As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Ruby Steele tends bar at a seedy Bahamas dive and keeps a very low profile—which suits her just fine, because Ruby has reasons to stay invisible. She’s a mixed-martial-arts pro who walked away from a championship career knowing too much about the wrong people, and the Bahamas felt like a good place to disappear. Then a dead tourist turns up in the dumpster behind her bar at three in the morning, and Ruby’s carefully constructed quiet life evaporates. 🏝️
Mia Gold builds her series opener around a protagonist who is simultaneously overqualified for her circumstances and completely ill-equipped for the particular mess she’s landed in. Ruby can handle herself physically—the bar’s unruly patrons have learned this the hard way—but a murder investigation with local cops already pointing in her direction is a different kind of problem entirely. The victim had a fiancée waiting in a hotel room. Nobody can explain what he was doing out at three a.m. And Ruby is running out of time to find answers before someone makes the decision for her. 🔍
The Bahamas setting gives the series a sun-drenched noir atmosphere that sets it apart from the usual gritty urban thriller, and Ruby herself is the kind of heroine who makes bad choices with her eyes open and just keeps moving. Gold’s pacing is relentless from the first page. 🌊
Why this grips from page one: A sharp, propulsive series opener with a heroine who is equal parts vulnerable and dangerous, set against a Caribbean backdrop that makes the darkness feel even more vivid. Perfect for fans of strong female protagonists who solve mysteries the hard way—and don’t always make it easy on themselves.
Beverly Laborde has a very specific grievance and a very particular set of skills. When a ruthless businessman destroyed her grandmother’s antiques shop and sent the old woman to an early grave, Beverly didn’t file a complaint—she became a con artist and went after him directly. Her method of revenge: scamming him out of a valuable Paul Revere heirloom. Her complication: running straight into Vermont detective Adam Dutton, who isn’t entirely sure whether to arrest her or ask her out. 🏺
BV Lawson has a gift for the kind of mismatched-partners dynamic that earns its chemistry gradually rather than announcing it upfront, and the Beverly-Adam pairing works precisely because both of them have good reasons to keep their guard up. Their inconvenient attraction takes a back seat almost immediately when they discover a shared enemy: the wealthy and very dangerous Reginald Forsythe, whose reach extends through Vermont politics and the Northeastern Antiquities League, and who does not appreciate being outsmarted. 🕵️
The antiques world setting gives the series a distinctive texture—elegant on the surface, cutthroat underneath—and the supporting cast, including a sympathetic dealer and the wonderfully named “Mr. X,” adds color without cluttering the central mystery. The pacing moves efficiently from con-job caper to genuine thriller. 🗝️
What makes this irresistible: A clever, character-driven mystery that combines the pleasures of a revenge caper with a proper murder investigation and a slow-burn partnership worth following for many books. Perfect for fans of traditional mysteries with sharp heroines, complicated heroes, and villains who actually feel dangerous.
Detective Inspector Tom Brand left London for his childhood village of Relby to take life at a slower pace—care for his elderly father, settle into a quiet posting, breathe some country air. He gets approximately no time to enjoy any of this before two twelve-year-old boys vanish without explanation. They’d been playing a game of their own invention, pretending to be detectives. Now the real detective has to find them. 🏡
Adam J. Wright understands the particular dread of missing children cases in small communities—the way silence descends, the way everyone becomes a suspect simply by virtue of knowing everyone else. The English village setting amplifies every tension: there’s nowhere to hide in Relby, and yet somehow a deadly secret has been hiding there for years, waiting for exactly this moment to surface. 🌲
Tom Brand is a quietly compelling protagonist—competent without being infallible, carrying his London past without being defined by it. The case’s clues are genuinely frustrating in the way real investigations are: partial, contradictory, and resistant to the neat solutions that two imaginative boys playing detective might have expected. 🔦
What makes this essential: A taut, atmospheric British detective novel that takes a straightforward missing-persons premise and builds it into something considerably darker and more complex. Perfect for fans of Peter James and M.C. Beaton who want their English village mysteries with real stakes and a detective worth following into the next book.
Valentine’s Day is approaching and Mina Kitchen—forty-something, single, perpetually covered in someone else’s marinara—is facing the romance holiday with her usual combination of good intentions and spectacular bad luck. Her neighbor has a significant other. Her best friend Trixie has a boyfriend, a full-time job, and has quit smoking, though she’s replaced cigarettes with an alarming jelly dependency. Mina, meanwhile, has a catering disorder, a ghost problem, and a mini mountain lion-sized cat named Vinnie who keeps assuring her everything will be fine. 🍬
Lizz Lund writes cozy comedy mysteries with the gleeful energy of someone who genuinely enjoys chaos, and the Mina Kitchen series is the purest expression of that sensibility. The humor is warm and slightly unhinged—a tone that’s harder to pull off than it looks—and Mina herself is the kind of protagonist whose disasters feel earned rather than contrived. Lancaster, Pennsylvania has never seemed like a more bewildering place to live. 😂
The romantic subplot—handsome Chef versus juicy James, with Mina too busy solving a theft ring to properly pursue either—runs alongside a mystery involving a series of shop burglaries that manages to be genuinely engaging despite competing with a haunting, a jelly addiction, and a GumBuster side job. 💝
Why this touches the heart: Fizzy, funny, and completely impossible to read without smiling, the Mina Kitchen series is comfort reading with a mystery backbone and enough absurdist humor to make it genuinely distinctive. Perfect for readers who want their cozies with extra comedy and zero po-faced earnestness.
On Boxing Day 1964, ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey left home to visit the fair. Her brother Terry didn’t go with her — he was ill with flu. That decision, made for the most ordinary of reasons, would haunt him for the rest of his life. Lesley was abducted that day by Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and she never came home. 💔
The Moors Murders are among the most notorious crimes in British history, endlessly documented from the perspective of investigators, journalists, and criminologists. What has rarely been told is the story of the families left behind — the siblings, parents, and loved ones who spent decades carrying the weight of an unimaginable loss compounded by relentless public attention. Terry West’s account fills that gap with painful honesty. 🕯️
This is not a book about the killers. It is a book about what it means to survive them — to live for sixty years with a moment you can never change, a decision that wasn’t even a decision, just the ordinary circumstance of being ill on the wrong day. The inclusion of family photographs and letters from Brady and Hindley gives the account a documentary intimacy that sets it apart from conventional true crime. 📖
Why this deserves your attention: A devastating, deeply personal memoir that reframes one of Britain’s most infamous crimes through the eyes of a surviving family member. Essential reading for anyone interested in true crime that centers the human cost rather than the perpetrators — and a profoundly moving tribute to a sister lost too soon.
Lady Ariel has been hiding from Society since a fire left her badly scarred, living quietly in the country behind a literal mask that has only amplified the gossip—Society has taken to calling her “Lady Beast.” Now her scheming second cousin, who inherited her father’s title but not his fortune, wants her committed so he can help himself to her money. Her only protection is a husband, which means re-entering a world that has been whispering about her for years. 🌹
Enter Peter, Lord Ransome—”Beau” to Society, inheritor of his father’s debts and a household of expensive dependents, including a stepmother who despises him and a collection of half-sisters who spend with cheerful disregard for the estate’s finances. He needs a wealthy bride. She needs a protective husband. It should be straightforward. It is, of course, not straightforward at all. 💍
Jude Knight puts a knowing spin on the Beauty and the Beast template by reversing the expected roles, and the result is a romance that earns its emotional beats rather than assuming them. The growing warmth between Ariel and Peter is rendered with patience and care, and the villain—the scheming cousin with his eye on the fortune—gives the story genuine stakes beyond the romantic central question. 🕯️
What makes this special: A beautifully constructed Regency romance that flips a classic fairy tale premise with wit and emotional intelligence. Perfect for fans of Eloisa James and Julia Quinn who want their historical romance with a heroine worth championing and a hero who discovers, slowly and sincerely, that he married better than he knew.
Grace had been planning the perfect anniversary surprise for months — a trip to Paris for her and her husband of twenty-five years. Then he delivered a surprise of his own: he wants a divorce. Reeling but refusing to collapse, Grace makes the most defiant decision of her life — she goes to Paris anyway, alone, with nothing but a suitcase and the ruins of her plans. 🗼
Audrey arrived in Paris from London carrying her own heartbreak, armed with romantic notions and almost no money or French. A job in a bookshop keeps her afloat, but the city she imagined and the city she’s actually living in are very different places — until she meets Grace, and suddenly both their summers shift entirely. 📚
Sarah Morgan is one of the most reliable writers working in contemporary women’s fiction, and One Summer in Paris showcases her greatest strength: the unlikely friendship that becomes the emotional center of the story. Grace and Audrey have almost nothing in common except honesty and need, and watching them figure each other out against the backdrop of Paris is genuinely warm and funny. 🥐
What makes this special: A beautifully observed novel about reinvention, unlikely connection, and the particular freedom of being a stranger in a beautiful city. Perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes and Elin Hilderbrand — and essential reading for anyone who has ever needed to go somewhere new to figure out who they actually are.
Detective Kyle Wallace thought his past was exactly that — past. Then his ex-girlfriend Mindy calls out of nowhere, frightened and desperate. She’s married now to a powerful, controlling man, and she’s afraid of what he might do. She needs help. Off the record. No questions asked. Kyle agrees, which is the first mistake. 📱
The deeper Kyle digs into Mindy’s world, the more complicated it gets — secrets layered under secrets, a marriage built on manipulation, and a city murder that keeps pulling his attention back to her. Cole Baxter builds his psychological thrillers around the particular tension of a protagonist who knows he’s too close to the situation to be objective and goes in anyway. 🔍
The novel’s central question — how far would you go for someone you once loved? — is the kind that gets more interesting the further the story progresses. Kyle isn’t naive, but he’s not immune either, and that vulnerability gives the thriller its real engine. 🌑
Why this grips from page one: A taut psychological thriller built around an ex-flame, a dangerous husband, and a detective who knows better but can’t walk away. Perfect for fans of fast-moving domestic suspense with a protagonist whose instincts are good but whose heart keeps overruling them.
The summer of 1862. A ragtag Confederate army — farmers, storekeepers, old men, and frightened boys — gathers in Virginia under Stonewall Jackson, ready to march north toward a destiny none of them can fully imagine. Among them is Usaph Bumpass, who left his wife Ephie behind to join the Shenandoah Volunteers, only to discover that Ephie’s lover is marching right alongside him. ⚔️
Thomas Keneally — the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler’s Ark — brings his extraordinary gift for historical intimacy to the Civil War, telling the story of Antietam from the ground up rather than from the command tent. These are not generals making history; they are ordinary men being ground up by it, carrying their domestic griefs and private loyalties into slaughter. 🎖️
Stonewall Jackson looms over the narrative as both military genius and tragic figure — brilliant, devout, and leading men who follow him out of something closer to reverence than patriotism. Keneally renders him with complexity and care, neither hero nor villain but a man utterly consumed by a cause history has rendered indefensible. 🌾
What makes this essential: One of the finest Civil War novels ever written, told with the ground-level humanity and moral seriousness that defines Keneally at his best. Essential reading for fans of historical fiction who want the war as it was actually experienced — brutal, confused, and heartbreakingly human.
A magazine is offering $100,000 to the most festively decorated store on Park Cove’s main avenue, and bookstore owner Bridget Boylston is absolutely in. There’s just one problem: the competition requires her to team up with her next-door neighbor, Theo Gardner — grumpy, guarded, and the last person she’d choose for a cheerful holiday partnership. 🎄
Chelsea Curto writes enemies-to-lovers romance with genuine wit and warmth, and Booked for the Holidays is the kind of story where the slow thaw of a grumpy hero is executed with enough patience and care that it actually earns the ending. Theo doesn’t just smile and transform — he inches toward Bridget in ways that feel real, one Christmas tree and string of lights at a time. 🏮
The small-town Florida holiday setting is a delightful twist on the snow-and-mistletoe formula, and the bookstore backdrop gives the romance an extra layer of cozy charm. The introduction of Theo’s daughter adds emotional depth without tipping the story into melodrama. ☀️
Why this touches the heart: A warmhearted holiday romance that understands the best grumpy heroes aren’t transformed by love — they’re revealed by it. Perfect for readers who want their Christmas reads funny, swoony, and set somewhere the sun actually shines.
The editors of Delish.com have built one of the internet’s most enthusiastically shared recipe empires on a simple premise: dessert should be fun, a little ridiculous, and absolutely worth making. Their second cookbook delivers 100 recipes that range from the classics done perfectly to the kind of inspired combinations that make you wonder why nobody thought of them sooner. 🍪
The essentials are all here — Snickerdoodles, Death By Chocolate Brownies, Extra-Fluffy Vanilla Cupcakes — but the real Delish DNA shows up in the twists: Crème Brûlée Cookies, Samoa Cheesecake Bars, Moscow Mule Cupcakes. There’s an entire chapter devoted to cookie cakes and skillet desserts for when a standard pan just isn’t going to cut it. 🍰
What makes this cookbook feel so usable is its honesty about how people actually bake — sometimes from scratch, sometimes with a boxed mix, sometimes because a bad day demands brownies and you need them in forty minutes. The recipes are written accordingly: accessible without being dumbed down, indulgent without being intimidating. 🎂
What makes this irresistible: A joyful, beautifully photographed dessert bible from the brand that understands the internet’s appetite for treats that are both impressive and actually achievable. At this price, it’s a steal for anyone who has ever stress-baked their way through a difficult week.
George vonHilsheimer was a failing, aimless teenager with no obvious future. The Army changed that. The paratrooper’s discipline changed that. And a long, improbable journey through some of the most consequential moments of recent American military history — Desert Storm, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq — completed the transformation from lost kid to Army flight surgeon. 🪖
The arc of Stripes is remarkable on its face: from jumping out of planes with the 82nd Airborne to flying attack helicopters against Saddam Hussein’s armor to medical school and Walter Reed — and then, on September 11, 2001, being present at the Pentagon when the world changed again. vonHilsheimer was there, and he was trained for exactly that moment. 🚁
What elevates this beyond standard military memoir is vonHilsheimer’s willingness to start with honest self-assessment. He doesn’t begin as a hero — he begins as someone who needed the military to become one, and the candor of that admission gives the later achievements their real weight. The writing is fast-paced and direct, with the no-nonsense voice of someone who spent decades in uniform. 🎖️
Why this deserves your attention: A genuinely inspiring military memoir that spans three decades and multiple theaters of war, written by someone who earned every stripe the hard way. Perfect for readers who love firsthand military history with a strong personal transformation at its core.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 2Page 2