Amelia Harley is starting over at forty-four, rebuilding her life after a difficult divorce with nothing but her savings, her determination, and the encouragement of her two teenage children. She sinks everything into The Pink Cupcake, a bright pink food truck parked in Food Truck Alley, hoping a business built on something as simple as homemade cupcakes can give her family the fresh start they need.The launch goes about as well as she could hope, until a man turns up stabbed to death in the dining area near the trucks, and the investigation lands almost immediately on Matthew, who runs the burrito truck next door. Tattooed and openly upfront about his past in a gang, Matthew makes an easy suspect for police eager to close the case quickly, but Amelia isn’t convinced they’ve got the right man.

Balancing a fledgling business with an investigation she has no business running, Amelia starts asking questions around Food Truck Alley, working through the tangled relationships and grudges among the vendors and regulars who make up her new community. Every answer she gets only deepens the mystery, and the deeper she digs, the more she realizes the real killer is someone far closer to home than anyone suspected.

With her business, her family’s fresh start, and possibly her own safety on the line, Amelia has to prove Matthew’s innocence and expose the true killer before Food Truck Alley’s newest, brightest venture becomes collateral damage in someone else’s crime. By the time she corners the truth, she has as much riding on the outcome personally as she does professionally, and walking away is no longer an option.

Why this delights: a divorcée’s brand-new cupcake truck becomes the center of a murder investigation when her only ally, the tattooed burrito vendor next door, is wrongly accused.

Lacey Lane has built her career as a television producer in New York City around control: control of the schedule, the story, the outcome. When she’s sent to Christmas Mountain, Montana to scout locations for her reality dating show, she sees it as exactly what it is on paper, a two-week work trip that could finally earn her the promotion, and the apartment, she’s been chasing.The trip starts going sideways the moment she arrives, quite literally, when a distracted phone call sends her crashing straight into Jacob Curtis on Main Street. Jacob turns out to be the son of the couple who run the Sugar Plum Inn, where Lacey is staying for the duration of her scouting trip, and despite their rocky introduction, he’s the one who helps her get settled.

As Lacey spends her days working out camera angles and romantic backdrops for other people’s love stories, she finds herself increasingly distracted by Jacob and the town’s genuine, unhurried warmth, a stark contrast to the ambition-driven world she’s built her identity around in New York. She tells herself she’s here to work, that nothing about Christmas Mountain, however charming, is going to derail the career she’s spent years building.

But the town keeps finding ways to slow her down, and Jacob keeps finding reasons to be wherever she is, until Lacey has to admit that the trip meant to boost her career might be reshaping what she actually wants from her life. A Sugar Plum Christmas follows a city producer’s reluctant, snowbound reckoning with small-town love.

Why this delights: a big-city producer scouting Christmas Mountain for a dating show finds herself falling for the inn owner’s son she literally crashed into on day one.

The Single Dad CEO series comes to a close with its third pairing, following the same tight-knit circle of friends who’ve spent two books watching each other stumble toward second chances. This installment turns the spotlight on the group’s last holdout, a single father who’s spent years insisting he’s done with romance, convinced that raising his kids alone is simpler than risking his heart again.That resolve gets tested the moment a woman from his past, or his present, depending on how the timing shakes out, walks back into his orbit with a connection neither of them planned for. As with the earlier books in the series, meddling friends and family treat the two as a foregone conclusion long before either of them is willing to admit it, engineering the kind of forced proximity that turns polite friendliness into something neither can keep pretending is nothing.

Balancing the demands of running a company, raising kids, and untangling feelings he’s spent years avoiding, the hero has to decide whether letting someone in is worth the risk of getting hurt again, while the heroine works through her own reasons for staying guarded. Familiar faces from the earlier Single Dad CEO books return throughout, tying the trilogy together as old friends celebrate one final happy ending among the group.

Heartsick & Lipsticks brings Shawna Renae’s Single Dad CEO series to its conclusion with the warmth, banter, and hard-won vulnerability that defined the two books before it. Old wounds resurface as the hero confronts why he shut the door on romance in the first place, forcing him to weigh the fear of repeating past mistakes against the very different reality standing in front of him now, before the group’s matchmaking schemes force his hand.

Why this delights: the last holdout in a tight friend group of single-dad CEOs finally lets his guard down, closing out the series with its most reluctant, hard-won romance.

Jack Sutton’s mother left him an inheritance with a catch built specifically to needle him: he can’t claim it unless he’s married. Rather than fall for anyone the traditional way, Jack decides to treat the whole thing as a transaction, a business arrangement with clearly defined terms and an expiration date, no messy feelings required.Kelly Bradley is a law student staring down a tuition deadline she has no way of meeting, and when Jack’s proposition lands in front of her, one year as his wife in exchange for the financial security to finish her degree, it looks less like a romance novel setup and more like a lifeline. She takes the deal with her eyes open, certain she can keep the arrangement exactly as businesslike as Jack intends it to be.

Neither of them accounts for what happens when two people share a home, a public image, and increasingly less separation between the fiction they’re maintaining and the way they actually feel about each other. As the contract’s expiration date creeps closer, Jack finds himself facing a question his mother’s will never anticipated: whether he can actually let Kelly go once the year is up, or whether he’s going to have to find a way to make her stay that has nothing to do with the terms they signed.

The Billionaire Deal follows a marriage of convenience that neither party expected to survive contact with real feelings, testing whether a contract built on boundaries can hold up against genuine love. This collection carries the story forward through Reuniting with the Billionaire and The Billionaire Op, as family pressure and rival business interests keep testing a bond neither of them intended to make real.

Why this delights: a billionaire’s business-only marriage to a cash-strapped law student stops being strictly business the moment real feelings start crossing the terms of their deal.

Keira Swanson has landed the kind of job most aspiring travel writers only dream about, a position at Viatorum, one of New York’s most prestigious travel magazines, but the reality of the job is proving far less glamorous than she imagined. Between a grueling work environment and a relationship that’s quietly falling apart, Keira has built up a healthy cynicism about love, one that makes her the perfect candidate for the assignment her editor hands her next.She’s sent to Ireland for thirty days to cover the Lisdoonvarna love festival, ostensibly to write a travel piece, but with an unspoken mandate underneath it: debunk the whole idea of true love, and give Viatorum’s readers a dose of the skepticism Keira genuinely feels. It’s a job that fits her worldview perfectly, right up until Ireland itself, and the tour guide assigned to show her around, start chipping away at every assumption she came in with.

As the thirty days unfold, Keira finds herself falling for the Irish countryside, the rhythm of a place utterly unlike New York, and, against every professional instinct she has, for her guide. The assignment meant to confirm her cynicism instead forces her to reckon with feelings she’d convinced herself she was too smart to have, testing whether a woman who built her identity around doubting love can let herself actually fall into it.

Love Like This opens The Romance Chronicles with a skeptic’s journey through Ireland that ends up rewriting everything she thought she believed about love. Her deadline forces the question sooner than she’d like: file the cynical piece her editor is expecting, or risk her career to write the truth of what actually happened to her over those thirty days.

Why this delights: sent to Ireland to debunk true love for a travel magazine, a cynical writer falls for the country, and her guide, instead.

Ashley Cooke is forty-six, divorced, and running Bluebird Basin, the Montana ski resort she manages alongside her mother, Maude Alice, while fending off pressure from her manipulative ex-husband Chuck, who’s working an angle for the wealthy conglomerate trying to acquire the resort out from under them. Years of financial strain and a marriage that chipped away at her confidence have left Ashley guarded, her heart, as she puts it to herself, walled off with brick and barbed wire.When the resort’s finances get tight enough that Ashley can’t afford the seasonal labor she needs, she strikes an unconventional deal with Matthew Madigan, a former 1980s grunge musician twenty-two years into recovery, who runs Little Timber, a sober living facility nearby. Madigan’s residents work the resort seasonally in exchange for room and board, solving Ashley’s staffing problem and giving his residents steady, purposeful work.

Thrown into regular contact by the arrangement, Ashley and Matthew build an easy friendship that neither one expects to deepen the way it does. Matthew, guarded by his own history and wary of the emotional intensity that sobriety has taught him to approach carefully, finds himself drawn to Ashley anyway, while Ashley has to relearn how to trust someone after a marriage that taught her not to.

As the season plays out against the mountain backdrop of Bluebird Basin, both of them are forced to decide whether they’re willing to risk vulnerability again, with Chuck’s scheming circling in the background as a reminder of exactly what trusting the wrong person can cost.

Why this delights: a guarded resort owner and a sober rock musician build an unlikely partnership at a Montana ski resort that slowly turns into something neither expected to risk again.

Gabriel Cocker is the rockstar member of the sprawling Cocker family, a man who’s spent his career on stages and in the tabloids, more comfortable behind a guitar than in anything resembling a stable relationship. As the tenth entry in Faleena Hopkins’s Cocker Brothers series, Cocky Rockstar follows Gabriel as fame, family expectations, and his own resistance to settling down collide with a woman who refuses to be impressed by any of it.True to the series’ formula, the chemistry between Gabriel and his love interest ignites fast and burns hot, propelled by the same brash, playful banter and steamy tension that define every Cocker brother’s romance. But underneath the rockstar bravado, Gabriel is carrying more baggage than his public image lets on, and the woman who finally gets past his defenses has to navigate both his fame and the parts of himself he’s spent years keeping hidden from everyone, including the people closest to him.

As their relationship deepens, Gabriel is forced to weigh what he actually wants against the version of himself the spotlight has built, a rockstar persona that’s easier to maintain than the vulnerability real intimacy requires. Familiar Cocker family dynamics thread through the background, with brothers, exes, and complications from the wider series feeding into Gabriel’s own reckoning with love.

Cocky Rockstar delivers another entry in the Cocker Brothers’ signature blend of family loyalty, alpha-male swagger, and hard-won romantic surrender, as Gabriel learns that the one thing his fame can’t buy him is the kind of love that actually sticks.

Why this delights: a rockstar used to burning through fame and flings meets a woman who refuses to be dazzled, forcing him to choose between the persona and the real thing.

Mia Germaine was twelve years old when a near-fatal car accident left her alive only because of a heart transplant, an organ harvested from a murder victim whose killer was never caught. Two decades later, Mia is haunted by nightmares she can’t explain, vivid, disturbing dreams that seem to be showing her fragments of the crime that claimed her donor’s life, a phenomenon some call organ memory and others dismiss as trauma dressed up as prophecy.Unable to ignore what her dreams seem to be telling her, Mia becomes consumed with solving the murder that gave her a second chance at life, a case that leads her straight into the path of an active serial killer known as the Triangle Terror. What starts as a search for closure turns into something far more dangerous, as Mia’s investigation draws the very killer she’s hunting directly toward her.

Caught between visions she can’t be sure are real and a threat that very much is, Mia has to figure out whether she’s chasing genuine evidence or slipping into a delusion born from trauma and unresolved grief, all while the people around her grow increasingly worried about the toll the obsession is taking. The cost of her pursuit turns out to be steep, threatening a relationship she can’t afford to lose even as she gets closer to the truth about her donor’s death.

A Secondhand Life follows a woman convinced her borrowed heart is trying to solve its own murder, and the danger that conviction pulls her directly into.

Why this grips: a heart transplant recipient becomes obsessed with solving her donor’s unsolved murder, pulling her directly into the path of the serial killer responsible.

The Essential Ketogenic Mediterranean Diet Cookbook takes two of the most researched approaches to healthy eating, the heart-protective, olive-oil-and-vegetable-forward Mediterranean diet and the low-carb, high-fat ketogenic diet, and merges them into a single, sustainable way of cooking. Registered dietitian Molly Devine builds the book around the idea that these two approaches aren’t opposites: both prioritize whole foods, healthy fats, and minimizing processed carbohydrates, and combining them can support weight loss, heart health, and steadier energy without the extremes either diet can demand on its own.The book opens with a clear, accessible explanation of the science, how the body shifts into ketosis, what macronutrient ratios actually mean in practice, and why the Mediterranean diet’s emphasis on olive oil, fish, and vegetables pairs naturally with ketogenic principles. From there, readers get a structured two-week meal plan designed to ease the transition into this way of eating, paired with detailed shopping lists that take the guesswork out of stocking a kitchen for it.

The heart of the book is its 100 recipes, built around everyday, accessible ingredients rather than obscure specialty items: dishes like a Greek egg and tomato scramble for breakfast, braised short ribs with red wine for dinner, and a full range of meals in between designed to keep the Mediterranean diet’s flavor and satisfaction intact while staying within ketogenic macros.

Beyond the recipes themselves, the book addresses the practical questions that trip up most people attempting either diet alone: how to eat out without derailing progress, how to read labels for hidden carbohydrates, and how to adjust portions as the body adapts over time. For anyone who wants the metabolic benefits of keto without giving up the Mediterranean table, this cookbook offers a practical, recipe-driven bridge between the two.

Why this helps: a registered dietitian merges Mediterranean and ketogenic eating into 100 practical recipes, backed by a two-week plan to ease the transition.

In June 1950, America’s military was badly unprepared for the war that erupted in Korea, and the Navy pilots who found themselves launching from carriers in the Sea of Japan were about to fly some of the most dangerous missions of their careers. Such Men as These follows a group of naval aviators from their earliest training through the brutal combat operations that defined the Korean War’s air campaign, many of them products of the Holloway Plan, the officer program that funneled a new generation of pilots into service.David Sears, himself a former Navy officer and Vietnam veteran, draws on notes James Michener took while embedded with the fleet in 1951, weaving them together with new research to reconstruct the missions and the men who flew them. Among the aviators profiled are Jesse Brown, the first Black naval aviator, killed after his plane went down behind enemy lines, and a young Neil Armstrong, whose own harrowing close call in a Panther jet nearly ended his career, and his life, decades before Apollo 11.

The book traces the rapid technological shift underway during the war, from World War II-era Corsairs to the new F9F Panther jets, the introduction of helicopters for search-and-rescue, and the brutal realities of carrier operations and captivity for pilots shot down over hostile territory. Throughout, Sears returns to the question Michener himself posed and later dramatized in The Bridges at Toko-Ri: where does America find men willing to fly missions like these, again and again, for a war few back home fully understood?

Why this moves: Navy pilots, including a young Neil Armstrong, fly brutal, underprepared missions over Korea in a war that asked everything of a barely-ready generation.

Berlin, the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War. Kim Becker leads a Special Forces team on a mission that could tip the balance of the entire conflict: slipping into East Germany to extract one of the CIA’s most valuable agents before the Stasi, East Germany’s ruthless state security service, can find him first.The operation is dangerous enough on its own terms, but it gets more complicated when Becker’s team is assigned an untested, untrained woman whose presence nobody on the team fully understands or trusts at the outset. As the mission unfolds deep in hostile territory, every member of the team has to adapt to variables the plan never accounted for, while the political temperature of the Cold War itself seems to be rising toward something far more dangerous than the usual shadow war of espionage and counter-espionage.

Author James Stejskal, a former Special Forces officer himself, builds the operation on real Cold War tradecraft and actual procedures rather than genre theatrics, grounding the extraction in the kind of coordinated, unglamorous teamwork that defined real special operations missions of the era. Rather than a single hero carrying the plot, the story is built around how a team survives, and completes an impossible mission, when trust between its members is the only real weapon they have.

A Question of Time opens the Snake Eater Chronicles with a tense, historically grounded rescue mission that treats the Cold War’s hidden battles with the seriousness and detail of someone who actually fought them.

Why this grips: a Special Forces team races to extract a CIA asset from East Germany before the Stasi finds him, in a mission built on real Cold War tradecraft.

Pete Holmes grew up in a strict evangelical household where the rules were absolute: smoking, drinking, doubting, sex before marriage, all of it led straight to eternal damnation. Terrified of getting it wrong, Holmes devoted himself to being good, following every rule he was given, right up through marrying his first serious girlfriend at twenty-two, exactly the way he’d been taught a good life was supposed to unfold.Then his wife had an affair, and the carefully built framework Holmes had organized his entire identity around collapsed overnight. Comedy Sex God traces what happened next: a period of genuine crisis in which Holmes, newly divorced and building a career as a stand-up comedian, found himself questioning every belief he’d been raised with, briefly flirting with atheism before realizing that rejecting his childhood faith wholesale didn’t actually answer any of the questions that mattered to him.

What follows is a wide-ranging, often very funny spiritual search: psychedelic experiences, deep dives into the writing of Ram Dass and other spiritual teachers, meditation practice, and conversations with comedians, mystics, and thinkers who’d wrestled with the same questions about meaning, certainty, and what, if anything, replaces religious faith once you’ve walked away from it.

Along the way, Holmes doesn’t abandon humor for solemnity, the book’s comic timing stays intact even as it wrestles with genuinely difficult questions about faith, betrayal, and what fills the space religion leaves behind once it’s gone. Blending memoir, standup-honed comic timing, and genuine philosophical searching, Comedy Sex God follows Holmes from rigid childhood certainty through personal collapse to a hard-won, uncertain, and much more spacious version of spirituality, one built on curiosity rather than fear.

Why this moves: a comedian raised on strict evangelical certainty rebuilds his entire worldview after his marriage collapses, chasing meaning through psychedelics, mysticism, and doubt.

Ben Goldacre opens Bad Pharma with a blunt argument: modern medicine is built on evidence that has been systematically distorted by the companies profiting from it, and doctors, patients, and regulators are all operating with a picture of drug safety and effectiveness that’s been quietly rigged from the start. Rather than a single scandal, Goldacre traces a pattern of corruption running through nearly every stage of how a drug reaches a patient’s prescription.The book walks through how pharmaceutical companies design and fund the vast majority of trials testing their own products, often using methods built to produce favorable results: comparing new drugs to ineffective alternatives, testing on unrepresentative patients, or simply stopping trials early the moment results look bad. Negative findings frequently vanish entirely, unpublished and inaccessible, while positive results get amplified, distorting the evidence base doctors rely on to prescribe safely. Goldacre uses the case of Tamiflu, on which governments spent billions based largely on industry-funded analysis, as a case study in exactly how this plays out at national scale.

Beyond trials themselves, the book examines how regulators like the FDA move through a revolving door with the industry they’re meant to police, how doctors’ prescribing habits are shaped by ghostwritten papers and industry-funded education, and how companies expand disease definitions to grow their markets, sometimes using studies with undisclosed financial ties to the companies developing the relevant drug.

Goldacre closes with concrete reforms: mandatory registration and full publication of every clinical trial, tighter restrictions on industry access to doctors, and greater transparency throughout, arguments that went on to fuel his AllTrials campaign for full clinical trial disclosure.

Why this matters: a doctor lays out, in exhaustive detail, how pharmaceutical companies have quietly rigged the evidence that medicine itself depends on.