Shane is on a snowy hillside carrying out a sniper mission when the operation collapses around him, and he’s pulled out of trouble by Phoebe, a small, sword-carrying operative with sharper wit than her size would suggest. With Agnes away in Paris, Shane finds himself leaning on the rest of the team, Lisa Livia, Joey, Detective Xavier, and the ever-present dog Rhett, for a job that’s about to get a lot more dangerous than expected.The assignment is protecting a wedding at Two Rivers, tangled up in the fate of a small but influential European kingdom. The bride is an icy Duchess, the groom an amiable Duke, and the guest list is a minefield: a furious ex-Duchess with a grudge, a hulking sword-wielding enforcer, and, worst of all, a traitor buried inside the Organization’s own ranks, feeding information to whoever wants the wedding to end in bloodshed.

As the ceremony draws closer, Shane and his team have to figure out who’s turned against them before the wedding party becomes a target, all while Phoebe pushes to prove she belongs among seasoned operatives rather than being treated as the new recruit. The threats multiply faster than the team can track them, forcing improvised alliances and split-second decisions as the wedding barrels toward chaos.

Woven through the action is the team’s own internal dynamic, old grudges, new loyalties, and the question of whether Phoebe’s sword skills make her an asset or a liability in the middle of a diplomatic crisis. The wedding itself becomes a pressure cooker, guests and staff alike suspects until proven otherwise.

Blending fast-paced action with the series’ trademark banter, Shane and the Hitwoman follows a mismatched team racing to protect a royal wedding from a saboteur hiding in plain sight.

Why this delights: a sniper mission gone wrong pulls Shane into guarding a royal wedding from a hidden traitor, a vengeful ex-Duchess, and a sword-wielding enforcer.

Cairo, 1922. Sahara Aldridge is a young Egyptologist working the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, fighting for a seat at the table in a field that has little patience for women. When a childhood friend turns up a lost journal that belonged to Sahara’s mother, who died at sea years earlier, it points to something Sahara has never let herself believe: that her parents may have been travelers through time itself.The discovery forces Sahara to reconsider a strange, unexplained incident from her own childhood, one she’s spent years trying to forget. As journalist Jack Moretti starts asking pointed questions about her family, Sahara’s suspicion hardens into certainty: her parents’ deaths weren’t an accident at sea, but a murder tied directly to their extraordinary, inherited gift.

Determined to find answers, Sahara makes the choice to travel back through time herself, landing in the era of King Tut and stepping directly into the political currents swirling around Egypt’s young pharaoh. What she uncovers there tangles her investigation into her parents’ deaths together with a conspiracy surrounding the pharaoh’s own demise, forcing her to weigh what she’s willing to risk, and what secrets might be safer left buried, against her need to finally understand where she came from.

Navigating a world where her modern instincts and knowledge are both an advantage and a constant danger to conceal, Sahara has to move carefully among pharaohs, priests, and palace intrigue while racing against a clock she barely understands, all while Jack’s questions back in 1922 threaten to expose secrets she isn’t ready to share.

Blending Jazz Age archaeology with time-travel adventure, A Time to Seek follows a woman chasing her family’s hidden history straight into the heart of ancient Egypt.

Why this captivates: a 1920s Egyptologist discovers her parents may have traveled through time, and travels back to King Tut’s era to uncover the truth behind their deaths.

In a near-future New York where an elite anti-terrorism unit called the Unleashed operates under a grim mandate, “the police don’t uphold the law, they unleash it,” Brock Harper leads a team built to meet extreme threats with extreme force. When a wave of terrorist attacks tears through the city, Harper’s unit becomes both New York’s last line of defense and, soon enough, a target in its own right.The man behind the attacks lost everything as a child, and he’s built a campaign of revenge around that loss, deploying bombs, odorless gas, and other lethal methods against police, elite personnel, and politicians alike. As the body count climbs and conventional tactics fail to slow him down, Harper is pushed toward a choice no one on his team saw coming.

Unable to stop the attacker through the rules his unit is supposed to operate under, Harper makes an agonizing decision, one that crosses a line he never expected to cross, sacrificing a piece of himself to prevent a far greater tragedy. The choice saves lives, but it leaves Harper permanently changed, carrying the weight of what he did long after the immediate crisis has passed.

Along the way, Harper’s own team fractures under the pressure of being hunted themselves, forcing him to hold together a unit built for offense while playing defense against an enemy who knows exactly how the Unleashed operate from the inside.

Terror In New York follows Harper and the Unleashed through an escalating siege on the city, building toward a conclusion that trades easy heroism for a harder, more morally complicated reckoning with what desperate circumstances can justify.

Why this grips: an anti-terror unit leader crosses an unthinkable line to stop a revenge-driven bomber terrorizing New York, and pays for it long after the smoke clears.

Baghdad, during the American occupation of Iraq. An elite four-person CIA team, including a female doctor working undercover in the field, is thrown into crisis when a terrorist leader kidnaps an American contractor and beheads him on a live internet broadcast, then promises a major attack within seven days.Hidden inside the terrorist cell is a man who doesn’t belong there: an Iraqi pharmacist who infiltrated the group not out of ideology but out of desperation, searching for his fiancée, who the same terrorist leader has also abducted. He takes part in the broadcast beheading to maintain his cover, then is released back into the city, carrying the weight of what he’s just done.

The pharmacist’s search collides with the CIA team’s investigation when his fiancée is forced to deliver the murdered contractor’s head to the Green Zone, and the corpse yields evidence directly linking it to the terrorist leader the Americans are hunting. From there, the race is on: the CIA team working to stop the promised attack before the deadline, and the pharmacist working to find his fiancée before it’s too late for her as well.

Neither side has the luxury of certainty: the CIA team can’t be sure who among their Iraqi contacts is trustworthy, and the pharmacist can’t reveal his true purpose without risking execution by the very people he’s infiltrated, leaving every step of the search balanced on a knife’s edge.

Told from multiple perspectives, American soldiers, Iraqi civilians, pro-American Iraqis, and the terrorists themselves, Seven Days From Sunday builds a ticking-clock thriller around the moral ambiguity of a war with no clean sides.

Why this grips: a CIA team races a seven-day deadline to stop a terrorist attack while an undercover pharmacist searches for his kidnapped fiancée inside the same plot.

Amanda Jacobs has just lost her father and inherited Mountain Ridge Outdoor Adventures, the family business that anchors her life in Hope Falls. Sorting through everything that comes with sudden ownership, she finds herself pulled back into memories of her teenage years with “the Fabulous Four,” and the unrequited feelings she once carried for Justin Barnes, her father’s employee and the object of a crush she never got to act on.Justin left Hope Falls a decade earlier, unable to bring himself to pursue Amanda when she was still five years his junior and the timing was impossible. Word of her father’s death reaches him far from home, and he returns to Hope Falls uncertain of his welcome, unsure whether Amanda will be glad to see him or still carry resentment over the way he disappeared from her life without explanation.

Back in the same town, working alongside the business her father built, Amanda and Justin are forced into proximity neither fully expected, and the years between them collapse faster than either is prepared for. The central question hangs over every scene they share: has the girl who once adored him grown into a woman who can’t stand him, or is he still, against all odds, the one thing that feels like home?

Old friends from the Fabulous Four keep circling back into both their lives, nudging them toward honesty neither is quite ready for, while Amanda balances new responsibility for her father’s business with old feelings she never fully let go of.

Set against the backdrop of Hope Falls and the outfitting business Amanda now runs, Feels Like Home follows two people working out whether a decade-old connection can survive grief, distance, and growing up.

Why this delights: a decade after leaving her behind, a man returns to Hope Falls to find out if the woman he once couldn’t have still feels like home.

Brooklyn, the 1930s. Abe Reles has clawed his way up from petty street crime to become one of the most feared enforcers in Murder, Inc., the contract-killing arm of the American mob’s national crime syndicate, an operation responsible for dozens of professional assassinations carried out with businesslike efficiency across state lines.A Brotherhood Betrayed follows Reles’s rise through that underworld and the string of murders that made him indispensable to the syndicate’s leadership, before tracing the collapse of his loyalty once law enforcement finally closes in. Facing the electric chair, Reles makes a decision that will make him one of the most consequential informants in American crime history: he agrees to testify, handing prosecutor Burton Turkus a roadmap to Murder, Inc.’s entire operation and setting off a chain of trials that dismantles the organization from the inside out, exposing killings that had gone unsolved for years and implicating some of the era’s most powerful mob bosses.

The book follows Turkus’s methodical prosecution built almost entirely on turning insiders against the organization that employed them, and the extraordinary risk Reles takes by cooperating, a decision that makes him a marked man even under police protection. That protection ultimately fails: Reles dies falling from a hotel window while guarded by six police officers just before he’s set to testify against his final target, a death officially ruled accidental but widely suspected, then and now, to have been an assassination made to look otherwise.

Grounded in trial transcripts and period reporting, this is the story of the informant whose testimony brought down Murder, Inc., and the mystery of the fall that silenced him for good.

Why this matters: the enforcer whose testimony exposed Murder, Inc.’s killing machine met a death still debated as murder disguised as an accident.

Phoenix, 2004. Marjorie Orbin has built a comfortable life as a suburban wife married to Jay Orbin, a successful art dealer, a long way from her earlier years as an exotic dancer with a string of failed marriages behind her. When Jay disappears shortly after celebrating their son’s birthday, Marjorie waits weeks before reporting him missing, a delay that becomes the first thread investigators pull on.What they find unravels fast: Marjorie kept using Jay’s credit cards after he vanished, moved her gym boyfriend into the house within days, and told her young son the new man would be filling his father’s role, all while insisting she had no idea where her husband had gone. The case breaks wide open when a torso, headless and limbless, turns up in the desert outside Phoenix, and forensic evidence begins tracing back unmistakably to Jay Orbin and to the home he shared with Marjorie.

As investigators dig into Marjorie’s past, a pattern of calculated reinvention emerges: six previous marriages, alleged connections to organized crime, and a string of relationships that consistently ended the moment they stopped serving her financially. Prosecutors argue that Jay was never anything more than a means to an end, a source of stability and money that Marjorie discarded the moment it became inconvenient, timing the murder for maximum financial gain while carefully staging her own alibi in the days that followed.

Dancing with Death traces the investigation and trial that ultimately convicted Marjorie Orbin of murdering and dismembering her seventh husband, a true crime account of a marriage built entirely on calculation.

Why this matters: a showgirl turned suburban wife murdered and dismembered her husband for money, and this account traces the investigation that finally caught her.

Chef Katie Button spent years training in some of the world’s most demanding kitchens, working under Ferran Adrià at the legendary elBulli and later alongside José Andrés, absorbing the techniques and philosophy behind modern Spanish cuisine at its most inventive. Cúrate distills everything she learned into recipes built for an American home kitchen, bringing the small-plate, share-everything spirit of Spanish tapas culture to readers who may never have attempted it themselves.The book, written with Genevieve Ko and carrying a foreword from both Adrià and Andrés, walks through the full range of Spanish cooking: classic tapas built for grazing and conversation, a properly detailed chicken paella, the cured meats and cheeses that anchor a good spread, and the technical backbone, sauces, stocks, and preserving methods, that separates competent Spanish cooking from the real thing. Recipes drawn directly from Button’s acclaimed Asheville restaurant of the same name translate her professional techniques into instructions a determined home cook can actually follow.

Beyond the recipes themselves, the book carries real technical instruction on Spanish culinary fundamentals: how to properly cure jamón-style meats at home, the science behind a good sofrito, and the exact balance that makes a gin and tonic, of all things, into a genuine Spanish culinary tradition worth understanding rather than an afterthought. It’s less a survey of Spanish food and more an apprenticeship compressed into recipe form, built by someone who actually trained under the country’s most influential chefs.

For anyone who wants to cook real Spanish food rather than a vague approximation of it, this is a serious, technique-forward cookbook that brings restaurant-level Spanish cuisine home.

Why this delights: a chef trained under Ferran Adrià and José Andrés brings real, technique-driven Spanish cooking, tapas to paella, into the American home kitchen.

Long before the Grateful Dead became a byword for tie-dye and tour buses, Jerry Garcia was a young, restless artist absorbing the full ferment of late-1950s San Francisco: Aldous Huxley’s writing on psychedelics, the freewheeling prose of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and the bohemian art scene at the California School of Fine Arts, where he studied under figures who prized spontaneity and communal experimentation above craft for its own sake.No Simple Highway traces how that specific cultural moment, equal parts literary movement, psychedelic experimentation, and countercultural rejection of postwar conformity, produced not just a band but an entire ethos that would eventually become the Grateful Dead’s defining spirit. Peter Richardson follows Garcia and his collaborators through the formation of the band, the emergence of the sprawling, devoted Deadhead subculture that grew up around their live shows, and the decades-long touring machine that turned improvisational jamming into one of the most durable live music enterprises in American history.

Rather than treating the band’s story as simple music biography, Richardson situates the Dead within the broader currents of 1960s counterculture, tracing how ideas about community, altered consciousness, and rejecting mainstream ambition shaped both the band’s music and the culture that formed around it, from the Haight-Ashbury scene through decades of touring that outlasted nearly every other act of their era. The book draws a straight line from a near-fatal car accident that reoriented Garcia’s sense of purpose through to the massive, self-sustaining community his band eventually built.

A serious cultural history for readers who want to understand the ideas underneath the tie-dye, not just the setlists.

Why this delights: a cultural history tracing how 1950s bohemian San Francisco produced Jerry Garcia’s ethos and the sprawling Deadhead culture that followed him for decades.

Stephanie London leaves St. Louis behind for Hope Springs, a small Southern town where her father’s family roots run deep, hoping the move will connect her to a heritage she’s never fully known. What she finds instead is a community whose name reads increasingly like irony: Hope Springs remains quietly, deeply divided along racial lines that decades haven’t managed to heal.Charlotte Willoughby has lived in Hope Springs her whole life and has her own reasons for wanting out, a broken engagement and mounting family pressure to stay making her question whether the town has anything left to offer her. When two local churches, one Black, one white, attempt a tentative gesture toward reconciliation by holding a monthly joint service, the initiative meets immediate resistance from congregants on both sides who have spent a lifetime treating the town’s racial lines as simply how things are.

The fragile progress those services represent is tested when a sudden, devastating tragedy pulls Hope Springs into the national spotlight, forcing the town to confront exactly the divisions it has spent generations avoiding. As the crisis unfolds, both Stephanie and Charlotte find their personal struggles, questions of belonging, faith, and what they actually want from their lives, colliding with a community reckoning that neither expected to be swept into.

Following multiple intertwined stories of prejudice, failed relationships, and unexpected calling, the novel asks whether real reconciliation is possible in a place that has spent so long refusing to look at itself honestly, and whether faith can carry a fractured community through when everything else has failed.

Why this moves: a small town’s fragile attempt at racial reconciliation is tested by tragedy, forcing two women to confront what faith and forgiveness actually demand.