Before Jodie Rattler became a star, she was a girl growing up in St. Louis. One day in 1955, when she was just six years old, her uncle Drew took her to the racetrack, where she got lucky --- and that roll of two-dollar bills she won has never since left her side. Jodie thrived in the warmth of her extended family, and then --- through a combination of hard work and serendipity --- she started a singing career, which catapulted her from St. Louis to New York City, from the English countryside to the tropical beaches of St. Thomas, from Cleveland to Los Angeles, and back again. Jodie comes of age in recording studios, backstage and on tour, and she tries to hold her own in the wake of Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell. Yet it feels like something is missing. Could it be true love? Or is that not actually what Jodie is looking for?

Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have: financial security. But when the dead bodies of young women start appearing outside of town, a darkness descends that she can't resist confronting. Side by side with her friend, Jean, and inspired by her reading --- especially by Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, Dupin --- Eliza pieces together an array of clues to try to catch the killer, all the while juggling clients who begin to seem more and more suspicious.

Paras, short for "Perestroika," is a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris. One afternoon, she finds the door of her stall open and wanders all the way to the City of Light. Soon she meets an elegant dog, a German shorthaired pointer named Frida, and they keep company with two irrepressible ducks and an opinionated raven. But then Paras meets a human boy, Etienne, and discovers a new, otherworldly part of Paris: the ivy-walled house where the boy and his nearly 100-year-old great-grandmother live in seclusion. As the cold weather and Christmas near, the unlikeliest of friendships bloom. But how long can a runaway horse stay undiscovered in Paris? How long can a boy keep her hidden and all to himself?

It’s 1987, and the next generation of Langdons is facing economic, social and political challenges unlike anything their ancestors have encountered. Michael and Richie, twin sons of World War II hero Frank, work in the high-stakes worlds of government and finance --- but their fiercest enemies may be closer to home. Charlie, the charmer, struggles to find his way; Guthrie is deployed to Iraq, leaving the Iowa family farm in the hands of his younger sister, Felicity --- who, as always, has her own ideas. Determined to help preserve the planet, she worries that her family farm’s land is imperiled, and not only by the extremes of climate change.

EARLY WARNING opens in 1953 with the Langdon family at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch, Walter, has suddenly died, leaving their five children, now adults, looking to the future. As the country moves out of post-World War II optimism through the darker landscape of the Cold War and the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s, and then into the unprecedented wealth (for some) of the early 1980s, the Langdon children each follow a different path in a rapidly changing world.

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children. Each chapter in SOME LUCK covers a single year, beginning in 1920 and going up through the early 1950s. As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly.