Cass Biehn

The clock is ticking. The gods are watching. This thrilling historical fantasy set in the days before Mount Vesuvius destroys Pompeii is a meet cute with an explosive fallout. Clever thief Felix slips from city to city to survive the present and escape a past he can’t remember. When Felix steals a mythical artifact—Mercury's helmet—from a temple in Pompeii, pieces of his forgotten past begin to surface. Loren, an ambitious temple attendant, has seen Felix in his apocalyptic nightmares for years. The last thing Loren expects is for his dream to stumble headfirst through his temple doors, moments after an earthquake rocks the city. When Felix shows Loren the helmet, Loren sees the world coming to an end. He knows they have mere days to uncover Felix’s ties to the relic and to Loren’s visions if they have any hope of saving the city. But Ancient Rome is ruled by bloody politics and unstoppable destinies, and now that Loren and Felix are intertwined, their lives aren’t all they risk losing. When all has turned to ash and rubble, the boys will have to piece together their fates to make it out of a burning city alive. An exploration of ambition and class, autonomy and religion, survival and love.

Two boys with rivaling ambitions must work together to stop a scheming botanist from cultivating the perfect poison—before he can use it to induce madness in them both. THOUGH THIS BE MADNESS is a loosely Hamlet-inspired YA Historical Romance, pitched as Anatomy: A Love Story meets the electric rivals-to-lovers dynamic of Carry On and the exploration of neurodivergency and queerness in a historical setting as in The Spirit Bears Its Teeth. The novel features a protagonist with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Coming in 2027 from Peachtree Teen