It’s been three years since Jaxyn left everything she knew behind. Three years of running from the nightmare that still wakes her in the night, from the friends she abandoned without a word. She’s finally done running—finally coming back to Boston to face what she left. The one thing she definitely wasn’t expecting was Kyden McCabe: hot, tattooed, pierced, a musician who lives his life one night stand at a time. He’s everything wrong for her. He’s arrogant, frustrating, and the last thing she needs when she’s still trying to put herself back together. He also can’t stop thinking about her from the moment she appears. Stephanie Hoffman McManus opens the Ever After series with the debut new adult romance that she has described as “a story of trauma, healing, and the love you never saw coming.” 💕
McManus writes the kind of slow-burn romance where both leads carry real wounds—Jaxyn’s history is dark and her healing is not linear, and Kyden’s wall of arrogance conceals a man with his own complicated past. The emotional depth underneath the attraction is what distinguishes this from the standard bad-boy romance template, and the 2025 revision brought the story fully into line with McManus’s current voice. Note: content advisory recommends 17+. 🔍
McManus is a Massachusetts author who built her readership through Give Me Books and the broader new adult romance community. The Ever After series continues with Chasing Ever After. ⭐
Why this hooks you: A woman returning home after three years of running, a tattooed musician who was supposed to be temporary, and the love story neither of them saw coming.
The thing that makes Darcy special is also the reason she’s been kidnapped. Somewhere in her memory, buried in the trauma of watching her FBI agent father’s assassination, is a code—a code that could bring his killers to justice and expose a conspiracy that runs deep. Four men want it. Their mysterious boss wants it even more. Hard men. Criminals, she’s certain. Willing to do whatever it takes to break her. But locked in the dark, Darcy starts to realize it’s not only the code they’re after—the glints in their eyes, the lingering touches, the heavy breaths tell a different story. Now she has to decide whether she wants to become part of that story too. Marissa Farrar opens the Dark Codes series with the reverse harem romance that Lily Harlem called “a gripping and heart-pounding start to a wonderfully crafted new series.” ✨
Farrar writes with the fast, action-packed energy that makes the series difficult to put down despite—or because of—its Stockholm syndrome tension. The five captors have distinct personalities that develop individually through Darcy’s perspective, and the romantic and thriller elements develop in tandem rather than overwhelming each other. This is intentionally dark; readers who enjoy the genre’s specific intensity will find this delivers what it promises. 🔍
Farrar is a British author of over 30 novels including the dark vampire Serenity series. The Dark Codes series is now complete at four books. ⭐
Why this captivates: A code buried in her memory, four men who kidnapped her to get it, and the unsettling realization that the code may not be all they want.
Centuries ago, the world fell. From the ashes rose the Tangata—a terrible new species, faster and stronger than humans, and steadily winning the war that humanity is losing. Lukys is twenty years old and freshly recruited from his academy when the allied armies, desperate for bodies, send him and other untrained young people straight into battle. His odds of surviving this are not good. Determined to live, he seeks out the one man who seems to care whether he does: Romaine, last warrior of an extinct kingdom, carrying the grief and skill of a civilization the Tangata already destroyed. Meanwhile, the Queen’s Archivist descends beneath the earth in search of the Gods’ lost magic—artifacts of power that could turn the war. She finds something else down there too. Something old. Something evil. Aaron Hodges opens Descendants of the Fall with the epic fantasy compared to the Shannara Chronicles crossed with David Gemmell. ⚔️
Hodges structures the novel across multiple converging perspectives, with Lukys’s survival story and the Archivist’s subterranean investigation developing at their own pace before the plot brings them toward collision. Reviewers consistently note the character-driven depth beneath the relentless action, and the final act delivers genuine surprises. For readers coming from Brandon Sanderson or classic military fantasy, this is an immediate recommendation. 🔍
Hodges is a New York Times bestselling author from New Zealand with over 30 published novels. The Descendants of the Fall series runs four books to its complete conclusion. ⭐
Why this captivates: A boy soldier with no training, the last warrior of a dead kingdom, a lost magic buried in the dark, and a war humanity is already losing.
The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was more than the genius behind America’s most iconic buildings—he was a man whose turbulent private life made him one of the country’s first celebrity scandals. His stormy marriage and his infamous affair with Mamah Borthwick, the married neighbor he ran off to Europe with in 1909, filled newspapers from coast to coast. When they returned, Wright built Taliesin in Wisconsin as a monument to their love. Then, in August 1914, while Wright was in Chicago, a handyman murdered Mamah, her two children, and several of Wright’s staff and burned Taliesin to the ground. The killer swallowed acid in jail and died before trial, taking his motive with him. Casey Sherman opens this propulsive true crime account with the mystery that has haunted Wright scholars ever since. 🔍
Sherman is less interested in the murder’s mechanics than in its aftermath—the way Mamah’s death shadowed Wright for the rest of his extraordinary, turbulent career, and the question of what the choices he made in the years before the fire say about the man behind the buildings. Publishers Weekly called it “a fascinating work of true crime” with “a novelist’s touch for psychological depth and narrative momentum.” Armchair architecture enthusiasts and true crime readers alike have consistently found this impossible to put down. 💙
Sherman is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of 17 books. As a new release from one of true crime’s most reliable storytellers, this is an immediate recommendation. ⭐
Why this matters: America’s most famous architect, a love affair that scandalized a nation, and the 1914 massacre that destroyed his paradise—true crime meets architectural history, new release.
Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground. His mother, Bernardine Dohrn, co-founded the Weather Underground and replaced Angela Davis on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. His father, Bill Ayers, was her partner in revolution and in parenthood. Dohrn grew up in hiding—packing milk crates at midnight, abandoning cars and apartments, carrying everything that mattered in a backpack because nothing was guaranteed to stay. In this explosive memoir, drawing on exclusive interviews, declassified FBI files, and long-hidden letters and diaries, Dohrn tells the story of his childhood on the run and the half-century of American radical history it intersects—including new revelations about the Weathermen’s bombing campaign, their secret alliance with the Black Liberation Army, and the dramatic prison break of Assata Shakur. 📚
This is simultaneously a deeply personal account of a childhood shaped by fugitivity and a meticulously researched work of American political history. Dohrn, a playwright and screenwriter who teaches at Northwestern University, brings a journalist’s precision and a son’s complicated love to a story that implicates his parents in real harm while refusing to simplify them. The New York Times Book Review named it an Editors’ Choice; Booklist gave it a starred review. 🔍
Dohrn is a Northwestern University professor whose work as a playwright and screenwriter informs the cinematic propulsion of the narrative. Literary Hub included it in their top nonfiction of May 2026. New release. ⭐
Why this matters: Born underground to the FBI’s most wanted woman, Zayd Dohrn finally tells the story of a fugitive childhood and the revolution his parents made—new release, New York Times Editors’ Choice.
As psychedelics move rapidly from underground practices to mainstream medicine and popular culture, a critical question is getting lost: where did this knowledge come from, and whose traditions are being commodified? Psychedelic Plant Medicines of the Americas addresses that question with scholarly rigor and genuine cultural respect. A collection of 23 articles written by historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and humanities scholars, it covers marijuana, psilocybin, ayahuasca, peyote, and other psychoactive plants—exploring the medicinal, spiritual, and cultural traditions behind each. Edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate—executive director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines—the anthology foregrounds contemporary Indigenous voices and weaves together Western scientific understanding with deep indigenous knowledge systems. 📚
The collection approaches the thorny questions of the psychedelic landscape from a nuanced ethical stance: the commodification and global circulation of these substances, the ecological challenges facing the territories where they grow, and what the psychedelic renaissance means for the Indigenous communities who have stewarded these traditions for generations. For anyone exploring psychedelics who wants to understand the full depth of what they’re entering, this is essential reading. 🔍
Labate has published 28 books and journal editions on psychedelic plant medicines, shamanism, and drug policy. Published by Penguin/TarcherPerigee. As a new release from the leading scholar in the field, this is an immediate recommendation. ⭐
Why this matters: Twenty-three scholarly essays on the Indigenous roots and complex ethics of the psychedelic renaissance—the essential companion for anyone who wants to understand these traditions rather than simply consume them—new release.