Orphans of Paradise — Laekan Zea Kemp

Every day hundreds of women smuggle drugs across international borders. Rani's sister was one of them, muling drugs from Colombia and earning enough money to buy her family's freedom to the States. They'd had a plan. Nadia would make one final drop in Boston, her siblings following her on a separate flight, leaving behind the shanty towns and the ashes of a territory war that had taken everything from them, including their parents.

Only Nadia wasn't waiting for them when they landed.

Jax is the heir to the largest drug operation in Boston, every officer and city official in his brother's back pocket. But when their mother leaves, abandoning not only her sons but a lifetime's worth of being afraid, Jax decides to leave too. He's seen enough. Done enough. And all he wants to be is numb -- alone and frozen as he trades his mother's old apartment for an abandoned lifeguard stand near the harbor.

He's almost mastered it too, until he's attacked one night by a girl he's never seen before. Though he knows those eyes -- the same one's belonging to the girl who ran with his brother's money, the girl his brother would find, though this time without Jax's help. Because Jax isn't just looking for a way out, he's looking for a way to make amends. To be the son his mother could love again. But as Jax helps Rani find the things she's lost, she helps him find something even more precious than redemption -- a reason to live.

Gritty and raw, Orphans of Paradise isn't just a dark exploration of the underground drug trade, but it's the story of two broken people, their pieces so intensely tangled, trying to assemble what's left of themselves into something new.