Lady Victoria Hamilton has three things going for her: a supernatural gift, a perfectly arranged engagement, and a guardian angel she didn’t ask for. That guardian turns out to be Finn Alexander—reigning king of London’s gossip sheets, illegitimate son of a viscount, and the most dazzlingly dangerous scoundrel in England. He’s also a mind reader. Victoria is supposed to be marrying for duty, not desire, and Finn is absolutely the wrong person to be spending this much time with. 🎩
Tracy Sumner builds the central tension cleverly: Finn can read anyone’s mind except Victoria’s. For a man who has spent his entire life hiding behind charm and wit because he always knows exactly what people think of him, encountering someone he genuinely cannot read is disorienting and irresistible in equal measure. The mystery of her is more dangerous than her beauty alone—which is saying something. 📖
The historical London setting is richly rendered, with the gossip sheet world giving Finn a distinctly modern-feeling hustle beneath his Regency-era exterior. Victoria’s situation—engaged to one man, increasingly drawn to another, gifted with powers that complicate everything—gives her real agency without requiring her to behave anachronistically. The supernatural layer lifts the romance well above standard historicals and gives both leads genuine stakes beyond the social. ✨
Unforgettable historical romantasy with a mind-reading rake, a heroine who is his one blind spot, and enough crackling tension to light up London—The Rake is Taken is a standout in the genre. FREE today on Amazon.
The world ended a long time ago. Jack Avery has adapted—scavenging through the ruins of the outer zone, dodging hunter patrols, doing what it takes to survive in a fallen civilization. The physical dangers of the apocalypse aren’t what haunt him most, though. Something happened two years ago, in a single short moment, that changed everything. Whatever it was, Jack carries it like a wound that won’t close. 🌆
Glynn James is less interested in the mechanics of collapse than in what survives inside a person after everything around them has fallen apart. Thrown Away is as much an internal journey as an external one—Jack’s trek through the wasteland parallels a reckoning with his own regrets and doubts that gives the post-apocalyptic action genuine emotional weight. The question the book keeps asking is whether second chances are even possible in a world that has been scoured clean of everything familiar. 💀
The world-building is spare and effective—James doesn’t overload the reader with lore, trusting the atmosphere to do its work. The outer zone feels genuinely desolate, and the hunter patrols suggest a larger, more organized threat lurking at the edges of Jack’s story. The focus stays tight on one man’s journey, which gives the narrative an intimacy that larger-scale post-apocalyptic fiction often sacrifices for spectacle. 🔦
Propulsive post-apocalyptic adventure with a haunted protagonist, a wasteland setting with real texture, and a beating human heart at its center—Thrown Away is a gripping series opener. FREE today on Amazon.
New year’s resolutions: never go hiking again, and stop bleeding on hibernating vampires. Everly’s impromptu hike took a catastrophic turn when she tumbled gracelessly into a vampire cave and woke up its very tall, very surly, very handsome occupant. The bonbons she offered as an apology were not well received. Cross would prefer something else entirely—specifically, Everly’s help navigating a world that has changed considerably since he last walked in it. 🍫
The setup is pure comedic gold, and the writing team behind Blood and Bonbons leans into it with confidence. Everly is a wonderfully chaotic heroine—the kind of person who brings candy to a vampire encounter and somehow makes it work as a peace offering. Cross is the classic fish-out-of-water ancient vampire learning to cope with modernity, and the dynamic between them has real warmth beneath all the fangs and exasperation. 🧛
The stakes escalate when one of Everly’s friends goes missing and she has to abandon etiquette lessons to ask Cross for help navigating the Shadow Trade—a supernatural underworld full of creatures and dangers she never wanted to know about. The tonal balance between comedy and genuine peril is handled well; the world feels dangerous without losing the book’s essential lightness. Every misstep could be fatal, but Everly faces it with bonbons and stubborn loyalty. 🌙
Delightful vampire romance with an irresistible premise, a heroine armed with candy, and a supernatural underworld that’s as entertaining as it is dangerous—Blood and Bonbons is a genuinely fun series opener. FREE today on Amazon.
The History of Rock & Roll, Volume One: 1920–1963
Ed Ward’s sweeping first volume covers the full first half of rock and roll’s story—from the 1920s, when medicine show music, vaudeville, and minstrel acts were beginning to collide into something new, through the rise of independent labels after World War II, all the way to December 1963, just as the Beatles were preparing to invade America and change everything. It’s a massive canvas, and Ward moves across it with the confidence of someone who has spent decades living inside this material. 🎸
The book earns its reputation as the definitive narrative by refusing to stop at the famous names. Yes, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Ray Charles are all here and treated with the depth they deserve. But Ward is equally committed to the forgotten heroes—the Burnette brothers, the “5” Royales, Marion Keisker, the Sam Phillips assistant who helped launch Elvis’s career and rarely gets the credit. The geography hops from Memphis to Chicago to Detroit to New York with the same restless energy as the music itself. 🎵
What separates this from standard rock history is the storytelling. Ward writes with a novelist’s ear for detail and momentum, finding the human drama inside the industry history without ever losing the thread of how the music actually developed. The independent label era in particular—Chess, Sun, Atlantic, and the others—comes alive as a genuine American story of ambition, exploitation, and accidental genius. 🎙️
Essential music history—authoritative, endlessly entertaining, and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where rock and roll actually came from. $2.99 today on Amazon.
It was supposed to be the best night of the summer—the end-of-season beach party, all the best friends together, and a wild idea: break into the abandoned funfair. It was a night to remember. And none of their lives were ever the same again. Leah Pitt opens The Funfair with the breathless energy of that teenage night before pulling back to reveal what it cost—a before-and-after structure that gives the novel its haunting momentum from the first page. 🎡
Years later, Rachel still lives at home with her mother in the same sleepy seaside town, keeping the memories of that night carefully contained. When her old friends return unexpectedly, the careful distance she’s maintained starts to collapse. The questions she’s been avoiding—who saw what, who lied to whom, what really happened—reassert themselves with a force that the intervening years haven’t blunted at all. Small-town secrets have a long half-life. 🌊
Pitt handles the dual timeline with skill, using the contrast between the vivid, reckless summer night and Rachel’s muted adult life to build slow-burning dread. The abandoned funfair is an inspired setting—inherently charged with both childhood wonder and decay, the perfect container for a story about what we carry from our youth and what carries us. The mystery of what actually happened that night unfolds carefully and pays off. 🎠
Gripping psychological thriller with a haunting seaside setting, a past that refuses to stay buried, and a tension that builds beautifully to the end—The Funfair is a standout debut. $0.99 today on Amazon.
Ten-year-old Bess has a voice that could stop a room, but in a world of poverty and hardship, singing is an unaffordable luxury. When her father sells her to the king of England, she is yanked from everything she has ever known and dropped into a world of opulence, music, and mortal danger in equal measure. Karen Heenan sets Songbird at the Tudor court with full command of its beauty and its brutality—a gilded cage where a single wrong note can be fatal. 🎵
Bess flourishes at court, building a new family and becoming Henry’s favorite minstrel, his “Songbird.” But coming of age in that world means witnessing its fragility firsthand—every smile might mask betrayal, every friendship is provisional, and even the king himself is not safe. The arrival of a young Anne Boleyn pulls Bess into currents well above her station, testing everything she has built and raising the stakes from personal to political. 👑
Running through all of it is Tom, Bess’s childhood friend and the one constant in her radically transformed life. Their bond—deepening from friendship into something more complicated as they both grow up—gives the novel its emotional spine. Heenan is careful not to let the romance overshadow the historical texture, and the result is a Tudor novel that feels genuinely inhabited rather than costumed. The tension between freedom and security drives Bess’s arc to a genuinely satisfying conclusion. 🌹
Captivating Tudor historical romance with a heroine who rises from poverty to the heart of a dangerous court—Songbird is a richly imagined and deeply felt series opener. $1.99 today on Amazon.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3