A Cover(t) Operation: Cover Reveal for The Florentine Entanglement
Creating a compelling book cover is a tricky thing, mostly because we absolutely DO judge books by their covers. While some cover artwork is intentionally abstract, more often in fiction, covers spotlight elements of the story, point to the milieu and era, even foreshadow the emotional freight the characters carry. For The Florentine Entanglement, artist David King designed an image that evokes various strands of the story—the May 1960 U-2 incident against a backdrop of Cold War Washington, DC, with a woman in shadow at the center. Haloed around her head is a bit of Florentine scrollwork, the woman’s past as a young art student in Italy figuring consequentially in the story.
Her hair styled in a 60s flip, the woman walks along the National Mall, the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building suggesting she is a creature of official Washington. To her left, a U-2 plane hovers—the high-altitude surveillance and reconnaissance spy plane at the center of an infamous Cold War clash—a project the woman’s husband oversees at the CIA. Throughout the 1950’s, U-2s took photos of key military sites over the Soviet Union until one was shot from the sky and its pilot captured. In all likelihood, no U-2 flew in the skies over DC in this way, certainly not at a visible altitude. But we give it a bit of a nod here because when the mission goes awry in The Florentine Entanglement, it threatens to expose truths that characters in the story have struggled for years to obscure.
In ways similar to my debut novel War Bonds, The Florentine Entanglement explores moral ambiguity against a high-stakes backdrop. If you’ve yet to read the first chapter, you can find it here. For me, the joy of writing historical fiction is wading into the history, in this case, researching a not-so-long-ago world that thrummed, anxiously, under a very real nuclear shadow. The research process is so engrossing, in fact, it takes a bit of discipline to pull myself out of the books and movies and monographs and get busy shaping a story around those historical events and the people behind them.
Bringing a book cover to life requires collaboration, trust, and persistence, as author and designer work through color palettes and imagery, consider which typeface offers the loveliest letterforms for the title, then refine with nuance and subtlety. I extend deep gratitude to David King at Black Rose Writing for using his talents and time to shepherd another beautiful, evocative book cover to completion.
The Florentine Entanglement will be published January 8, 2026, by Black Rose Writing
For those interested in learning more about flying an aircraft at 70,000 feet, this article from Smithsonian Magazine offers a fascinating pilot’s perspective on the hazards involved in flying a U-2. The aircraft—nicknamed The Dragon Lady—continues to operate as part of contemporary intelligence-gathering missions.
