When Alina Goodwin’s father dies suddenly, the comfortable life she’s always known disappears with him — replaced by debt, necessity, and a position as deportment and music instructor in the household of the Duke of Griffinstead. The Duke himself is a war veteran carrying burdens he hasn’t shared with anyone: a title he didn’t expect, a younger sister whose future now depends on him, and a growing fascination with his new employee that he has no idea what to do with. 🎵
Abigail Agar writes Victorian romance with the formula’s essential pleasures intact — the class barrier, the slow-burn attraction, the misunderstanding that threatens everything just when things are finally going well — and delivers them with enough emotional sincerity to make the familiar feel fresh. The music connection between Alina and the Duke gives their relationship a shared language that goes beyond the usual drawing-room courtship. 🌹
The accusation of deceit that derails the romance in the third act is handled with enough specificity to feel like a genuine obstacle rather than a plot convenience, and Agar gives both characters real agency in the resolution — this isn’t a story where the hero simply explains and the heroine forgives, but one where both have to decide what they’re actually willing to risk. 🕯️
Why this enchants from page one: A warm, emotionally satisfying Victorian romance featuring a music instructor forced into service by debt, a lonely Duke carrying more than he can manage alone, and a slow-burn connection that a damaging accusation threatens to destroy before it can begin. Free today — perfect for fans of Georgette Heyer and Julia Quinn who want their historical romance tender, period-authentic, and built on the kind of quiet emotional intensity that stays with you.
Lady Alice Andrews was once a woman who had everything — until she wasn’t. Widowed and lonely, she moves through a society that has precise and limiting ideas about what a woman in her position may do, say, and want. Then Lord Timothy Langley arrives: a self-made man with a dark past, a ruthless business reputation, and an inconvenient habit of being the only person in any room who treats Alice as someone worth respecting. He also happens to be the man responsible for her ruin. 🌹
Henrietta Harding writes Regency romance built on the genre’s most satisfying tension — the forbidden attraction between a woman the rules protect insufficiently and a man the rules were never designed to accommodate. The enemies-to-lovers framework is given genuine complication by the history between Alice and Timothy, which means their eventual connection has to reckon with real grievances rather than simply dissolving them. 💫
The collection format gives readers multiple complete romantic arcs within a single volume, each following a different high-society couple navigating the gap between Regency propriety and actual human desire. For readers who prefer variety within a consistent setting and tone, the anthology approach delivers exceptional value. 🎭
What makes this irresistible: A sweeping Regency romance collection featuring seductive ladies, wicked lords, forbidden desire, and the particular pleasure of watching society’s rules bend under the pressure of genuine feeling. Free today — perfect for fans of Eloisa James and Lorraine Heath who want their historical romance lush, emotionally charged, and populated with heroes who earn their redemption one difficult page at a time.
London, 1950. War hero Captain Fabian Sarre is found dead in a locked Belgravia room with a bullet wound to his head and no note, no explanation. The police call it suicide. Lady Bentham, his godmother, calls it murder — and she calls in private investigator Alexandra Raven to prove it. All they have is a hunch and a police file. What Alex finds as she digs deeper is considerably more: hidden wounds the autopsy missed, gambling debts, a strangled body in Soho, and a past full of secrets that someone was willing to kill to protect. 🔍
Shiv Saywack introduces Alexandra Raven with the quiet confidence of an author who has fully realized her protagonist before writing a single scene. Alex is a former wartime operative — which means she brings tradecraft, nerve, and a high tolerance for dangerous situations to an era when women investigators were regarded as a category error. Post-war London is rendered with period authenticity, and the atmosphere of a city still processing what it survived gives the mystery genuine texture. 🗝️
The dual-mystery structure — the locked-room death and the Soho strangling — gives the investigation enough complexity to sustain a full novel while Saywack establishes Alex as a series lead with the kind of specific competence and moral seriousness that makes readers want to follow a character indefinitely. 🌆
What makes this essential: A sharp, atmospherically rich traditional mystery set in 1950 London, featuring a war hero’s suspicious death, a private investigator with an extraordinary past, and enough hidden secrets to sustain a very satisfying series. Free today — perfect for fans of Jacqueline Winspear and Charles Todd who want their post-war mysteries intelligent, period-precise, and built on heroines worth following for a very long time.
Untouchable: A Novella (Special Agent Constant Marlowe)
Special Agent Constant Marlowe is passing through a charming Illinois college town when a terrified student stops her cold. Kathleen Delaine did the right thing — she demanded an inquiry into traumatic brain injuries among the university’s football team. Then a manosphere shock jock picked up the story, made it personal on his radio show, and the online harassment bled into the real world. Now someone is making credible threats, and Marlowe is the only person standing between Kathleen and whatever comes next. 🎙️
Jeffery Deaver is one of the thriller genre’s most technically accomplished plotters — the author of the Lincoln Rhyme series knows exactly how to construct a mystery that rewards close attention while keeping the pages turning — and Untouchable introduces a new protagonist with the kind of confident economy that suggests Constant Marlowe is built for a long run. The novella format suits Deaver’s precision: no fat, no filler, just a tight investigation with a satisfying twist architecture. 🔍
The contemporary subject matter — online harassment, manosphere radicalization, the way internet hostility becomes real-world danger — gives the story an urgency that purely procedural thrillers can lack. Deaver uses it without being preachy, which is the harder thing to do. The conspiracy Marlowe uncovers behind the bullying campaign is the kind of revelation that makes you want to immediately start the next one. 🌑
Why this grips from page one: A razor-sharp new thriller novella from New York Times bestselling master Jeffery Deaver, introducing Special Agent Constant Marlowe — and a college town mystery that turns out to be considerably more dangerous than anyone anticipated. Perfect for fans of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series who want his trademark plotting intensity delivered in a single sitting.
When their beloved sister dies, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored in the way only the death of a sibling can unmoor you. Then there’s a misunderstanding about apple cake. Within a decade, they’re not speaking. Their children — busy with divorces, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals — have no interest in getting involved. Their grandchildren are out of the question. Allegra Goodman sets up one of fiction’s most recognizable dynamics and then takes it apart with surgical precision and tremendous warmth. 🍎
Goodman is one of American literary fiction’s most astute observers of Jewish family life and the particular way that love and stubbornness become indistinguishable from each other across generations. This Is Not About Us is her return to the multigenerational family novel, and it arrives with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly what she’s doing — sharply observed, laced with dry humor, and emotionally generous in ways that sneak up on you. 👨👩👧👦
The novel spans decades and perspectives, tracing how a single act of stubbornness ripples outward through a family that would rather pretend the rift doesn’t exist than do the uncomfortable work of healing it. Goodman is equally interested in the children who inherit these conflicts as she is in the sisters who created them. 📚
What makes this essential: A big-hearted, sharply funny multigenerational novel about two sisters, a decade of stubborn silence, and the family that gets caught in the middle — told with the wit and emotional precision that has made Allegra Goodman one of American fiction’s most beloved chroniclers of family life. A new release from a writer at the top of her form.
Christina Applegate grew up on sets, raised in the chaos of Laurel Canyon in the 70s and 80s, performing as a financial necessity before it became an emotional escape. She rocketed to stardom on Married…with Children while navigating a home life that was considerably less sitcom-friendly than the one she played on screen. Five decades later, a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis in 2021 confined her to bed and brought everything she’d been outrunning finally into focus. 🌟
What makes this memoir exceptional is Applegate’s refusal to package her story into something comfortable. She returns to the diaries she kept throughout her life, and what she finds there — the self-doubt, the body dysmorphia, her mother’s struggles with addiction and abuse, the accumulated physical toll of decades in an industry that never stopped demanding — is rendered with the kind of unflinching honesty that distinguishes real memoir from celebrity autobiography. The pain is matched by joy, and Applegate holds both without resolving either into something easier. 💙
The MS diagnosis frames the narrative without defining it — this is a story about a whole life, not just its most recent chapter — and the perspective that serious illness brings to everything that came before gives the earlier material a resonance it might not otherwise carry. Applegate writes with the directness of someone who has finally decided she has nothing left to protect. 📖
Why this moves and inspires: A raw, unflinching memoir from one of Hollywood’s most beloved actresses — returning to a lifetime of diaries to tell the story she’s never told, with the clarity and courage that only mortality can bring. A new release from a woman who spent five decades performing for everyone else, finally speaking for herself.