Cain spent years as an assassin working for the fae, the only human ever admitted into the ranks of the Oblivion Guard, before walking away from that life to become a tracker for a more conventional assassination agency. It’s supposed to be simpler work, cleaner in its own violent way, until a routine job tracking a teenage girl goes sideways and leaves both of them hunted by forces far more powerful than anything Cain dealt with in his old life.The reason surfaces fast and hard: the fae have been sitting on a secret that upends everything Cain thought he understood about the world, the gods aren’t dead, and they’ve been quietly eliminating humans they judge too dangerous to let live. Cain and the girl he’s supposed to be tracking now qualify as exactly that kind of threat.
As if that weren’t enough, Cain discovers he’s dying, cursed by something from his past, with only one possible cure available to him: the living, beating heart of a unicorn, a creature he’s spent his whole life assuming was extinct. A mysterious party offers him exactly that cure, in exchange for one more job, assassinating the leader of the Mages Guild, forcing Cain to weigh his own survival against a killing he’s not sure he can live with.
Caught between vengeful gods, the fae he used to serve, and a supernatural underworld that wants him dead for what he knows, Cain has to rely on every instinct from his violent past to protect the girl, find his unicorn, and buy himself a future he never expected to need.
Why this grips: a former fae assassin discovers the gods aren’t dead and need a unicorn’s heart to save his own life, all while protecting a girl who’s suddenly a target too.
Brandon Drew made his fortune as a nabob in India and has come home to England with one overriding ambition: marrying his two daughters into the peerage, ideally to a duke, a marquess, or at minimum an earl. His younger daughter Bianca is ready and eager for her society debut, but Brandon has decreed she can’t have her season until her older sister Charlotte proves she can land a suitably titled husband first.The problem is Charlotte, an outspoken bluestocking with radical political opinions and a headful of ideas that horrify polite society, has absolutely no interest in marrying anyone, titled or otherwise. Rather than refuse her father outright and doom Bianca’s chances, Charlotte strikes her own bargain: she’ll attract a duke’s attention and rein in her more scandalous opinions just enough to pass muster, without actually promising to marry anyone at all.
That leaves Charlotte with an absurd task ahead of her, convincing a duke to court a woman who is loud, opinionated, politically radical, and sporting a head of famously untameable red curls, everything the aristocracy typically avoids in a prospective duchess. As she sets out to secure a suitor she has no intention of keeping, Charlotte finds the process considerably more complicated, and considerably more distracing, than the simple performance she intended it to be.
Tamed by a Duke opens the Wilful Wallflowers series with a Regency heroine determined to outmaneuver the marriage market on her own terms, only to find the game harder to fake than she expected.
Why this delights: a radical bluestocking agrees to fake-court a duke to win her sister’s society debut, only to find the performance far harder to control than planned.
England, during the tense years of the Napoleonic Wars. Gemma Marchant has quietly built a second life for herself as a spy for the Crown, gathering intelligence under the guise of an ordinary gentlewoman while the war against France grinds on. Her cover, and her usefulness to the Crown, depends entirely on nobody suspecting there’s anything more to her than pleasant conversation and good manners.That careful arrangement gets complicated when Gemma’s spymasters decide her cover needs shoring up, and the fix they land on is marriage, specifically, to a fellow operative who can watch her back without raising suspicion about either of their real work. The husband selected for the mission is a man with his own secrets and his own reasons for needing a wife who won’t ask too many questions about where he disappears to or why.
What begins as a marriage of pure strategic necessity, two spies posing as a devoted couple while continuing their separate intelligence work, gets steadily more complicated as proximity, danger, and genuine partnership start to erode the professional distance both of them intended to maintain. Neither expected to actually fall for the person assigned to be their cover story, and neither is entirely sure what to do once the pretense stops feeling like pretense.
The Husband Mission opens the Spy Matchmaker series with a Regency-era marriage of convenience built on espionage, following two operatives who discover that maintaining a fake marriage is far harder when the feelings underneath it turn out to be real.
Why this delights: two Regency-era spies enter a marriage arranged purely for cover, only to discover the feelings they’re supposed to be faking have become entirely real.
So Big
Selina Peake De Jong takes a job as a schoolteacher in the Dutch farming country outside Chicago, bringing with her a genuine appreciation for beauty that seems almost foreign to the hardscrabble agricultural community around her. She marries Pervus DeJong, a farmer with little interest in anything beyond the next harvest, and settles into a life defined by physical labor rather than the aesthetic pleasures she once imagined for herself.When Pervus dies, Selina takes over the farm entirely on her own, determined to build a future for their young son, Dirk, whom she’s nicknamed “So Big.” Her hard-won success running the farm becomes the foundation for Dirk’s education and opportunities, opportunities Selina hopes will let him pursue something larger and more meaningful than the grinding practicality that has defined her own adult life.
Dirk grows up to train as an architect, but drifts instead toward the far more lucrative work of bond trading, choosing financial security over the artistic ambitions Selina had quietly hoped he’d carry forward. His relationship with Dallas O’Mara, a genuinely gifted painter who shares Selina’s belief that beauty and meaning matter more than money, forces Dirk to confront exactly what he’s traded away in choosing comfort over creation.
When Selina’s old student, Roelf Pool, returns years later as an internationally celebrated sculptor, having achieved precisely what Dirk abandoned, Dirk is left to reckon with a success that suddenly looks a great deal like failure. So Big follows a mother’s quiet triumph and a son’s comfortable defeat, and asks which one actually amounts to a life well lived.
Why this moves: a widow builds a farm from nothing to give her son opportunity, only to watch him trade the artistic life she hoped for him for hollow financial comfort.
This collection gathers three of Roger Angell’s landmark baseball books into a single volume, tracing more than two decades of the sport through the eyes of one of its greatest chroniclers. The Summer Game opens the collection with essays written for The New Yorker across ten seasons, from 1962 through 1971, following the game from Mets spring training through championship runs, capturing legends like Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, and Roberto Clemente as the sport itself transformed through expansion and changing ballparks. The volume closes with “The Interior Stadium,” Angell’s own meditation on why baseball’s rhythms never quite repeat themselves the same way twice.Five Seasons continues the chronicle through the mid-1970s, widely regarded by critics as surpassing even The Summer Game in its literary reach, opening with a reflective piece on the baseball itself before moving through a run of pennant races, personalities, and postseason drama rendered with the same clarity and passion that made Angell’s writing essential reading even for people who’d never set foot in a ballpark.
Season Ticket rounds out the collection with fifteen pieces written between 1984 and 1987, covering spring training, player profiles of stars like Cal Ripken and Reggie Jackson, conversations with managers including Earl Weaver, and four consecutive World Series, all while tracking the sport’s evolving techniques, from infield play to the emerging split-finger fastball.
Together, the three books offer a sweeping, deeply literary record of baseball across more than twenty years, from a writer credited with revolutionizing how the sport gets written about at all.
Why this delights: three landmark collections trace over two decades of baseball through the eyes of the writer who revolutionized how the sport gets written about.
Deep in Belize, the cave known as Actun Tunichil Muknal becomes the axis point connecting three storylines separated by a thousand years apiece. In 1012, twin siblings Ajul and Ixul, descendants of the Hero Twins of Mayan myth, prepare to become co-rulers of the kingdom of Tzoyna, only to face a sudden uprising that threatens everything their bloodline has built. Their younger sister Ket, gifted with prophetic visions, sees the fractures coming before anyone else, as the kingdom’s rituals of captivity and sacrifice strain under the weight of approaching collapse.In 2012, Leah Oliveri, a biracial woman from Minnesota, travels to Belize to trace her father’s identity and her own Belizean heritage. She hires twin brothers, Javier and Xander, as guides into the sacred cave, and what starts as a personal pilgrimage turns into something stranger: a growing, unexplainable connection to Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, and to the brothers’ own conflicted feelings about tourism, ancestry, and who gets to claim their culture.
A thousand years later, in 3012, the survivors of an environmental collapse have built the viajeras, a nomadic, genderless society whose religion centers on Leah and the twin brothers from her own era, now mythologized as sacred ancestors. Niloux deCayo challenges the faith’s core doctrine, insisting Xibalba is metaphor rather than literal underworld, setting her against the devout Tanaaj deCayo in a conflict that threatens to fracture the entire society.
The Actual Star braids all three threads through the same sacred cave, building toward a shared reckoning with identity, faith, and what actually survives across a thousand years.
Why this captivates: three storylines separated by a thousand years converge on a single sacred cave, tracing the same questions of identity and belief across an ancient kingdom, a modern pilgrimage, and a post-collapse future.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3