlotte, Oliver, and Julia—are waiting for lunch aboard the express train from Milan to Rome. Their parents, James and Lucy McWilliams, have just stepped into the café two cars down to get the meal, when a terrorist bomb goes off, killing everyone in the first two cars, James and Lucy included. In telling the story of the McWilliams orphans, especially the story of Sam, vigilant new head of a shattered family, Shreve begins with a bang, and never stops for breath. This novel makes you dizzy with fear and fierce with hope all at the same time, taking you in one after another unexpected direction. Just like Sam, who turns the family tragedy into the family enterprise. In creating the dynamic dark comedy of Plum & Jaggers, a laugh-cause-it-hurts double brother/sister stage routine, Sam launches an entertainment vehicle that will rocket the McWilliams kids from Second City to Saturday Night Live and beyond. But as Sam and his siblings know all too well, you’re never safe from surprise, and at the height of the McWilliams’s professional success, a stranger comes a-knockin' on the door.