You’re invited to visit Deep Lakes, Wisconsin and meet a new friend, Francine “Frankie” Champagne. The 40-something owner of Bubble and Bake—bakery by day, wine lounge by night—Frankie is a spitfire pastry maker, vintner, and budding journalist with a talent for asking uncomfortable questions and a stubborn streak that won’t let her back down from a challenge. 🧁
Frankie finds herself on the perimeter of a suspicious death that upends the peaceful winter slumber in Deep Lakes when the local pastor is found dead inside his fishing shanty on Lake Loki. The official ruling seems too neat, too quick, and something about the whole situation doesn’t sit right with her keen instincts. Frankie sticks her curious nose into the investigation, despite warnings from the local sheriff to leave it alone and multiple suggestions that she’s out of her depth.
But she has something to prove, maybe to the newspaper editor who wouldn’t hire her as a reporter, dismissing her as just a baker playing at journalism, maybe to herself as she searches for fulfillment beyond the success of her business. Regardless, her fierce independence won’t allow her to back down, even when the investigation starts getting dangerous and people in town begin to look at her with suspicion. 🔍
Follow Frankie as she stumbles upon one discovery after another, connecting dots between the pastor’s past and present that no one else seems to see. She trails potential suspects through the snowy Wisconsin landscape, uses her bakery and wine lounge as an information hub where locals gather and gossip flows freely, and pieces together clues that lead her closer to the truth. With her sharp wit, determination, and an uncanny ability to be in the wrong place at the right time, Frankie manages to solve the case—though not without ruffling plenty of feathers in her small town.
What makes this series starter special: Ribar creates a vivid Wisconsin setting complete with ice fishing culture and small-town dynamics, while Frankie emerges as a refreshingly complex amateur sleuth—capable and flawed, driven by both noble and selfish motives. The bakery/wine lounge concept provides natural gathering places for clues and suspects alike.
Retired Navy SEAL and police officer Pierce Archer was looking forward to a laid back family vacation filled with scuba tours, snorkeling, and plenty of time in the sun. After years of high-stakes operations and the daily grind of police work, he’s ready to disconnect, relax, and simply enjoy being a husband and father in paradise. But when pirates attack their excursion boat and take a family member hostage, Pierce’s instincts kick in immediately, and the old skillset he thought he’d put to rest comes roaring back into practice. ⚓
The crystal-clear Caribbean waters and picture-perfect beaches transform into a hostile environment where every decision matters and every second counts. Pierce finds himself facing an enemy that’s ruthless, well-armed, and holding the leverage that matters most—his family. He vows to do everything in his power to get his family back, drawing on years of specialized training that most people hope they’ll never need to use in civilian life.
But without any weapons, far from home, and operating in unfamiliar territory where he doesn’t know who to trust, can he pull it off? Pierce must rely on improvisation, tactical thinking, and sheer determination as he navigates a dangerous game where the stakes couldn’t be higher. The peaceful vacation becomes a desperate rescue mission that will test every skill he learned as a SEAL and every instinct he’s honed as a cop. Or will his Caribbean vacation turn into disaster? 🌊
Why this grabs you from page one: Bianchi delivers a taut, realistic action thriller that showcases how specialized training translates to civilian emergencies. Pierce is a believable hero—competent without being superhuman, resourceful without relying on convenient coincidences. Perfect for fans of military thrillers who want high-stakes action with heart.
When Ricky Steele, a fifty-something odd jobber with a mischievous streak and too much time on her hands, plays a practical joke on her former boarding school, she plunges headlong into kidnapping and murder. What started as a harmless prank to get back at the institution that made her teenage years miserable quickly spirals into something far more serious and sinister. 🕵️
While she pretends to be an ace private investigator—complete with fake business cards and an impressive amount of confidence for someone with zero actual detective experience—the niece of Massachusetts’ governor goes missing from campus and a murderer terrorizes the grounds of Whitley School. Suddenly, Ricky’s fake investigation becomes terrifyingly real, and people are looking to her for answers she doesn’t have.
Ricky enlists the aid of her former roommates, Lolly and Katie, and together, they create mayhem during Whitley School’s reunion weekend. The three middle-aged women stumble through interrogations, misinterpret clues spectacularly, and somehow manage to get themselves deeper into danger with each passing hour. As she bungles along in search of the truth, armed with more determination than skill, old ghosts of her boarding school days come back to haunt the pretend sleuth. Ghosts of mean girls and strict headmistresses, of teenage heartbreak and long-buried secrets. Ghosts and a secret love that never quite died. 💕
The line between her fake detective persona and actual investigation blurs as Ricky discovers that some of the school’s current troubles might be connected to incidents from her own time there—incidents that were never properly resolved, questions that were never fully answered. Can a woman with no training, a tendency to jump to conclusions, and a habit of getting in her own way actually solve a real mystery? Or will her reunion weekend end in tragedy?
What makes this series launch so entertaining: Prescott creates a delightfully imperfect amateur sleuth in Ricky Steele—she’s funny, fallible, and utterly relatable. The boarding school setting adds layers of nostalgia and old grudges while the mystery itself is genuinely engaging. Perfect for readers who love their cozy mysteries with humor, heart, and a heroine who succeeds despite herself.
NEW RELEASES
Author: Marisa Kashino
NEW RELEASE
Dark Humor
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick • A Good Housekeeping Book Club Pick • An ELLE Best Mystery/Thriller of 2025 • A BookRiot Best Mystery/Thriller of 2025
“It starts out feeling pretty light and fun, but I promise you, you have no idea where this story is going.” —Taylor Jenkins Reid, recommended for her Must-Read Book of 2025 in TIME Magazine
An insanely competitive housing market. A desperate buyer on the edge. In Marisa Kashino’s darkly humorous debut novel, Best Offer Wins, the white picket fence becomes the ultimate symbol of success—and obsession. How far would you go for the house of your dreams?
Eighteen months and 11 lost bidding wars into house-hunting in the overheated Washington, DC suburbs, 37-year-old publicist Margo Miyake gets a tip about the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, slated to come up for sale in one month. It’s everything she’s been searching for—the answer to all her problems, the key to the life she’s supposed to be living.
Desperate to escape the cramped apartment she shares with her husband Ian—and in turn, get their marriage, plan to have a baby, and whole life back on track—Margo becomes obsessed with buying the house before it’s publicly listed and the masses descend (with unbeatable, all-cash offers in hand). This is her chance, maybe her only chance, and she’s not going to let it slip away.
A little stalking? Harmless. A bit of trespassing? Necessary. As Margo infiltrates the homeowners’ lives, her tactics grow increasingly unhinged—but just when she thinks she’s won them over, she hits a snag in her plan. Undeterred, Margo will prove again and again that there’s no boundary she won’t cross to seize the dream life she’s been chasing.
The most unsettling part? You’ll root for her, even as you gasp in disbelief. Kashino has crafted a protagonist who’s simultaneously sympathetic and alarming, relatable and unhinged—a woman pushed to her breaking point by a system designed to crush people like her.
What makes this essential reading: Kashino nails the psychological toll of the modern housing market while delivering a propulsive, darkly comic story about ambition, desperation, class anxiety, and the lies we tell ourselves when we want something badly enough.
Author: Jamie Siminoff, Andrew Postman
NEW RELEASE
Small Business Sales & Selling
From a sweaty, near-catastrophic Shark Tank demo to a billion-dollar acquisition by Amazon, Jamie Siminoff’s story of founding Ring is the ultimate underdog tale of invention, grit, and relentless reinvention.
While tinkering in his garage to solve his problem of missed deliveries, Jamie hacked together a Wi-Fi video doorbell. His wife called it a safety game-changer. The Sharks called it a pass. After walking away from Shark Tank empty-handed and broke, Jamie rallied a ragtag team of Craigslist hires and turned rejection into rocket fuel.
Through near-bankruptcy, factory disasters, and wild wins, complete with celebrity investors like Shaq and Richard Branson, Jamie built one of the most iconic consumer tech brands of all time. The journey was anything but smooth—filled with manufacturing nightmares, cash flow crises, and moments where the entire company hung by a thread.
Told with unfiltered honesty and humor, Ding Dong isn’t a polished success story; it’s a blueprint for anyone who’s been underestimated, rejected, or told to quit. Jamie shares the real story—the failures, the pivots, the near-death experiences, and the unlikely breaks that kept Ring alive long enough to become a household name.
Because when opportunity knocks, the real question is: will you answer the door? This is the story of what happens when you do—and when you refuse to take no for an answer.
About the Author: A lifelong inventor and mission-driven entrepreneur, Jamie Siminoff created the world’s first wifi video doorbell while working in his garage in 2011. That doorbell has since transformed into Ring, the whole-home security powerhouse that was acquired by Amazon in 2018 for over $1 billion.
Why this matters: A refreshingly honest blueprint for entrepreneurship that doesn’t sugarcoat the struggle. Perfect for anyone who’s been rejected, anyone building something from nothing, and anyone who needs proof that one “no” doesn’t define your future.
Author: Ellen Huet
NEW RELEASE
Human Sexuality
A cautionary tale of sex and salvation for the wellness generation: how orgasmic meditation turned into a cult.
OneTaste hoped orgasm would change the world. Emerging in the midst of the late-aughts for-profit wellness boom, the company was unwavering in its faith in orgasmic meditation, or OM, a fifteen-minute practice featuring a woman being clitorally stimulated by a clothed, usually male partner. Founder Nicole Daedone envisioned a world where OM was as widespread as yoga—a revolutionary practice that would heal trauma, unlock human potential, and fundamentally transform society.
But Daedone’s vision came with a price: behind the militant loyalty she inspired and her millions of dollars of sales was what former members describe as a cult of manipulation, abuse, and coercion driven by a relentless quest for control. Members were pushed to recruit friends and family, to give beyond their financial means, to participate in practices that violated their boundaries—all in the name of enlightenment and healing.
And by the time the FBI showed up at her door in 2023 with an indictment alleging she conspired to commit forced labor, even Daedone herself was no longer safe from the empire she’d built.
Building on the viral Bloomberg article that exposed the dark side of OneTaste and Daedone, Ellen Huet’s Empire of Orgasm is a deeply reported and cinematic chronicle of how a boundary-pushing wellness program became a cult that, according to dozens of witnesses, ruthlessly exploited its members. Huet, the undeniable authority on the group, reveals how, in demanding absolute fealty to Daedone as a path to enlightenment and healing, OneTaste pushed its followers past their limits—sexually, emotionally, financially—and left many of their lives in shambles.
The story culminates in Daedone’s conviction in June 2025 after a five-week criminal trial, providing a rare look at accountability in an industry often shielded from scrutiny.
Why you need to read this: A deeply reported, meticulously researched cautionary tale about charismatic leadership, the dark underbelly of the wellness industry, and how supposed paths to enlightenment can mask manipulation and abuse. Essential reading for understanding how cults form in plain sight.