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When Shadows Follow (Cherry Creek Series Book 1) (affiliate link)
Blend in. Stay quiet. Survive.
Fallon Blake is starting her senior year in a new town with the goal of sliding through to graduation unseen. Despite her attempts to lay low, she makes a snap decision to act when the king of Cherry Creek High School, Jesse Callaway, gets jumped at a party.
Now, fearing Fallon needs protection from the mess she threw herself into, Jesse refuses to let her recede back into the shadows. Little does he know, with each lingering glance, or brush of his hand, he is reigniting a fire within Fallon that burns her to the core. Every gentle touch scorches the scars on her fragile heart. As sparks fly between them, Fallon fights to snuff them out. How can she trust her own judgment when it failed her horrifically before? But when the past catches up with her, Fallon is left with two options. Confide in Jesse… or run.
Silencio! (Dev Haskell Private Investigator Book 30) (affiliate link)
Sole Survivor (Sole Justice Book 1) (affiliate link)
When the lines vanish, only justice remains.
John Sole is a cop. He has witnessed the dark side of humanity before, but an international drug cartel’s plans take him to a place where the lines between good and evil disappear.
As Border Patrol and DEA agents increase pressure on the Los Salvajes cartel, their leader, Juan “Bébé” Elizondo, strikes a deal that promises to circumvent the Feds and increase the flow of narcotics to the north. The plan is intricate and expensive, but with a billion dollars of cocaine at stake, there is no stopping Los Salvajes—The Savages.
A tip from a criminal informant brings Sole and his partner Randall Travis into the hunt. Their investigation takes them into the heart of Atlanta’s criminal underworld and leads to the door of one of the state’s most powerful men.
Working with the Feds, they close in, but not before, Elizondo unleashes his most trusted lieutenant, Alejandro Garza, a man who kills without passion or remorse.
Starship Alexander (The Hive Invasion Book 1) (affiliate link)
A washed-up captain. A worn-out ship. A crew of green cadets. And they’re Earth’s only hope.
The Alexander is the last true warship, a relic from the days of interstellar war. She’s destined for the scrapyard, and her captain, Richard Hammett, is about to retire. Their last mission is a training run with a ship full of cadets.
It’s supposed to be a routine hop through a wormhole Gate. But Gates have been going offline, one after another, and Hammett knows in his bones it means trouble. The kind of trouble only a real warship can handle.
Defying orders, he takes the Alexander through another Gate, and puts the ship smack dab in the path of an alien invasion. Now a captain at the end of his career will have to take dozens of terrified cadets and forge them into a crew of warriors, because the Alexander is all that stands between the Earth and the swarming ships of the Hive.
Does personal finance make you feel a little nauseous? Don’t even know what questions to ask? Embarrassed or intimidated? Whether you’re eighteen, twenty-eight or a bit older, this is the book for anyone just getting started with financial management.
In this approachable, entertaining and informative book, Kate Nixon Anania deals with everything you need to know to manage your money. This book covers the basics- banking, budgets, credit, debt and retirement, but also tackles salary negotiation, taxes, how to make financial decisions about education and student loans, includes a number of ways to save money and ideas for side hustles. The book also includes practical advice for couples to manage their money together, advice specifically tailored for women, and quizzes to help you determine the best budgeting techniques for your personality.
They Call Me Weener: 55 Short Giggle Producing Chinwags (affiliate link)
LIFE IS FULL OF QUESTIONS
How do you pour the perfect glass of milk?
Why are there Eskimos on the roof of the hospital in Nevada?
Why would anyone happily accept being called Weener?
Step into the head of Trina Machacek and the answers to these and a cornucopia of life’s more interesting quandaries. Explore how to exercise in an elevator, build the perfect fire, and point with your eyes. What exactly is a Moose Bag? What are the fingers of life and just how do they relate to one’s personality? What’s a Fibber Drawer? A No-Time Time Zone? A Pro-Crastinator?
Fall heart-first into Machacek’s quirky and wholesome collection of essays that are sure to make you a fan of her ongoing national newspaper column “Is This You?”
Gia Santella Crime Thrillers Boxed Set (Books 4-6) (affiliate link)
Vigilante heiress Gia Santella has everything that money can buy.
It’s what she can’t buy—love, companionship, friendship—that eludes her.
When Gia is forced to take a luxury cruise, she sets aside her vigilante ways. As she enjoys exotic lands and foods, a new friendship gives her hope that she might be able to lead a normal life like everybody else.
But like everything else in her life has done, her new friendship soon takes a deadly turn.
It’s up to Gia to do what she does best—hunt for a killer to exact justice for those unable to do so themselves. With her new friendship on the line—and maybe her own life—Gia sets out to avenge the innocent once more.
But this time, her desire for vendetta may be her undoing.
The Maiden Bride (affiliate link)
All her life, Linnea de Valcourt has been reviled as the cursed daughter of Maidenstone Castle. The younger of identical twins, she narrowly escaped a death sentence at birth. To save her beloved sister from marriage to the savage Norman conqueror who has laid siege to their castle, Linnea will sacrifice her own happiness by engaging in a dangerous deception.
Years of exile have driven Axton de la Manse to the brink of despair. Now he will have his vengeance by taking his enemy’s most prized possession, his eldest daughter. Once they wed and she is carrying the de la Manse heir, no one can dispute his claim to Maidenstone, the stronghold stolen from his family. That is, until the unthinkable happens: He loses his heart to his bride, whose own desires ignite a fierce longing deep within Axton. Is their growing love enough to overcome the lies and treachery that could drive them apart?
Old Fashioned Family (A Traditional Family Book 1) (affiliate link)
Melissa Mitchell is going to be alone at the holidays, at least until her new friend Terri Coleman takes pity and invites her to the family home in rural North Carolina for an old-fashioned family Christmas. It sounds wonderful, and to top it all off, Terri has a single and very eligible brother, Richmond police detective Joe Coleman.
Then Terri drops her bomb shell: the Coleman family is old-fashioned in more ways that one, and Terri has recently fallen afoul of her brother, who took care of the situation in the time-honored way. Could it happen again? There are issues unresolved between Terri and her brother, and Terri feels she needs to warn Melissa that no-nonsense Joe just might resort to spanking if he thought the situation warranted it. And that’s not all: Terri’s other brother and his wife are in a domestic discipline relationship, and are very open about it.
We Came Here to Shine: A Novel (affiliate link)
Vivi Holden is closer than she’s ever been to living her dream as a lead actress in sun-dappled L.A., but an unfair turn of events sends her back to New York, a place she worked so hard to escape from. She has one last chance to get back to Hollywood–by performing well as the star of the heralded Aquacade synchronized swimming spectacular at the World’s Fair. Everything seems to be working against her, but her summer in New York will lead to her biggest opportunity to find her own way, on her own terms…
Maxine Roth wants nothing more than to be a serious journalist at the iconic New York Times, but her professor has other plans. Instead, she’s landed a post at the pop-up publication dedicated to covering the World’s Fair–and even then, her big ideas are continually overlooked by her male counterparts. Max didn’t work this hard to be the only–and an unheard one at that–woman in the room.
For the centennial celebration of this annual series, The Best American Short Stories, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls “all its wildnesses of character and voice.”
These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway’s first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write “as an aid to love-making.” Nancy Hale’s story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen’s story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music.
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (affiliate link)
Gender identity ideology is about more than Twitter storms and using the right pronouns. In just 10 years, laws, company policies, school and university curricula, sport, medical protocols, and the media have been reshaped to privilege self-declared gender identity over biological sex.
People are being shamed and silenced for attempting to understand the consequences of redefining “man” and “woman”. While compassion for transgender lives is well-intentioned, it is stifling much-needed inquiry into the significance of our bodies.
If we recommit to our liberal values of freedom of belief, freedom of speech, and robust debate, we scan de-escalate this most vicious of culture wars.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 2Page 2