Paul Russo’s wife has just died. While struggling to get his family’s life back in order—grieving, parenting, surviving the loss—he discovers that his wife’s spirit is being held hostage on the other side by a demon. The torment is not passive: the demon is actively working against Paul, using his wife as leverage in ways that compound his grief with supernatural terror. 💀
Paul’s only path to setting his wife’s soul free runs through Stillwell Manor—an old haunted mansion on the north shore of Long Island with clues buried centuries deep that connect directly to his family’s fate. The dark fantasy horror premise here operates with the specific emotional weight that grief stories carry when they are combined with supernatural stakes: a man who cannot let go of his dead wife, and is being prevented from letting go by something considerably more dangerous than ordinary mourning. 👻
Michael Phillip Cash writes the Haunting on Long Island series with the Long Island North Shore setting and dark atmospheric horror that distinguishes it from more conventional ghost story fare—the specific geography of the Gold Coast, with its old wealth and older secrets, gives Stillwell Manor its particular resonance. The series has built its readership on Cash’s ability to blend family drama with genuine supernatural dread, keeping the emotional stakes of Paul’s grief at the center while the haunting raises the external pressure. The first installment establishes the world and the mystery with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly where the clues lead. 💛
What makes this gripping: Michael Phillip Cash launches the Haunting on Long Island series with a dark horror of genuine emotional power—a grieving widower whose wife’s spirit is being held hostage by a demon, whose only hope lies in centuries-old clues buried inside a haunted Long Island mansion. 🌟
Lexy Monroe has spent her entire life trying to survive the nightmare of her mother’s alcoholism—every minute a countdown to the next blackout, every day another exercise in managing unpredictability. She fears nothing will ever change until she finds a letter that changes everything, sending her to her family’s ranch in Tennessee and a family she did not know she had. 💔
The ranch holds dark, painful secrets about her mother’s past—something horrible happened there, something her mother has been hiding for years. As Lexy digs into the truth, she meets Nick Walker, who is just as damaged and broken as she is. A devastating accident has caused him to shut down and shut everyone out. Just as Lexy begins to break through his walls, a terrifying tragedy threatens to tear all their lives apart before either of them has fully found their footing with the other. 💛
Jenny K. Percey writes with the emotional rawness and Tennessee ranch setting that give the novel its particular atmosphere—damaged characters rendered with enough specificity to make their connection feel earned rather than convenient, secrets that emerge gradually rather than being deployed as dramatic set pieces, and a romance that develops in the shadow of ongoing trauma rather than in its aftermath. The novel takes seriously what it means to fall in love when neither person is fully healed, which is where contemporary romance is most honest and most powerful. ⚡
What makes this compelling: Jenny K. Percey delivers a contemporary romance of raw emotional honesty—a woman who discovers a hidden family and their buried secrets, a man shut down by tragedy, and two broken people discovering each other before a new crisis threatens to take everything before it has properly begun. 🌟
Arabella Dandridge has always been torn between the life her parents wish for her and the adventure she craves beyond England’s borders. When a much older man puts a claim on her, she will do whatever it takes to avoid the union—including enlisting a handsome Marquess to pretend they have an interest in each other. What she does not anticipate is stopping the pretense, because she genuinely falls for the charming stranger before the scheme is properly underway. 💛
Francis Thorpe, Marquess of Pembroke, returns to his childhood home despite its painful associations and agrees to help Arabella—partly because the arrangement benefits him too, as he desperately wants to avoid the woman his grandfather insists he marry. Neither of them anticipated that the fake interest would become real, or that a woman claiming to be the Marquess’s fiancée would arrive to complicate matters precisely when the feelings between them are too genuine to dismiss. 🌹
Bridget Barton writes with the Regency period warmth and fake-courtship romantic comedy that the Noble Hearts and Hidden Desires series delivers consistently—both protagonists are operating schemes for their own protection, which gives the central romance its particular layered irony: two people pretending to care for each other who discover they actually do, complicated by external interference at the worst possible moment. The adventurous Arabella and the reluctant-to-return Francis give the novel its dual emotional stakes, and the threat from his past gives it its external pressure alongside the romantic development. ⚡
What makes this captivating: Bridget Barton delivers a Regency romance of delightful fake-courtship warmth—a woman who enlists a handsome Marquess to help her avoid an unwanted match, a man who needs her pretense to escape his own, and a woman from his past who arrives at exactly the wrong moment. 🌟
Murder in the Green Room (The Comedian Series)
Gwen Harper never planned on becoming a stand-up comedian at fifty-three. She planned on growing old with her husband, watching her kids find their way, living quietly. But Tom is gone, and the one promise she made him—to finally chase the dream she had always talked about—is the thing keeping her moving. So she drives two hours to open mic nights at questionable venues, clutches a notebook of uncertain jokes, and tells herself the nerves mean she cares. 💔
When she arrives at The Rusty Nail for a Friday open mic, she is surprised and delighted to find Tessa Ray—a fellow comic and one of the few people who ever made Gwen believe she could actually do this. Their reunion is warm and full of laughter. Then Tessa walks down the hall to the green room to meet someone, and never comes back. 💀
Dianne Harman—one of cozy mystery’s most prolific and widely read authors, with dozens of series to her name—writes The Comedian Series with a protagonist whose late-in-life reinvention gives the series its distinctive emotional foundation. Gwen’s grief, her complicated family relationships—a grown daughter over the garage, a mortgage still on the books, an estrangement from her oldest child—give the cozy its depth beyond the central mystery, and the stand-up comedy world gives it its setting texture. The green room murder arriving at the moment of genuine joy and reconnection is exactly the cozy mystery timing that hits hardest. ⚡
What makes this charming: Dianne Harman launches The Comedian Series with a cozy mystery of genuine emotional warmth—a widow at fifty-three chasing her late husband’s dream of seeing her do stand-up, a fellow comic whose reunion ends when she walks to the green room and never returns. 🌟
Mercury Stardust—the trans handy ma’am whose Safe and Sound became a number one New York Times bestseller—is back with the next chapter: buying a house and taking her loyal audience along every step of the journey. Lost and Found demystifies the homeownership process for first-time buyers with the same compassionate, accessible approach that made her previous book a phenomenon. 🏡
The practical questions that intimidate most first-time buyers are addressed with clarity and warmth: how to find a trustworthy lender, what closing costs actually are and how much to budget, whether a fixer-upper is actually affordable once the renovation costs are honest-accounted for. The book follows Mercury through offer, inspection, and closing, then into her first year with a fixer-upper that needs significant renovation—providing DIY projects and guides for updating every part of a home, with additional coverage of weatherproofing and outdoor space maintenance. 💡
What distinguishes Lost and Found from conventional homeownership guides is the same thing that distinguished Safe and Sound: Mercury Stardust writes from experience rather than theory, with the specific voice of someone who has done the hard thing and wants to make it less hard for the people following behind her. The LGBTQ+ perspective gives the book its particular warmth for communities that have historically faced additional barriers to homeownership, and the fixer-upper format gives it its practical depth beyond the purchase process. 🌟
What makes this essential: Mercury Stardust delivers the follow-up to her number one New York Times bestseller—a compassionate, practical guide to buying a first home, navigating the fixer-upper reality, and creating the space you want, from the trans handy ma’am who made home repair feel genuinely accessible. 🌟
Elizabeth II was not born to reign. Like Queen Victoria before her, the throne came to her by indirect means—through the scandalous abdication of her uncle and the unexpected elevation of her father. Yet she would become one of the most beloved monarchs in history, surpassing almost every entry in the royal record book across a reign of seventy years. Robert Hardman marks the centenary of her birth with a comprehensive celebration of her life, told from both the private and public dimensions that made her who she was. 👑
The story begins with an idyllic childhood on the royal fringe, transformed by her uncle’s scandalous love life and then by war. Through multiple attacks on the family home, the young Elizabeth watched her father lead the nation through its darkest hours to victory—falling in love along the way with the naval officer who would become her husband. At twenty-five, a young wife and mother of two, she suddenly found herself head of state of much of the Earth, with Winston Churchill as her senior adviser. The decades that followed were among the most transformative in British history. 💛
Hardman—the bestselling author of The Making of a King and Queen of Our Times, and one of the most authoritative royal biographers writing today—brings the access and expertise that have made his previous books definitive to this centenary celebration. Elizabeth II delivers the full arc of an extraordinary life with the depth and warmth that both devoted royal watchers and general readers will find compelling. 📖
What makes this essential: Robert Hardman delivers a centenary celebration of Queen Elizabeth II—from an idyllic childhood on the royal fringe through war, unexpected accession at twenty-five, and seven decades of reign that made her one of the most beloved monarchs in history. 🌟