Goldie Locke has two PhDs, a law degree, and a five-foot frame that makes it a constant uphill battle to be taken seriously, not helped by a name that invites exactly the jokes you’d expect. As an earth witch working as environmental lawyer for three were-bear brothers, Goldie has carved out a niche in a magical world that doesn’t always know what to do with her, competent, overqualified, and perpetually underestimated.That underestimation becomes dangerous when magical creatures start turning up dead across New England, their mutilated remains left behind with no explanation. Goldie is pulled into investigating, and the case forces her into an uneasy partnership with Donovan, a completely ordinary human police detective who has no idea the magical world even exists, let alone that Goldie is part of it.
Working the case together means Goldie has to walk an increasingly difficult line, helping Donovan close in on the killer while keeping the existence of magic itself hidden from him, a balancing act that collapses the moment Donovan is nearly killed and Goldie has no choice but to use her magic to save him. That single act rips the secret wide open, and it also puts a target on Goldie’s back: whoever has been hunting magical creatures has just found a far more interesting target in the witch who exposed herself to save a human detective’s life.
Baehrly Breathing opens the Goldie Locke and the Were Bears series with a witch forced to choose between keeping her world secret and keeping the man beside her alive.
Why this delights: an underestimated earth witch exposes the hidden magical world to save a human detective’s life, and becomes the next target of the killer she’s hunting.
The Lovelock Inn has sat at the heart of Valentine Key for as long as anyone can remember, the kind of place locals treat as a fixture rather than just a business, and the kind of place its owner’s granddaughter swore she’d never come back to run. Return to the Lovelock Inn opens with exactly that homecoming, as circumstances she didn’t choose pull her back to the small island town and the inn she spent years deliberately staying away from.Picking the inn back up means confronting everything she left behind when she went, unfinished history with the town, unresolved feelings about the family who built the place, and, inevitably, a man she never quite got over leaving. What was supposed to be a temporary, practical return, get the inn back on its feet and go back to the life she built elsewhere, keeps getting complicated by how much of her old life in Valentine Key still fits, despite years spent convinced it didn’t.
As she works to restore the inn’s fortunes and reconnect with a community that never quite let go of her, she’s forced to reckon with why she left in the first place, and whether the reasons that once felt airtight still hold up against the pull of a home she’s spent years pretending not to miss. Valentine Key itself, with its close-knit charm and long memory, keeps nudging her toward a decision she isn’t ready to make.
Return to the Lovelock Inn opens the Valentine Key series with a reluctant homecoming that turns into a genuine second chance, at the inn, the town, and the life she thought she’d left behind for good.
Why this delights: a reluctant homecoming to run her family’s inn forces a woman to face the town, and the man, she convinced herself she was better off leaving behind.
Byron Douglas is a defense attorney with a mob hitman on his trail and nowhere near enough protection to feel safe, so when federal witness protection isn’t an option, he improvises his own version: faking his own death and building an entirely new identity from the ground up. It’s a plan built for disappearing, staying quiet, and staying alive.Except Byron doesn’t disappear. Unable to walk away from the work he’s good at, he starts practicing criminal defense under his new name, taking on high-profile cases that put him squarely back in the public eye, the exact opposite of what anyone running from a hitman should be doing. Every headline and courtroom appearance is a fresh risk that someone, police, old colleagues, or the hitman himself, will see through the disguise.
As Byron juggles maintaining his fabricated identity with the demands of a very public legal career, the plot spirals through a string of escalating complications: hitmen resurface, people believed dead turn out to be very much alive, and Byron finds himself confronting the surreal experience of viewing what’s supposed to be his own corpse in a morgue. Each twist pulls him deeper into a tangle of deception that eventually forces the real killer out into the open.
Dead By Proxy follows a lawyer forced to live a double life just to stay alive, building toward a resolution where every fabricated identity and faked death finally collides with the truth. Byron’s own legal instincts, the very thing that makes him dangerous to the people hunting him, end up being the only tool sharp enough to untangle the web of threats closing in around him, and the only thing standing between his fragile second chance and the past he can’t outrun.
Why this grips: a defense attorney fakes his own death to escape a hitman, only to keep drawing dangerous attention back to himself through the high-profile cases he can’t resist.
The Disappearers: A Novel
Kingston, Jamaica, the 1980s. A gay theatre troupe is preparing to stage John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes when a homophobic attack tears through the production, an act of violence that becomes the fracture point around which the rest of the novel unfolds. Told across five distinct parts, The Disappearers follows the troupe’s closeted actors in the aftermath, each of them forced to choose their own way of surviving a country, and a moment, with no safe place for who they actually are.Some of the men retreat further into silence, burying what happened alongside years of accumulated self-erasure. Others are pushed toward confrontation, unable to keep pretending the violence was an isolated incident rather than a symptom of the world closing in around them. As the narrative moves between these different responses, the novel builds a portrait of Jamaica’s underground queer community in the 1980s, a world shaped as much by internalized shame and racism as by the external threat of violence.
Marlon James drew the novel’s inspiration from an unconfirmed attack on gay men that he witnessed as a young man, and that memory sits at the emotional core of the book, giving the violence at its center a weight that goes beyond plot. Rather than resolving into a single narrative of triumph or tragedy, The Disappearers lets its five parts sit in tension with each other, refusing any easy answer to what survival actually costs.
The result is a fractured, multi-voiced portrait of men choosing to vanish, in different ways, rather than face what being seen might cost them.
Why this moves: after a violent attack shatters their theatre troupe, closeted gay men in 1980s Kingston each choose their own way of disappearing rather than being truly seen.
Getting into the prison was supposed to be the hard part. Sent undercover with one mission, freeing an imprisoned vampire king, the heroine quickly discovers that the facility’s magic is dangerously unstable: half its cells hold genuinely dangerous immortal creatures who belong there, and the other half hold innocent people trapped by nothing more than an exploited glitch in the spellwork that built the place.Surviving inside means staying invisible, and staying invisible means she and the vampire king have to convince everyone around them that they’re a couple, an assignment that starts as pure performance and gets more complicated the longer it goes on. As the only person who actually understands the prison’s hidden flaws and secret passages, she’s a marked target the moment anyone realizes what she knows, which makes the vampire king’s increasingly convincing devotion both her best cover and her biggest liability.
What starts as a purely tactical arrangement, two people pretending to want each other in order to stay alive, shifts as the days pass into something neither of them planned for. The vampire king’s performance of obsession stops feeling entirely like performance, and the heroine has to reckon with whether the mate bond building between them is real or just the most convincing act either of them has ever pulled off.
A standalone entry in the Fated Mate Bonds series, Imprisoned with the Vampire King follows a fake romance forced into existence by survival that becomes considerably more dangerous, and more real, than either party intended.
Why this delights: forced to fake a romance to survive a magically unstable prison, a woman and the vampire king she’s freeing can’t tell anymore where the performance ends.
Audrey, Micah, Jasmine, and Beck were inseparable in high school, a tight foursome known to everyone around them as the Core Four. The night after graduation, a devastating accident shattered that bond permanently, scattering four people who once knew each other completely into lives defined as much by what they never talk about as by what actually happened to each of them.Twenty-five years later, none of their lives look the way any of them expected back when the future still felt wide open. Careers stalled or veered in unplanned directions, relationships came and went, and each of the four has been quietly carrying secrets from that same accident and from everything that followed. When a high school reunion brings all four back into the same room, the reunion becomes something closer to a reckoning, especially once one of them receives a diagnosis of early-onset dementia that makes this gathering feel less like nostalgia and more like a closing window.
Moving between the summer that ended their friendship and the present-day reunion forcing them back together, the novel follows all four as they finally confront the accident they’ve spent twenty-five years avoiding, along with the secrets each of them has protected since. What emerges is less about assigning blame for what happened that night than about whether four people who once meant everything to each other can find their way back to something resembling friendship before time runs out to try.
The Me I Used to Be asks whether the people who knew us best when we were young can still know us at all a quarter century later, and whether that’s worth finding out before it’s too late.
Why this moves: four lifelong friends shattered by a tragedy the night of graduation reunite twenty-five years later, racing a devastating diagnosis to finally face what tore them apart.