Oakland private investigator Jeri Howard is finally on vacation, touring New Orleans with her retired father, birdwatching and working through a long list of French Quarter restaurants, when a phone call from her friend Davina cuts the trip short. Davina’s younger sister Laurette has vanished, last seen leaving town with her boyfriend Slade, a musician with a volatile temper and a habit of getting violent when he doesn’t get his way. Jeri agrees to help look before officially filing a missing persons report, working her way through the city’s late-night music clubs and the more workaday corners of NOLA that tourists never see, tracing Laurette and Slade’s last known movements. What starts as a favor for a friend curdles quickly: witnesses describe Slade’s temper escalating in the days before the couple disappeared, and the more Jeri learns about him, the less confident she is that Laurette left town willingly.

The trail eventually pulls Jeri away from New Orleans and back across the country to the Bay Area, where the case she thought she could wrap up long-distance turns into something far more dangerous, forcing her back into old Oakland haunts and putting her directly in the path of a man who doesn’t respond well to being followed. As Jeri closes in on the truth about where Laurette really is and what Slade is capable of, the investigation builds toward a confrontation neither woman saw coming.

The thirteenth entry in the long-running Jeri Howard series, this is a tightly plotted private-eye mystery that trades a relaxing vacation for a race against a temper that’s already proven it can turn deadly.

Why this grips: a PI’s New Orleans vacation turns into a cross-country search for a missing woman and the volatile boyfriend who may not have let her go.

Jade has spent her whole life being trained to kill vampires, and she’s done with it. Determined to leave her family’s violent legacy behind, she joins the Magiford Supernatural Task Force hoping to actually protect people instead of hunting them, only to find that her new colleagues trust her about as much as the vampires she used to stake. Her already awkward new life gets more complicated when Connor moves in next door: easygoing, charming, and someone Jade finds herself unexpectedly drawn to despite her crippling social anxiety. What Jade doesn’t know is that Connor is a vampire. What Connor doesn’t know is that his new friend is a trained slayer. By day, they build a genuine, low-stakes friendship over shared takeout and bad TV. By night, unknowingly, they’re each other’s natural enemy, a secret neither can afford to reveal without losing the other.

Their careful balance shatters when a powerful, ancient vampire starts hunting through downtown Magiford, toying with the task force and treating Jade’s obvious inner conflict as personal entertainment. As the body count rises and the task force scrambles for a plan, Jade realizes she may be the only one with the specific skills, and the specific vulnerability, to actually stop him, even if doing so means finally coming clean to Connor about exactly what she is and what she was trained to do to people like him.

The first book in a planned trilogy, this urban fantasy blends humor, romance, and genuine stakes as it asks whether the lines between monster and protector were ever as clear as Jade was taught.

Why this charms: a reformed vampire slayer falls for her vampire neighbor without either knowing the other’s secret, until an ancient predator forces both truths into the open.

When her older sister bolts from an arranged betrothal days before the wedding, Lady Penelope, already written off by her family and shipped toward a convent, suddenly finds herself the substitute bride. Her intended is Duke James, a man the ton whispers murdered his own family, a reputation so damaged that a marriage to anyone, even a spare daughter with no dowry to speak of, is his best remaining option for respectability. Penelope agrees to the marriage but sets her own terms immediately: whatever the ton assumes about their union, she will not share his bed for a full year. James, amused rather than offended by her defiance, counters with a wager of his own, betting that he can have her begging for his touch well before that year is up. What begins as a battle of wills between two people who each have every reason to distrust marriage becomes something neither expected, as Penelope discovers the tenderness beneath James’s dark reputation and James finds himself genuinely, dangerously undone by a wife he only meant to seduce as a point of pride.

As the wager stretches on, old rumors about the deaths in James’s family resurface, threatening the fragile trust the two of them have built, and forcing Penelope to decide whether she believes the man she’s falling for over the story the rest of society insists on telling about him.

A steamy Regency romance with a guaranteed happy ending, no infidelity, and no cliffhanger, built around two people who set out to use each other and end up genuinely falling instead.

Why this captivates: a scandal-plagued duke wagers he can seduce the wife he married for convenience, only to fall for her before either of them expects it.

Fall has finally settled over Sweetwater Falls, and Charlotte is looking forward to pumpkin spice everything at Bill’s Diner, where a little seasonal cheer usually means nothing worse than an argument over the last slice of pie. That changes the morning she stumbles across her coworker’s body, and the cozy small-town rhythm she’s used to gets replaced by something much darker. As the investigation into the murder gets underway, it becomes clear the victim wasn’t quite who everyone assumed: old grudges, buried debts, and secrets several diner regulars would rather have stayed hidden all start surfacing, turning nearly everyone Charlotte knows into a potential suspect. Determined not to let a killer walk free among people she considers family, Charlotte starts asking her own questions, following the same rumor mill and long memories that make a small town both comforting and impossible to keep secrets in.

The stakes get personal fast: when the killer strikes again, Charlotte realizes she’s no longer just trying to solve a puzzle for the sake of curiosity or justice. She may have already gotten close enough to the truth to make herself the next target, and she has to figure out who’s really behind the murders before her own nosiness gets her killed. Along the way, she leans on old friends and finds herself newly wary of a few people she thought she could trust completely.

The fourth entry in the Cupcake Crimes series, this autumn-flavored cozy mystery serves up small-town secrets, seasonal treats, and a killer hiding in plain sight.

Why this charms: a diner regular’s murder unravels Sweetwater Falls’ secrets, and Charlotte has to catch the killer before her own curiosity makes her the next victim.

Rose Parker left her small Pennsylvania hometown a decade ago and never looked back, so when her father’s death calls her home to settle his estate, she plans to be in and out within a week. The will has other ideas: Rose is named co-executor alongside Gray Roberts, her father’s old friend and, inconveniently, the kind of ruggedly charming flower farmer Rose spent her teenage years trying to avoid falling for. The week-long visit becomes something much longer when Rose discovers her father’s estate is buried under three hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, threatening to swallow everything he left behind. With her sisters, Rose hatches a plan to save the family’s century-old flower shop by reopening it, and Gray, holding both the floral inventory and the local know-how the sisters lack, offers to become her business partner whether she wants him underfoot or not.

Working side by side to renovate and relaunch the shop, Rose and Gray’s old antagonism keeps curdling into something far more complicated, as Gray’s community devotion and steady charm chip away at every reason Rose had for keeping him at arm’s length. The trouble is, Rose has spent a decade building a life in Los Angeles she still fully intends to return to the second the shop is solvent again, and every day she stays in town makes that plan a little harder to justify, even to herself.

A small-town enemies-to-lovers romcom about roots you can’t quite outrun and a man determined to prove that home is worth staying for.

Why this charms: a woman forced home to save her family’s flower shop finds herself falling for the reformed bad boy she can’t stop butting heads with.

Georgia, the Great Depression. Six-year-old Roger “Bud” MacLeod is trying to survive childhood in a household where his parents’ cruelty is as constant as the poverty pressing in from every side. A stutter and a visible birthmark make him an easy target for schoolyard bullies, and home offers no real refuge from the world’s harshness, only a different, more intimate version of it.Over the decade that follows, Bud grows up fast in a South still working through the aftershocks of war and economic collapse, forming bonds that complicate the simple narratives he’s been raised on. His friendship with Ry, a Japanese-American boy navigating his own precarious place in a suspicious community, and his encounters with German prisoners of war working nearby, force Bud to confront ideas about loyalty and belonging that go well beyond anything his parents ever taught him. Along a winding path marked by fishing trips, half-understood supernatural encounters, and the ordinary cruelties of a hard rural childhood, Bud slowly builds a private moral compass distinct from the one he was handed at home.

As Bud edges toward adulthood, the betrayals in his life multiply and complicate, some inflicted on him, some by him, forcing him to reckon with how easily good people can fail each other and how much dignity it takes to keep choosing better anyway. The novel follows his hard-won maturation against a backdrop of shared struggle, racial tension, and the particular resilience of a community that has learned to expect very little from the world and to make the most of it regardless.

A coming-of-age story about the long road out of a hard childhood, and what it costs to walk it with your character intact.

Why this moves: a boy’s decade-long fight for dignity against abuse and poverty in Depression-era Georgia becomes a hard-earned story of resilience and moral growth.

Did NASA fake the moon landing, or is that the real cover story hiding something even stranger? In The NASA Conspiracies, veteran paranormal investigator Nick Redfern digs through decades of declassified documents, Freedom of Information Act requests, and firsthand testimony to lay out the wildest theories ever attached to America’s space program, and lets readers decide for themselves what actually holds up.Redfern moves methodically through the agency’s most famous controversies: the enduring moon-landing hoax claims, the mysterious “Face on Mars” that fueled decades of speculation about ancient alien structures on the Martian surface, and photographs allegedly censored or doctored before public release. He doesn’t stop at the greatest hits, though, following threads that connect NASA to UFO sightings reported by astronauts, the Roswell incident, space shuttle disasters explained away too quickly for some investigators’ comfort, and even reports of unidentified creatures allegedly encountered during agency research.

What sets Redfern’s approach apart is his refusal to simply cheerlead for every theory he covers. He examines the evidence for each claim with a skeptical eye, debunking some conspiracies outright while conceding that others raise questions that official explanations never fully answered. The result reads less like a manifesto and more like a case-by-case investigation, organized thematically so readers can dip into whichever mystery interests them most without needing the whole book’s context.

For readers who grew up fascinated by grainy footage, redacted documents, and the nagging sense that the official story never quite added up, this is a guided tour through fifty years of space-age suspicion, told by someone who has spent a career chasing down exactly this kind of unexplained mystery.

Why this intrigues: a paranormal investigator digs through declassified NASA files to separate the moon-landing myths worth dismissing from the mysteries that still don’t add up.

On November 24, 1971, a quiet man in a suit and dark sunglasses boards a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle, orders a bourbon, and calmly hands the flight attendant a note: he has a bomb, and he wants $200,000 in cash and four parachutes waiting when the plane lands. The demands are met. The plane takes off again with only the crew and the hijacker aboard. Somewhere over the dense forests of southwest Washington, he opens the rear stairs of the 727 and jumps into the night, and is never seen again.Unsolved Case Files: Escape at 10,000 Feet reconstructs the case widely considered the only unsolved commercial airplane hijacking in American history, using a documentary-style format built from FBI files, forensic reports, maps, and diagrams rather than a conventional narrative. Readers follow the investigation step by step: the search parties combing the Pacific Northwest wilderness for any trace of the jumper, the eventual discovery of a small bundle of the ransom cash buried along the Columbia River years later, and the long list of suspects the FBI investigated and, one by one, eliminated.

Rather than settling on a single tidy answer, the book lays out the strongest theories investigators have pursued over fifty years, along with the specific evidence that undercuts each one, leaving the true identity of “D.B. Cooper” as open a question today as it was the night he vanished into the clouds. Structured for readers who like piecing together a mystery themselves, it hands over the actual case file and lets you play detective.

A true story stranger than most fiction, told through the same documents the FBI used to chase a lead that never panned out.

Why this intrigues: a hijacker parachuted out of a passenger jet with $200,000 and vanished, and this case file walks you through every theory investigators still can’t confirm.

In an unnamed Middle Eastern police state, a young hacker known only by his handle, Alif, makes his living selling digital security to dissidents, activists, and anyone else the regime would rather silence. When the woman he loves, Intisar, breaks things off to enter an arranged marriage, Alif does something reckless: he writes a program designed to make himself invisible to her forever, a piece of code far more powerful than he realizes. ⚡Before she leaves him for good, Intisar sends Alif one last gift: an old, mysterious book called the Alf Yeom, a collection of stories about djinn that turns out to contain something far more dangerous than folklore. When the state’s chief internet censor, a shadowy operative known as the Hand, traces Alif’s illegal software and comes after him directly, Alif is forced to flee with his neighbor Dina into the city’s hidden corners, where the line between the digital underground and the supernatural underworld turns out to be thinner than either of them imagined.

Rescued by the djinn Vikram and his sister, Alif discovers that the Alf Yeom holds secrets that could revolutionize quantum computing, knowledge the Hand would kill to possess and control for the regime. As Alif races to decode the book before it’s too late, arrests, betrayals, and an uprising in the streets collide, forcing him to choose between the safety of hiding and the risk of becoming the very symbol of resistance he never meant to be.

Blending cyberpunk, Arabian mythology, and the real unrest of the Arab Spring, this is a story about the power of stories themselves to topple what force alone cannot.

Why this captivates: a hacker on the run from a regime’s chief censor discovers an ancient book of djinn tales holding the key to a technology powerful enough to start a revolution.

In 1982, David Reichert was a young King County detective assigned to what would become the most notorious unsolved case in American history: a killer preying on women along Washington’s Green River, dumping their bodies with a coldness that suggested he had no intention of stopping. Reichert had no way of knowing that the case would consume the next twenty-one years of his life.Chasing the Devil is Reichert’s own account of that decades-long pursuit, from the first bodies pulled from the riverbank through the years of dead-end leads, task forces disbanded for lack of progress, and a public that grew weary of a case with no resolution in sight. As the body count climbed toward fifty, Reichert built relationships with victims’ families that outlasted budget cuts and shifting political priorities, refusing to let cases go cold simply because the women killed were largely runaways and sex workers society had already written off.

The investigation finally broke in 2001, when new forensic DNA technology matched decades-old evidence to Gary Ridgway, a truck painter who had been questioned and released years earlier. Reichert recounts the arrest, Ridgway’s eventual confession to 49 murders, making him the most prolific documented serial killer in American history, and the strange, unsettling experience of finally facing the man he had spent half his career chasing.

Written with the direct, procedural detail of someone who lived every step of the investigation, this is both a firsthand history of one of the country’s most infamous manhunts and a testament to the detectives who refused to let it go unsolved.

Why this matters: the detective who spent twenty-one years hunting the Green River Killer recounts the investigation that finally caught America’s most prolific serial murderer.

Tim Buckley died of a heroin overdose in 1975 at twenty-eight, having spent most of his son Jeff’s childhood absent from his life. Jeff Buckley drowned in 1997 at thirty, four months after performing at a tribute concert for the father he barely knew. Dream Brother traces the parallel lives of two singularly gifted musicians who rarely spoke, yet who each spent their careers, and their lives, in a kind of unspoken dialogue with the other.David Browne’s dual biography follows both men from their earliest musical influences through the pressures of the industry that shaped and ultimately consumed them. Tim Buckley’s brief, restless career took him through folk, jazz, and avant-garde experimentation before his death left Jeff, only eight years old, with almost no direct memory of his father beyond the records he left behind. Jeff grew into his own singular talent, an extraordinary vocal range and a magnetic stage presence that drew comparisons to Tim from the moment he began performing, comparisons he alternately resented and, quietly, seemed to seek out.

Drawing on journals, unreleased recordings, and extensive interviews with those closest to both men, Browne pieces together how father and son, separated by years and by choice, nonetheless shaped each other’s music and mythology, each haunted by an absence the other never resolved. The book follows both men to the water: Tim to the overdose that ended his life on tour, Jeff to the Mississippi River crossing that took his.

A biography as much about inheritance and longing as about music itself, tracing two lives that ended eerily alike, twenty-two years apart.

Why this resonates: a father and son, both gifted musicians who barely knew each other, are traced across two careers and two eerily similar tragic endings.