Set in 1945 between Hitler's death and Hiroshima, The Second Child is a satirical thriller about one young woman's plot to outsmart the supreme dictators in a world on fire. From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The First Friend.

You can't choose your family, but you can choose your enemies.

1945: It's the dying days of the war. A triumphant Josef Stalin has the world's future in his hands, but leading up to the Potsdam peace summit he is restless and paranoid, increasingly suspicious that his ambitious security overlord Lavrentiy Beria is plotting against him.

Beria has a secret weapon, his best friend's daughter. A patriot and devotee of Papa Stalin, Melor Murtov has returned from a two-year exile to become Beria's adopted daughter and his eyes and ears among the nepobabies of the Kremlin.

In this palace of intrigue and deception, Melor must play a dangerous game, outwitting treacherous power plays and the capricious whims of her frenemies while conducting a secret mission of her own: to find out who murdered her parents before her time runs out.

Against a backdrop of international politics, spying and the true-history intrigue of the closing days of World War Two, The Second Child is a chilling black comedy about survival in the court of madmen.