Elodie works nights as a waitress at Inferno, an exclusive nightclub, and when the chance comes to earn real money fast, she takes it: volunteering as the prey in the Hunt, a brutal game staged for wealthy clientele on a private stretch of Billionaire’s Island. Survive until midnight, and she walks away with ten thousand dollars. Make it to dawn, and the payout climbs to a hundred thousand, more than enough to take care of herself and her sister.Her hunter is Jaeger, a towering, feral operative from the Fraternitas brotherhood, a man built for violence and only barely holding his own primal instincts in check. What Elodie doesn’t know going in is the Hunt’s hidden rule, whispered among the men who run it but never spoken to the women who play: whatever the hunter catches, he keeps.
As the night stretches on and Elodie evades capture across the island’s grounds, the line between predator and prey blurs into something neither of them expected, an intensity that has as much to do with obsession as it does with the money on the line. What was supposed to be a single desperate night for quick cash turns into something far more dangerous, and far more permanent, once Jaeger closes the distance between them.
The club’s wealthy clientele treat the Hunt as pure spectacle, but for Elodie and Jaeger the game stops being a performance almost from the first chase, forcing both to reckon with wanting something the rules of Billionaire’s Island were never built to allow.
A dark, modern retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set inside a mafia underworld, His Perfect Prey follows a woman hunted for sport by a man who has no intention of letting her go.
Why this grips: a woman becomes prey in a mafia brotherhood’s brutal hunting game, only to discover the hunter has no intention of letting his catch go free.
Sara Dunn is an Irish registered nurse working at a busy ICU in Portland, Oregon. When a German man is admitted to her unit after nearly dying on a transatlantic flight from Tokyo, doctors are confused and don’t understand how to treat the man. Before he dies that evening, he tells Sara a sequence of numbers that mean nothing to her. Soon the FBI is questioning her about the murdered man, she’s put on administrative leave, and her house is trashed. Coming to her rescue is her mysterious neighbor, Don, who says she can hide out with him at his house on the Oregon coast. She finds out Don is retired military and now makes high-priced Japanese swords. But even Don can’t keep her entirely safe. Now he must travel to Japan to unravel a mystery, while he tries to stay one step ahead of the deadly Yakuza underground.
Maddox Cruz is a tech billionaire and single father who never fully got over the six-month relationship he had with Peyton Russo in high school, a connection that ended abruptly twenty years ago when Peyton vanished from his life without a word of explanation. When Maddox learns that Peyton is set to attend their upcoming twenty-year reunion, he decides to go despite every instinct telling him to stay away.Peyton, now living in New York and a teacher by profession, only ends up at the reunion because her grandmother tricks her into coming home and guilt-trips her into attending. The moment she and Maddox reconnect, the chemistry between them reignites immediately, undimmed by two decades apart. But Peyton is carrying a secret from their shared past, one she’s certain will turn Maddox’s affection into hatred the moment he learns the truth.
After a single night together, Peyton disappears again, leaving Maddox to wonder if history is simply repeating itself. Months later, circumstances force her back to town for good, and she finds herself now teaching Maddox’s young daughter, Hannah, throwing the two of them into repeated contact neither can avoid. Every school pickup and parent conference becomes another opportunity for old feelings to resurface, even as Peyton keeps trying to maintain the professional distance her new job demands. As friends and family meddle their way toward pushing the two together, Peyton finally reveals what she’s been hiding: she gave birth to their child years ago. Rather than the anger she braced for, Maddox responds with compassion, and the two finally begin working toward the relationship fate has been engineering all along.
Why this delights: a billionaire single dad reunites with the high school sweetheart who vanished decades ago, only to learn she’s been raising the child they never knew about.
Threats and Promises
Lauren has just remade herself: a new look, a new business, a new sense of confidence in a life she’s worked hard to build. She’s too caught up in the momentum of her own reinvention to notice the strange, unsettling incidents accumulating around her, small things easy enough to explain away individually, until Matt shows up. Charming, attentive, and suspiciously well-timed, Matt’s sudden interest in Lauren raises a question she can’t quite ignore: is he genuinely drawn to her, or is his arrival connected to the trouble that’s been quietly building around her life?As Lauren gets pulled deeper into a relationship she can’t fully trust, the threats around her escalate from vague unease into something impossible to explain away, forcing her to decide whether Matt is protection or the source of the danger itself.
This edition pairs Barbara Delinsky’s romantic suspense with a second novel, Her Secret Past by Amanda Stevens: Amber Tremain vanished from her small Mississippi hometown eleven years ago and has just as mysteriously returned, only to find her own family questioning whether she’s really who she claims to be. Determined to find out what actually happened to her all those years ago, Amber turns to Connor McBride, her former boyfriend, a man once accused of murdering her, the very crime her disappearance was assumed to be. Wary but unable to walk away, Connor agrees to help Amber untangle who wanted her gone in the first place, digging up a decade-old mystery that neither of them ever got real answers to.
Two full novels of romantic suspense in one collection, each built around a woman whose past refuses to stay buried and a man she isn’t sure she can trust.
Why this grips: two romantic suspense novels pair women haunted by unresolved danger with men they can’t decide to trust or fear.
Making soap from scratch looks intimidating from the outside, all lye warnings and precise measurements, but The Complete Guide to Natural Soap Making breaks the process down into something any determined beginner can actually manage safely at home, walking through the full cold-process method step by step before handing over 65 complete recipes to work through.Amanda Gail Aaron starts with the fundamentals: how lye actually works and how to handle it safely, the role each oil and butter plays in a finished bar’s lather, hardness, and moisturizing quality, and the basic equipment a home soap maker actually needs versus what’s just nice to have. From there, the book moves through a genuinely wide range of finished soaps, herbal and botanical bars built around calendula, lavender, and oatmeal, exfoliating scrubs using coffee grounds and sea salt, and richer, moisturizing bars built around shea butter and goat’s milk for anyone dealing with sensitive or dry skin.
Each recipe includes exact measurements and a full walkthrough of the process, along with troubleshooting guidance for the specific problems beginners actually run into: soap that won’t harden properly, unexpected discoloration, or a batch that separates instead of setting. The book also covers natural coloring and scenting options for readers who want to avoid synthetic fragrances and dyes entirely, along with guidance on curing and storing finished bars so they last.
Whether the goal is replacing store-bought soap with something free of synthetic additives or building a small side business around handmade bars, this is a practical, safety-first guide to a craft that rewards patience with genuinely useful results.
Why this helps: a safety-first, recipe-packed guide walks beginners through cold-process soap making, from lye basics to 65 finished natural bars.
What actually separates a career comedy writer from someone who’s merely funny at parties? And Here’s the Kicker goes looking for the answer through in-depth conversations with 21 successful humor writers spanning generations and mediums, from veteran sketch and film writers like Irving Brecher and Buck Henry to contemporary voices like Stephen Merchant and Dan Mazer.Mike Sacks structures the book as a series of extended interviews rather than a single unified argument, letting each writer’s own path speak for itself, and the resulting portrait is refreshingly inconsistent: there is no single formula for breaking into comedy writing, no reliable script to follow. Some writers describe grinding out submissions to places like The Onion or The New Yorker for years before their first acceptance; others stumbled into their careers through entirely different doors. What emerges instead of a formula is a set of recurring traits across nearly every interview: stubborn determination, willingness to adapt when one approach isn’t working, and the value of building real relationships early with other writers chasing the same goals.
Along the way, the interviews pull back the curtain on how specific, beloved comedy actually gets made: how much of Borat’s seemingly improvised chaos was actually carefully scripted in advance, why The Office adopted its now-iconic documentary-style filming approach, and the practical mechanics of building a writers’ room from the ground up. Sacks includes practical guidance throughout on the unglamorous realities of breaking in: how submissions actually get read, what makes a spec script stand out, and how representation actually gets secured.
Part career guide, part oral history of modern comedy writing, this is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the jokes actually get made.
Why this helps: 21 top comedy writers reveal the unglamorous, wildly different paths that actually led to their careers, and how the industry’s biggest laughs get built.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3