Vodka and Chocolate Drops (affiliate link)
One woman. One cheating ex. One life do-over.
Amber Thompson always thought she wanted a superstar boyfriend—until he kicked her to the curb on the eve of his big break.
When Amber’s best friend, Scott Malone, comes running in to save her once again, she realizes he’s the man she truly wants. The only problem? Scott isn’t interested in pursuing a woman on the rebound.
Determined to prove she’s ready to commit, Amber comes up with a plan to woo Scott, only to have it derailed by explosive family secrets. With her assumptions about everything—including herself—dismantled, she finds herself torn between a need for answers and protecting her mother’s past. But Amber knows if she has any hope of a meaningful relationship with Scott, she needs to figure out who she is—and that means unearthing even more secrets.
Will Amber find what she’s looking for? And if she does, will she find it in time to help her win the man of her dreams?
They bring out the worst in each other until they’re running for their lives…
Morgan Taylor, D.C. socialite and wildlife biologist, leads a charmed life until everything changes with a phone call. Her research team has been found dead—slaughtered—in backcountry Montana.
As the case grows cold, Morgan is determined to unravel the mystery behind her friends’ gruesome deaths. Despite the dangers of a murderer still free, nothing will stand in her way, not even the bodyguard her father hires, L.A.’s top Close Protection Agent, Hunter Phillips.
Sparks fly from the start when no-nonsense Hunter clashes with Morgan’s strong-willed independence. Their endless search for answers proves hopeless—until Hunter discovers the truth.
The Silvan Saga: The Warrior Cycle (affiliate link)
Treachery made him an orphan. Destiny would make him a legend.
Embark on an epic journey of adventure and discovery with Fel’annár, a young immortal who joins the elvenking’s forces as a novice warrior.
As he faces the enemy for the first time, his martial skills are put to the test. But an arcane power emerges, one he can’t control. Who is Fel’annár, and what secrets does his past hold?
From the elven forests of the Silvans, to the mountain ridges of the Alpine elves, prepare to be swept away by this action-packed fantasy tale of friendship, loyalty and betrayal, one you won’t be able to put down.
Collection 1: The Warrior Cycle, includes the first three books in the now complete six-book series.
Genres: epic fantasy, high fantasy, military fantasy, sword and sorcery, the chosen one, elves and mythical creatures, action and adventure, magical realism.
Smoke on the Wind: A Novel (affiliate link)
Struggling with the tragic end of her marriage, Keaka Denney is on a bittersweet adventure in Scotland with her son, Colin. She’s joining him on a weeklong hike along the West Highland Way before he enters university in Glasgow. Soon into the journey, Keaka’s disquieting visions begin—a woman from ages past reaching for Colin, a burning cottage, violence.
Scotland, 1801. After Sorcha Chisholm and her son are wrenched from their home in a brutal eviction, they face an arduous trek toward a new beginning. When Sorcha learns she’s wanted for a murder she didn’t commit, she and her son run for their lives. Then help arrives from the strangest woman in the most unexpected ways.
Centuries apart, Keaka and Sorcha walk the same path—devoted mothers in circumstances beyond their control who will do anything to keep their sons safe. Defying logic, they find strength in each other. But what does their connection mean? And how far will it go?
The Oceans and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story (affiliate link)
A Navy captain near the end of a decorated career, Stephen Rensselaer is disciplined, intelligent, and determined to always do what’s right. In defending the development of a new variant of warship, he makes an enemy of the president of the United States, who assigns him to command the doomed line’s only prototype––Athena, Patrol Coastal 15––with the intent to humiliate a man who should have been an admiral.
Rather than resign, Rensselaer takes the new assignment in stride, and while supervising Athena’s fitting out in New Orleans, encounters a brilliant lawyer, Katy Farrar, with whom he falls in last-chance love. Soon thereafter, he is deployed on a mission that subjects his integrity, morality, and skill to the ultimate test, and ensures that Athena will live forever in the annals of the Navy.
As in the Odyssey, Katy is the force that keeps him alive and the beacon that lights the way home through seven battles, mutiny, and court martial. In classic literary form, an enthralling new novel that extolls the virtues of living by the laws of conscience, decency, and sacrifice, The Oceans and the Stars is nothing short of a masterpiece.
The Gene: An Intimate History (affiliate link)
“Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
“Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3