Grey Lawson returns to Winfield, his hometown on the shore of Lake Superior, after serving seven years in prison for a drunk driving crash that killed two people. He arrives expecting rejection, and gets some of it: certain family members of the victims can’t forgive him, no matter how much time has passed. But much of the town sees something else in him, a man who has genuinely reckoned with what he did, and Grey’s reputation begins, cautiously, to recover.That recovery accelerates when Grey helps locate a missing child, turning him almost overnight into an unlikely local hero. But the goodwill is short-lived: a string of copycat crimes begins hitting Winfield, each one bearing unsettling similarities to Grey’s own past offense, and suspicion quickly falls back on the one person the town had just started trusting again.
Deputy Trish Franklin takes charge of the investigation, determined to handle it by the book despite an attraction to Grey that complicates every professional boundary she’s supposed to maintain. As she digs deeper into the copycat crimes, Trish uncovers a truth far closer to home than she expected: members of her own family are tied to what’s been happening, forcing her to choose between loyalty to blood and the truth her badge requires her to pursue.
The closer Trish gets to the truth, the more the investigation threatens the very relationships that have sustained her in Winfield, forcing her to weigh her badge’s demands against the people she’s loved her whole life.
Bitter Autumn follows Grey and Trish through a small town’s reckoning with guilt, redemption, and the difficulty of separating who someone was from who they’ve become.
Why this moves: a man rebuilding his life after prison becomes the prime suspect in copycat crimes, while the deputy investigating him uncovers her own family’s role.
Jake Header runs a small vigilante operation built around cases the official channels move too slowly, or too carefully, to handle. When a teenager goes missing, Jake and his team follow the trail far beyond Miami, all the way to the Azores, the remote Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic, chasing leads that keep pointing toward people with far more resources and far less conscience than Jake is used to dealing with.The deeper Jake digs into who took the missing teen and why, the more the case resists easy answers. What looks at first like a straightforward abduction unravels into something far more tangled: a web of deceit that stretches clear across the ocean, connecting the Azores back to the same Miami circles Jake thought he’d left behind when the case started. Figuring out who can actually be trusted becomes as dangerous as finding the teenager herself, as Jake realizes some of the people offering to help have their own reasons for wanting the case to go a certain way.
With time working against him and the stakes rising well beyond one missing kid, Jake is forced to move fast and trust selectively, knowing that hesitation, or trusting the wrong person, could cost more than the case itself. As the true scope of the conspiracy comes into focus, Jake has to decide how far he’s willing to go to bring the girl home safely.
Miami Malice opens the Coastal Vigilante series with Jake Header’s first case, a transatlantic hunt for a missing teenager that exposes a conspiracy larger than anyone involved expected.
Why this grips: a vigilante’s search for a missing teenager stretches from Miami to a remote Atlantic archipelago, unraveling a conspiracy built on deceit and divided loyalties.
When Scottish lass Bryana Campbell-Sinclair flees her home to escape an unwanted marriage, she seeks refuge as the chaperone of an overpowering duke’s sister. Her new identity as a widowed Englishwoman should give her the protection she needs, but suddenly it’s her heart that is left unguarded from the duke’s mesmerising gaze. Will she surrender to his liberating embrace, even if that means risking it all, including her valuable disguise?
Gordon Ashbrook, the Duke of Clement, immediately distrusts his sister’s choice of chaperone. Bryana may be a widow, but she is still far too beautiful and young to be anything but trouble. The more time he spends with her, the more the lines between servant and master blur, until he finds that he can no longer trust his own judgement. His heart has a winning shot of convincing him to surrender to his feelings… but will he ever manage to set his own pride aside?
When the fate that Bryana so desperately tried to avoid finds her, she is forced to choose between the man she secretly loves and her duty to her family. To make matters worse, Gordon is also torn between the traditional world he grew up in and the enlightening one he discovered through his love for Bryana. With so many obstacles threatening to tear them apart, can they overcome them all to be together? Will their love prove strong enough to shatter every piece of threatening prejudice and intimidation around them?
Love Antidote
Isla Castillon has an unusual specialty for a contract killer: she’s also a trained pastry chef, and she’s built a reputation for eliminating targets with desserts nobody would ever suspect. Her latest job is a weapons dealer who’s made a habit of taking a very specific pastry with his coffee, and Isla has prepared something lethal for exactly that purpose. The plan goes sideways when a rival hitman, Mateo Rocha, intercepts the poisoned treat and eats it himself before the intended target ever gets close.Isla has spent her career avoiding entanglements with other people in her line of work, professional courtesy usually meaning staying out of each other’s way entirely, but she can’t quite bring herself to let Mateo die from her own carefully engineered dessert. Saving his life turns out to be the easy part; the aftermath, an inconvenient and immediate spark of chemistry between two people whose entire professional lives are built around not trusting anyone, proves far more complicated to manage.
Rather than going their separate ways, Isla and Mateo decide to team up and finish the job together, a decision that gets considerably more dangerous once they discover their actual target is guarded by one of the most sadistic hired killers in the business. Getting to their mark, and getting out alive, means the two of them have to be twice as ruthless and twice as clever as either has ever needed to be alone, all while trying to figure out whether whatever’s growing between them can survive people whose entire skill set is built around not caring too much about anyone.
A darkly funny, high-body-count romance about two assassins who accidentally fall for each other mid-job.
Why this delights: a pastry chef assassin accidentally poisons a rival hitman instead of her target, and the two team up in a darkly funny, deadly romance.
Los Angeles, 2031, the first spring after America’s collapse. At a party in Silverlake, something happens that defies easy explanation: a bewildered, uncanny double of one guest stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, at almost the exact moment the party’s host, Kareem, vanishes into thin air. Ari Waker, another guest at the party, becomes obsessed with figuring out exactly what she witnessed.Her investigation refuses to stay contained to one night, one party, or even one version of reality. As Ari pulls at the thread of Kareem’s disappearance, the narrative fractures outward across a fragmented, post-collapse America still reeling from civil conflict, then further still: to elegant seaside cliffs in Greece where weapons dealers conduct business behind resort luxury, to a domed, climate-sealed Paris sealed off from a deteriorating outside world, and eventually to a lunar colony orbiting a planet that no longer resembles the one Ari grew up in.
Threaded through the mystery of Kareem’s disappearance are recurring doubles, shadow versions of people and places that shouldn’t exist, and timelines that seem to fold back on each other in ways Ari can’t fully reconcile, all raising questions about what safety actually costs in a surveillance-saturated world built out of catastrophe’s wreckage. As the scope of what happened at that party expands beyond anything Ari could have imagined, the novel becomes as much about the fractures running through a broken world as it is about the one impossible night that started her search.
A genre-bending novel of doubles and fractured realities, this is a story about human resilience built to survive cataclysmic change, one impossible disappearance at a time.
Why this captivates: a party guest’s impossible disappearance sends the investigation spiraling across a fractured, post-collapse world of doubles and shadow realities.
Why this captivates: a rebel Knight Mage captures the empire’s deadliest weapon to use against the throne, only for enmity to curdle into a dangerous, forbidden obsession.