Excerpt from Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"She probably gets a lot out of her men," Winant said thoughtfully. "And I don't mean money. She learns things, Sal. And passes them on. I bet your dad finds that damned useful. Love Pam or hate her, she's got the makings of a great political courtesan."

He was right, of course. They both knew Pamela Digby had won Churchill's heart from the moment she sailed into the family and took Randolph off their hands. As a child, Sarah's brother had been difficult; as an adult, he was a hard drinker, a hopeless gambler, and a bruiser with an uncontrolled temper. For a few months, Pamela had seemed like a God-given answer. A steadying influence. A good woman whose love could save even Randolph. The fact that Pamela was neither steady nor good was apparently beside the point. Randolph's abandonment—and Pam's determination to ignore it—had only ranged his parents more firmly on his wife's side.

It occurred to Sarah that Gil was right. Her father appreciated the courtesan in Pamela. Used it, even, in a way he would never appreciate or use any of his own daughters. Sarah felt suddenly like weeping. She had spent much of her youth trying to escape the Churchill name, the Churchill madness—running away to the stage and an unhappy marriage with a showman who was too cheap and too old for her—and now, in the midst of this bloody war and her father's visible decline, she wanted nothing so much as to belong to him. One of the most brilliant and demanding personalities on earth.

Gil didn't have to be told any of this. He seemed to understand everything important about Sarah and her troublesome family. Not because he was one of Roosevelt's trusted men or had twice been governor of New Hampshire or because he had raised two sons himself. Gil was a philosopher and a lover of poetry, a quiet and inward-looking man whose simplest pronouncements rang with existential truth. He hated to speak in public, but he'd won British hearts by risking his life in bombing raids and promising far more help than America would ever give. Sarah suspected he'd gladly die if it would save her country from annihilation—and he'd do it in a heartbeat to save her. Which meant that she'd already destroyed something precious in Gil Winant. Because the man with more integrity than anybody in England had left a wife behind in the United States.

She was no better than Pamela after all, Sarah thought. An adulteress who took her happiness in both hands. But unlike Pamela, she was strangling it with guilt.

"Ever had turkey?" Gil asked her now.

She shook her head.

"It's dry. Go for the stuffing instead." He kissed her cheek. "See you at dinner."

He glanced down the villa's empty hall, then slipped noiselessly from her room on stocking feet. Sweet of him, but Sarah wondered why he bothered to tiptoe. If Pamela knew they were lovers, so did the entire British delegation.

—

"I LOATHE and abominate that sly dog of a Chiang," the Minister for War Transport, Lord Leathers, was saying petulantly as he sipped his whiskey. His short legs were stuck straight out on the wool carpet, as though discarded by his round body. "He wants to bugger our understanding with President Roosevelt. Nattering on, in his slit-eyed way, about Colonials. Playing up the democratic bit. Deploring our nasty British ambitions. Our postwar plans to buy and sell them all, from Shanghai to . . . to . . ."

Leathers's knowledge of the world momentarily failed him; he had left school at fifteen. A shipping magnate with a shrewd and canny sense of sea lanes, certainly, but no Public School education. That was what Ian was for.

"Guangzhou?" Ian suggested delicately.

"Indeed!" Leathers grunted, and raised his glass.

Ian topped it off. "I'd like the name of his tailor. Fellow's extraordinarily well dressed."

Excerpted from Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews. Copyright © 2015 by Francine Mathews. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.