It’s a dirty galaxy and someone has to clean it. Triana Moore’s job on Station Kelly Kornienko is to monitor the cleaning bots that do the actual janitorial work, which keeps her nicely separated from the wealthy inhabitants on the upper decks who she would prefer to avoid entirely. Rule number one: stay out of their way. Rule number two: eat all the chocolate. Then one of her bots finds a dead body, and all the rules go out the airlock. A highly connected security agent named O’Neill shows up with stories of missing bodies and an offer she can’t refuse without losing her job—cooperate or find a new assignment dirt-side. A girl has to pay the rent. Working with a shiny detective beats a shuttle back to the surface, so Triana lends her programming expertise to his investigation. Together they find more victims and evidence of a cover-up that reaches to the highest levels of the station. Julia Huni delivers the funny sci-fi mystery that readers describe as genuinely impossible to stop reading. ✨
Huni writes with the rare combination of sharp humor, solid mystery mechanics, and genuine sci-fi world-building that makes each of those three elements better for the presence of the other two. Triana’s voice is warmly sarcastic, O’Neill is appropriately inscrutable, and the croissants are, by all accounts, excellent. Multiple reviewers report reading the entire series back-to-back immediately after finishing this first installment. 🔍
Huni is a former Air Force officer and community college administrator who writes the completed Space Janitor series. The Vacuum of Space was originally published as Murder is Messy. The series runs five books. ⭐
Why this captivates: A space station janitor whose cleaning bot finds a corpse, a detective who needs her programming skills, and a cover-up that goes all the way to the top of the station.
From the moment Andra hears about the mysterious illness spreading across the globe, she knows it’s the end. As a writer of post-apocalyptic fiction, she’s spent years imagining exactly this scenario—and none of it prepared her for the reality. Sheltering with her daughter, her ex, and his new family, she watches the world crumble through the news cycle and then through the window as the world outside stops pretending to hold together. When the dust settles and survivors begin to emerge, rumors of something far worse than the disease itself start spreading: the transformed survivors. They are not what anyone anticipated, and they are not something that can be reasoned with. Building a new life in this changed world was already impossibly hard. The fresh horror waiting for them may be something none of them can survive. Kate L. Mary opens the Cursed World series with the post-apocalyptic thriller that reviewers are calling “extraordinary and unique.” 🔍
What distinguishes World of Blood from the standard plague-apocalypse template is the origin of the horror—rooted in an isolated island tribe with a history the outside world barely knows and has catastrophically underestimated. Mary brings genuine research to the premise and builds her monster mythology with more care than the genre usually affords it. Readers’ Favorite called the suspense “building in intensity from start to finish.” 💙
Mary is an award-winning author of adult, new adult, and young adult fiction spanning post-apocalyptic horror, speculative fiction, and contemporary romance. The Cursed World series runs six books. ⭐
Why this grips you: A post-apocalyptic novelist who always imagined the end of the world—and discovers that nothing she wrote prepared her for the transformed survivors waiting outside.
Secret Service Agent Carlie Simmons started her day at an inter-agency shooting competition in Tucson, Arizona, surrounded by trusted colleagues. It ended with a staggering body count as the world unraveled around her from a fast-spreading deadly infection. With her mission to extract the President’s daughter Eliza Huntington from the University of Arizona suddenly gone horribly wrong, Carlie must choose between her sworn duty and her moral obligations to the civilians being overtaken around her as roving packs of flesh-eating infected spread through the city. This boxed set collects the first three volumes—Until Morning Comes, In Too Deep, and The Way Back—following Carlie’s desperate push toward safety across a collapsing America, and Eliza’s parallel struggle to survive after Air Force One goes down in remote Idaho. JT Sawyer delivers the zombie apocalypse thriller built on real survival expertise. 🔍
Sawyer writes under a pen name but brings 30 years of teaching survival skills to the military special operations community, DHS, US Marshals, and other federal agencies to his fiction. The tactical and survival details feel authentic in ways most apocalyptic thrillers don’t achieve, and Carlie is a capable, genuinely compelling protagonist. The dual-protagonist structure—Carlie’s trained badass arc and Eliza’s forced transformation from First Daughter to survivor—gives the series its emotional range. 💙
Sawyer has appeared on the Travel Channel, Fox News, and Discovery, and consulted on the film Into the Wild. The full Carlie Simmons series runs five volumes. This box set contains volumes 1 through 3. ⭐
Why this grips you: A Secret Service agent, the President’s daughter in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a zombie outbreak that turns a routine detail into a cross-country survival mission.
Better Off Wed
When your arranged marriage to a stranger in coastal Maine is the most promising thing on your calendar, it is time to admit the year has gotten away from you. Her Manhattan bridal business is circling the drain, her finances are a crime scene, and her wedding-singer parents have opinions about her string of failed engagements—loudly, in public, frequently in harmony. The only thing standing between her and her childhood bedroom is a marriage of convenience to a man she has never met, in a small town she has never visited, with a six-week eject clause she fully intends to survive. Gideon Mars—six-foot-something of controlled fury and burn-scarred jaw—stares down at her from the altar like she is, specifically, his worst nightmare. He’s clearly trying to scare her off before the ink dries. She says “I do” anyway. Lilian Monroe opens the Marswood Harbor series with the marriage of convenience romcom readers are already calling her funniest book. 💕
What follows is one bed, six weeks of forced proximity with a man who is simultaneously her grumpiest adversary and her most reliable protector, and a threat from someone in Marswood Harbor who wants her gone even more than Gideon did on day one. Monroe’s instinct for comic timing is excellent and the slow thaw of Gideon is extremely well earned. 🔍
Monroe is a Canadian-Australian author whose catalog spans more than 40 romance novels. Better Off Wed is the first of two Marswood Harbor books. Contains mature content; HEA guaranteed. New release. ⭐
Why this charms: An arranged marriage, one bed, a burn-scarred grump who definitely wants her gone, and a matchmaking grandmother who is absolutely not sorry—new release.
Tula Cassidy’s mother was a deep-sea diver who traveled the world—and who did not come up from her last dive. The Oceanus, a passenger ship sunk off the North Carolina coast in 1942, became her mother’s final resting place. Seven years later, Tula has turned her back on the sea entirely. She can’t even get in the water. When her boss asks her to temporarily relocate to the Outer Banks to clean out his great-uncle’s beach house and uncover the rest of an old historical manuscript about the Oceanus, Tula finds herself drawn into something she hadn’t expected: an intimate connection between the shipwreck, the manuscript, and her own family. Mary Ellen Taylor delivers the emotionally resonant Outer Banks dual-timeline novel that blends wartime history and personal grief with the beauty of the North Carolina coast. 📚
The WWII thread follows the Oceanus before its sinking, weaving the kind of historical mystery that Taylor’s readership has come to expect from her dual-timeline women’s fiction. The contemporary thread asks whether Tula can face the water that took her mother, with the help of the dive instructor she left behind years ago—Nathan, who has been waiting for her return. Taylor writes with emotional intelligence and a deep sense of place. 🔍
Taylor is an Amazon Charts bestselling author whose books include Winter Cottage, Spring House, and When the Rain Ends. The Sky Beneath Her is a standalone Outer Banks novel. New release. ⭐
Why this moves you: A woman who fears the ocean since her mother’s death returns to the Outer Banks and discovers a WWII shipwreck holds the secret to her own family’s history—new release.
When a husband, wife, and son are murdered in their Denver home and the family’s teenage twins vanish the same night, FBI profiler Helen Belle immediately senses something beyond the obvious—because she has seen this before. Five years ago, she and criminal humanities professor Dr. Benedict Hoffman investigated a case where a teenage boy killed his family, then went mute. Their theory was that an online manipulator they called the Midnight Man had groomed and directed the boy to violence. Nobody believed them. Now Helen can’t shake the feeling that this new case is confirming everything she and Benedict were told to forget. To stop the Midnight Man—someone who uses the dark web, online gaming, and virtual reality to gain access to vulnerable teenage minds—Helen needs Benedict back in the field. Barbara Nickless opens the Benedict Hoffman and Helen Belle series with the WSJ bestselling thriller that readers are comparing to The Silence of the Lambs. 🔍
Nickless brings her trademark psychological depth and research rigor to a premise that is disturbingly contemporary—the mechanisms of online radicalization rendered with procedural specificity rather than hand-waving. The dual-POV structure gives both investigators distinct voices, and the hunt through dark web gaming spaces generates genuine dread. An Amazon UK reviewer called it “chilling and thought-provoking.” 💙
Nickless is the WSJ and #1 Amazon Charts bestselling author of nine novels, with her first series optioned for television. She is a member of the FBI Citizens Academy Alumni Association and teaches writing to combat veterans. New release. ⭐
Why this grips you: An online manipulator who radicalized teenagers once before is doing it again—and the FBI agent and professor who couldn’t prove it then have one more chance—new release.