Preston Seaton, Duke of Grandhampton, has spent years nursing a single fixed purpose: making Lord Neville Beckett pay for the brother’s death Preston believes he caused. When gambling debts force Beckett to auction off his daughter’s hand in marriage to the highest bidder, Preston sees his opening and makes an offer no other suitor can match, evidence of murder that could send Beckett to the gallows if Preston chooses to use it.Penelope Beckett, an aspiring artist with no say in her own fate, dreads the marriage entirely, certain she’s being handed over to a man who despises everything about her family and, by extension, her. She goes into the arrangement expecting cold distance at best and open contempt at worst.

Living under the same roof forces both of them to confront assumptions neither expected to abandon. Preston discovers a compassionate, sharply observant woman beneath the daughter of the man he’s sworn to destroy, while Penelope slowly uncovers the grief and vulnerability Preston has buried under years of calculated anger. Her artistic passion becomes a quiet point of connection between them, even as Preston’s conviction that she somehow betrayed his brother continues to poison what’s growing between them.

As real feelings take hold, Preston’s carefully guarded secrets threaten to unravel the fragile trust he and Penelope have built, forcing him toward an impossible choice between the revenge he’s spent years planning and the woman he’s come to love despite himself. All Duke and Bothered follows that reckoning to its resolution, with Preston’s own family offering crucial support as the crisis comes to a head.

Why this delights: a duke marries his enemy’s daughter purely for revenge, only to find the woman he meant to punish is the one person capable of healing him.

Cal Shepard has spent sixteen years as one of the CIA’s most capable operatives, a specialist within the agency’s counter-assassin unit whose entire career has been built on trust: trust in his training, his instincts, and the chain of command that sends him into the world’s worst places and expects him to come back out. That trust collapses the moment Cal discovers he’s been set up and betrayed by a powerful cabal operating from deep inside the United States’ own intelligence apparatus.Stripped of the institutional protection that once shielded him and marked for elimination by the very people who once gave him his orders, Cal is forced to go fully off the grid, relying on nothing but the skills the agency spent sixteen years honing in him. What begins as a fight for his own survival quickly becomes something larger: a methodical hunt for the people responsible, using every black-ops tactic he’s ever learned against the system that trained him.

As Cal closes in on the conspiracy, the danger escalates in both directions. He has to stay ahead of assassins sent specifically to silence him before he can expose what he knows, while piecing together exactly how deep the betrayal runs and who at the top is protecting it. Every step forward brings him closer to answers and closer to the kind of exposure that could get him killed before the truth ever sees daylight.

Search and Destroy launches the Cal Shepard series with a former insider turned hunted man, delivering his own brand of justice against enemies who assumed he’d never see the knife coming.

Why this grips: a veteran CIA operative betrayed by his own government goes fully rogue, turning sixteen years of black-ops training against the very people who trained him.

Harley Tatum is seventeen, wealthy, and spending her summer the way she has for years, training horses at Willowhaven Farms in the rural South, a world away from the cold, controlling grip of her mother’s expectations back in New York. It’s at Willowhaven that she falls for Wyatt Doran, the farm owners’ oldest son, a natural horseman with dreams of becoming a firefighter and a devotion to Harley that’s as steady as it is fierce.Their romance stays a closely guarded secret, shielded from Harley’s disapproving family and the wide class gap separating the two worlds they come from, but the secrecy can’t hold forever. When Harley’s parents arrive at the farm unannounced and discover the relationship, her mother delivers an ultimatum severe enough to end things outright: continue seeing Wyatt, and she’ll ruin the Doran family financially. Faced with that threat, Harley and Wyatt are torn apart before they’re ready, both left heartbroken and unable to explain themselves to each other in the chaos of the separation.

Years pass in silence, filled with miscommunication and assumptions of betrayal that neither one ever gets the chance to correct, until a traffic accident throws them back into each other’s orbit. By then, Wyatt has become the firefighter he always dreamed of being, and Harley has grown into someone capable of standing up to the mother who once controlled her choices.

Southern Impulsion follows Harley and Wyatt’s second chance at a love interrupted too soon, testing whether the connection that survived a forced separation can survive being given a real chance at last.

Why this delights: a wealthy teenager and a farmhand’s son are torn apart by her controlling mother, only for fate to reunite them years later as adults finally free to choose each other.

She’s still raw from a recent breakup when she shows up for a blind date and meets Max Yearwood instead, a charming stranger with dimples who turns out not to be her date at all. He’s simply filling in, and before he disappears he leaves her with an odd parting gift: a ticket to a hockey game.When her actual blind date turns out to be a letdown, she decides to use the ticket, and that’s when she discovers exactly who Max is. As the arena erupts around a big play, his face flashes up on the Jumbotron: Max is a professional hockey player, and one who’s just signed with a team relocating three thousand miles away, making him about as safe a rebound as anyone could ask for.

Max proposes an arrangement that seems almost too convenient: spend the summer together, no strings, purely to help her move past her ex, with his impending cross-country move guaranteeing neither of them has to worry about things getting serious. It’s the kind of low-stakes deal that sounds perfect on paper, built entirely around the fact that it has a built-in expiration date.

Of course, carefully drawn boundaries have a way of dissolving under real chemistry, and as the summer plays out, both of them start to realize the feelings developing between them are considerably less temporary than either intended. Max’s looming cross-country move, once the whole appeal of the arrangement, starts looking less like a safety net and more like a deadline neither of them wants to face.

The Summer Proposal follows what happens when a fling with a built-in ending refuses to stay contained to just one season, forcing both of them to decide whether walking away on schedule is really what they want anymore.

Why this delights: a professional hockey player’s convenient summer-only arrangement to help a heartbroken woman move on stops feeling so temporary the longer it lasts.

Easy Pizza Cookbook: 50 Delicious Pizza Recipes gathers fifty recipes from BookSumo Press built around a simple premise: pizza doesn’t have to mean the same handful of toppings on the same round crust every time. Rather than sticking narrowly to traditional pies, the collection stretches the definition of pizza itself, folding in pizza-inspired lasagnas, pizza salads, pizza mac and cheese, and pesto-based variations alongside the classics readers expect.The recipe lineup ranges from the familiar to the genuinely surprising, including Greek pizza built around feta and olives, a vegetarian potato and tofu pizza, a tropical walnut pizza, cranberry chicken pizza for a sweet-savory twist, a straightforward hamburger pizza for comfort-food nights, and a dessert pizza finished with chocolate chips and coconut for anyone wanting to end the meal the same way it started.

Each recipe is built for accessibility, with clear ingredient lists that include substitution options for readers working around dietary preferences or a half-empty pantry, straightforward step-by-step directions, and color-coded prep and cook times that make weeknight planning easier. Nutritional information accompanies every recipe, covering calories, fat, carbohydrates, protein, cholesterol, and sodium, giving health-conscious cooks the numbers up front rather than leaving them to guess.

For home cooks who’ve grown bored with the standard pizza night rotation, Easy Pizza Cookbook offers fifty ways to keep the format familiar while constantly changing what actually lands on the crust, from savory dinner staples to dessert. Folding lasagna and mac and cheese in alongside traditional pies gives it more range than most single-subject cookbooks manage, useful equally for weeknight variety and for surprising guests with something unexpected.

Why this delights: fifty pizza recipes stretch far past pepperoni and cheese, turning pizza night into everything from Greek feta pies to chocolate-coconut dessert pizza.

Natalie is an archaeology graduate student chasing the discovery that could make her career: a lost Mayan city buried deep in the Guatemalan jungle, documented only in the journal of an earlier researcher who never lived to finish the work. Determined to be the one who finally finds it, she pushes into the ruins as night falls, and when she gets separated from her guides in the dark, she quickly realizes she isn’t alone out there.Something massive begins stalking her through the trees, a creature that looks like an impossible cross between a T-rex and a raptor, closing in with a speed and intelligence no known predator should have. Just as the danger peaks, a naked man appears out of nowhere to pull her to safety, and Natalie learns the terrifying truth: the creature and her rescuer are the same being.

Kroktl is no earthly predator. He’s an alien dinosaur shifter, one of a squad of stranded extraterrestrials abandoned on Earth after a mission gone wrong, and right now he’s deep in a reproductive heat cycle that’s driving him to find a compatible mate. Despite every reason to run, Natalie finds herself pulled toward him instead, drawn into an intensity that has nothing to do with the jungle air.

As Kroktl’s stranded squad works to navigate the added danger of cartel territory encroaching on their hideout while searching for any way off the planet, Natalie has to decide how far she’s willing to go for a connection unlike anything she ever expected to find in the ruins she came to study.

Why this delights: an archaeologist hunting a lost Mayan city instead finds a stranded alien dinosaur shifter, and an attraction far more dangerous than the jungle around them.

Rae Maddox has moved so many times she’s stopped calling anyone a friend, treating every new school as a temporary stop rather than a place worth putting down roots. So when her principal asks her to help a new student settle in, Rae agrees reluctantly, expecting the same brief, forgettable acquaintance she’s grown used to.The new student is Allison, a quiet, withdrawn girl whose parents recently died in a fire, and whose only family connection at the school is her cousin Blake, a popular kid who treats her with open cruelty rather than the support she desperately needs. Rae, with her mother’s steady encouragement behind her, tries to reach past Allison’s guarded silence anyway, recognizing something of her own outsider status in the grieving girl’s isolation.

The friendship that slowly forms between them becomes the one stable thing in Allison’s unraveling world, but it isn’t enough to hold back whatever’s building beneath the surface. When Allison suddenly disappears, Rae is left combing through every conversation they’d shared, certain she knows something about where Allison might have gone, even as no one else seems to grasp the urgency of the situation.

Racing against time and her own uncertainty, Rae has to trust the connection she built with a girl most of the school barely noticed, following instinct and fragments of memory before it’s too late. Along the way, Rae reckons with her own pattern of keeping people at arm’s length, recognizing that the same guardedness that’s protected her through years of moving might have nearly kept her from seeing Allison’s danger in time.

Life on Hold follows Rae’s reckoning with grief and isolation, and what it costs her to finally let someone matter.

Why this grips: a girl used to never staying anywhere long enough to make friends becomes the only person who can find a grieving classmate before tragedy strikes.

San Antonio, Texas, 1963. Doc Ebersole lost his medical license years ago to a morphine addiction he’s never shaken, and now runs an underground practice out of the Yellow Rose Resort Home, a boarding house on the city’s impoverished south side that doubles as a brothel. He treats the knife wounds, gunshot wounds, and unwanted pregnancies of people with nowhere else to turn, sustaining his own habit with whatever he can scrape together between patients.Doc carries a particular haunting that sets him apart from the other lost souls around him: the ghost of Hank Williams, with whom he was traveling the night the singer died of an overdose, a death Doc has spent a decade suspecting he caused with his own hands. Hank’s ghost needles him relentlessly, a running argument with a dead man that Doc can’t seem to win or escape.

Everything shifts when Graciela, a teenage Mexican immigrant, arrives at the Yellow Rose seeking an abortion. She stays on as Doc’s assistant, and it becomes clear she carries something uncanny: a wound on her own body that never heals, paired with an ability to heal others through touch. Her presence begins working a slow transformation on the addicts, sex workers, and discarded people who pass through Doc’s practice, unsettling Hank’s ghost and drawing the suspicious attention of a local priest investigating rumors of a miracle.

I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive follows Doc’s reckoning with guilt, addiction, and the possibility of redemption, as Graciela’s arrival forces him to confront exactly what he’s become and whether becoming something else is still within reach.

Why this grips: a disgraced doctor haunted by Hank Williams’s ghost finds his underground practice transformed by a teenage patient with an unexplainable gift for healing.

Fighting Fox Company: The Battling Flank of the Band of Brothers tells the story of Fox Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, the unit that fought alongside the famous Easy Company chronicled in Band of Brothers but whose own combat record has received far less attention. Authors Terry Poyser and WWII veteran Bill Brown spent a decade tracking down and interviewing Fox Company survivors to assemble this account before their firsthand memories were lost.The book follows Fox Company from their parachute drop into Normandy on D-Day, through the brutal hedgerow fighting that followed, into Operation Market Garden’s airborne assault on Holland, and finally to the desperate defense of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. Each campaign is reconstructed largely in the words of the men who lived through it, giving the narrative an immediacy that secondhand histories can’t match.

Beyond the combat narrative itself, the authors weave in rosters, casualty lists, and rare photographs that document the human cost behind the unit’s battle honors, along with candid recollections of encounters with German forces and the day-to-day reality of life in a paratrooper regiment. The book also offers glimpses of figures like Dick Winters from an angle outside the more familiar Easy Company perspective, adding texture to a story many readers think they already know.

Fighting Fox Company stands as a corrective to the historical record, giving one of the 101st Airborne’s most battle-tested companies the same detailed, veteran-sourced treatment that made Easy Company’s story famous, and ensuring their sacrifice through Normandy, Holland, and Bastogne isn’t lost to time.

Why this grips: a decade of interviews with aging veterans preserves the untold combat history of the 101st Airborne company that fought beside the famous Easy Company.

No Gluten, No Problem Pizza gathers more than seventy-five recipes from Kelli and Peter Bronski built around a simple, stated conviction: this isn’t gluten-free pizza, it’s pizza, gluten-free, with no compromise on taste or texture implied by the distinction. The book covers the full range of regional pizza styles, from thin-crust New York pies and blistered Neapolitan rounds to Roman, Detroit, and Sicilian variations, treating each as its own discipline rather than forcing one dough to do every job.That philosophy shows up most clearly in the book’s approach to dough itself. Rather than offering a single all-purpose gluten-free flour blend, the Bronskis developed roughly fifteen distinct dough recipes, each customized with its own combination of gluten-free flours and starches to match the character of the style it’s built for, whether that means the char and chew of a Neapolitan crust or the thick, caramelized edge of a Detroit-style pan pizza.

The recipes trace back to two sources: years of family pizza nights perfected in the Bronskis’ own Colorado kitchen, and a research trip through Italy in 2018 that took them to more than twenty pizzerias, from the Alpine foothills down to the Amalfi Coast, gathering technique directly from working pizzaioli. That research surfaces throughout the book in specialty inclusions like a fried montanara pizza inspired by Naples street food and a dessert pizza recipe adapted from a world champion pizzaiolo.

Written for home cooks who’ve been told gluten-free means settling for less, No Gluten, No Problem Pizza sets out to prove that authentic regional pizza and dietary restriction aren’t mutually exclusive, one carefully engineered dough at a time.

Why this delights: seventy-five recipes and roughly fifteen custom doughs prove regional pizza styles, from Neapolitan to Detroit, don’t have to sacrifice anything to go gluten-free.

Kautokeino, a small village in northern Norway, deep in Sami reindeer-herding country, during the weeks-long polar night when the sun doesn’t rise at all. As the town counts down to the first sunrise in forty days, two crimes strike within hours of each other: an ancient Sami ceremonial drum, the most valuable piece in the local museum’s collection and scheduled for a UN exhibition, is stolen, and Mattis, one of the region’s last traditional reindeer herders, is found murdered in his gumpy, a traditional Sami dwelling.Investigating both crimes falls to Klemet Nango, a seasoned Sami police officer who has spent his career navigating the fault lines of his own community, and Nina Nansen, his younger partner newly arrived from southern Norway and still learning the unwritten rules of a region she doesn’t yet understand. As the pair dig into Mattis’s murder and the drum’s theft, they find the two cases pulling in the same disturbing direction.

The investigation drags Klemet and Nina into the deep tensions fracturing Kautokeino: Sami residents fighting to protect a vanishing way of life, ultra-Lutheran colonists pressing their own religious agenda, and mining geologists eyeing the region’s resources, each with reasons to want the truth buried along with the past. A prologue set in 1693 Central Lapland threads centuries-old history into the present case, suggesting the drum’s theft reaches back further than anyone in town wants to admit.

Forty Days Without Shadow races against the returning sun, as Klemet and Nina work to solve a murder and a theft before the answers, and the artifact at the center of it all, disappear from the region for good.

Why this grips: a stolen sacred drum and a reindeer herder’s murder pull two mismatched detectives into centuries of buried tension during the Arctic’s darkest weeks.

Kevin Belton’s New Orleans Kitchen brings the PBS cooking show host’s family recipes and decades of Creole and Cajun cooking experience into a single collection built around the classics that define New Orleans dining. Home cooks will find the city’s signature dishes here, including crawfish pie, fried oyster po-boys finished with blue cheese and buffalo sauce, and duck and andouille gumbo served alongside a proper potato salad, each recipe grounded in the techniques Belton learned growing up in three different family kitchens.Rather than staying strictly within tradition, Belton widens the scope with globally-inspired dishes carrying a distinctly New Orleans accent, among them Cuban paella, Vietnamese wonton soup with shrimp dumplings, and Greek souvlaki with tzatziki, reflecting the city’s long history as a port town shaped by immigration and cultural exchange. Throughout, he returns to the foundational trinity of onion, celery, and bell pepper that underlies so much of Creole cooking, walking readers through why that base matters before building more complex dishes on top of it.

The book opens with an extended introduction in which Belton reflects on the kitchens that shaped him and the family traditions passed down through generations, giving the recipes that follow a personal and cultural weight beyond simple instruction. Color photography throughout captures both the finished dishes and the spirit of the city they come from.

Part memoir and part working cookbook, Kevin Belton’s New Orleans Kitchen offers home cooks both the techniques behind the city’s most beloved dishes and the family history that gives them their meaning.

Why this delights: a PBS cooking host shares the family recipes and kitchen memories behind New Orleans’ most iconic dishes, from gumbo to globally-inspired twists on Creole classics.