Number one <i>New York Times</i> best-selling author Richard North Patterson, author of more than twenty novels, including <i>Degree of Guilt</i> and <i>Silent Witness, </i>returns with a sweeping family drama of dark secrets and individual awakenings.<br> <br> <i>Loss of Innocence, </i>the second book in the Blaine trilogy, “in one life of the 1960s, symbolizes a movement that keeps changing all our lives” (Gloria Steinem) in “a richly-layered look at the loss of innocence not only among his characters but that which America lost as a nation." (<i>Martha’s Vineyard Times</i>) “An extraordinary novel—profound, emotionally involving and totally addictive,” said actor and author Stephen Fry, “this may be Richard North Patterson’s best work.”<br> America is in a state of turbulence, engulfed in civil unrest and uncertainty. Yet for Whitney Dane- spending the summer of her twenty-second year on Martha’s Vineyard--life could not be safer, nor the future more certain. Educated at Wheaton, soon to be married, and the youngest daughter of the all-American Dane family, Whitney has everything she has ever wanted, and is everything her all-powerful and doting father, Charles Dane, wants her to be. But the Vineyard’s still waters are disturbed by the appearance of Benjamin Blaine. An underprivileged, yet fiercely ambitious and charismatic figure, Blaine is a force of nature neither Whitney nor her family could have prepared for.<br> <br> As Ben’s presence begins to awaken independence within Whitney, it also brings deep-rooted family tensions to a dangerous head. And soon Whitney’s set-in-stone future becomes far from satisfactory, and her picture-perfect family far from pretty.<br> <br> An acknowledged master of the courtroom thriller, Patterson’s Blaine trilogy, a bold and surprising departure from his past novels, is a complex family drama pulsing with the tumult of the time and “dripping with summer diversions, youthful passion and ideals, class tensions, and familial disruptions.” (<i>Library Journal</i>)<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>