Alex Harley’s closest encounter with a zombie before this weekend was on his gaming console. He agreed to a hiking trip in the Welsh mountains mostly because his mate Mike’s girlfriend was bringing a friend along. It seemed like a reasonable trade-off at the time. Then the Emergency Broadcast System kicks in, London reports start coming through on the radio, and the dead begin to rise. Alex’s weekend plans have changed considerably. 🧟
Shaun Harbinger sets his zombie apocalypse in a British landscape that feels refreshingly specific — the Welsh mountain range, the remote terrain, the particular bleakness of being cut off from civilization in weather that was already not cooperating. The group dynamic of four friends who went hiking and found something considerably worse gives the novel an intimate scale that makes the large-scale horror more immediate rather than less. 🏔️
The target: reach the coast. The reasoning: the sea might offer safety, or at least distance, from what’s happening inland. Harbinger is smart enough to signal early that arriving at the coast will not be the end of the problem — just the end of this particular problem. The series promise is built into the structure from the start. ⚡
What makes this irresistible: A fast-paced, atmospheric British zombie apocalypse that takes an ordinary gamer from his couch to the front lines of the end of the world in a single weekend — with a Welsh mountain setting, a likeable group of survivors, and the kind of ending that makes the next book mandatory. Perfect for fans of Charlie Higson and M.R. Hall who want their undead fiction grounded, grim, and impossible to put down.
Colin Emerson, Earl of Ridgeway, has a straightforward problem with an equally straightforward solution: the family debts his late father left behind require an heiress, and an heiress is what he intends to find. The plan is sensible, responsible, and completely derailed the moment he develops serious feelings for his sisters’ new governess — who is, of course, entirely penniless. 🏰
Maureen Driscoll writes Regency romance in the classic tradition, with the focus firmly on the emotional conflict generated by a society that makes love and financial responsibility genuinely incompatible. Colin is an honorable man in an impossible position, and Driscoll gives that honor real weight — he’s not being foolish or selfish, he has actual dependents whose futures depend on his choices. The tension between duty and desire is the engine the whole novel runs on. 🌹
Ava Conway is an equally well-drawn heroine — independent by necessity rather than choice, clear-eyed about the constraints of her position, and unwilling to let her feelings for the earl become a source of damage to the family she’s come to care for. The mutual restraint between them, and its eventual undoing, is handled with the delicacy the form requires. 📖
Why this warms the heart: A beautifully constructed traditional Regency romance built on the most satisfying of all the genre’s conflicts — a good man, a good woman, and a social system determined to keep them apart. Perfect for fans of Georgette Heyer and Mary Balogh who want their historical romance elegant, emotionally intelligent, and thoroughly earned by the final page.
Kaitlin has two priorities after catching her fiancé with someone else: restore her fixer-upper and stay far away from anything resembling romance. Her well-meaning friends have other ideas. Their offer — five dates in exchange for painting the house — seems manageable in theory. In practice, it means five dates in five days, which is where things get complicated. And then there’s Paul, the bartender with the electric blue eyes who keeps watching her awkward dates from across the room. 💕
Susan Hatler writes sweet contemporary romance with a warmth and lightness that makes her one of the most reliable names in the genre, and The Healing House delivers exactly what the title promises — a story about rebuilding, literally and emotionally, with the right person turning up at exactly the right moment. The fixer-upper house is a smart structural metaphor that Hatler uses without overworking it. 🏡
The five-dates premise generates the kind of escalating situational comedy that romantic comedy does best, and the slow-build between Kaitlin and Paul — he sees far more of her than she realizes — gives the novel a sweetness that lands because it’s earned rather than assumed. This is the sixth book in the series but reads perfectly well as a standalone. ☀️
What makes this irresistible: A charming, feel-good sweet romance about a woman putting her life back together one renovation project at a time — and the bartender who has been quietly rooting for her all along. Perfect for fans of Debbie Macomber and RaeAnne Thayne who want their contemporary romance warm, witty, and guaranteed to leave them smiling.
SOG: A Photo History of the Secret Wars
In 1972, the U.S. military destroyed all known photographs of the Studies and Observations Group — the top-secret special operations unit that ran some of the Vietnam War’s most dangerous and deniable missions deep inside enemy territory. The intention was permanent erasure. What the brass didn’t know was that SOG veterans had been quietly keeping their own photographs for years, hidden away and waiting. 🎖️
More than 700 of those irreplaceable images appear in this volume, many never previously published, documenting what SOG actually looked like on the ground: the small recon teams, the Hatchet Force operations, the HALO insertions, the string extractions under fire, the Son Tay raid, the defense of Khe Sanh. John L. Plaster — himself a SOG veteran — provides the context and the stories behind the photographs with the authority of someone who was there. 🪖
The legends are here in these pages: Larry Thorne, Bob Howard, Dick Meadows, George Sisler — men whose actions remain among the most remarkable in American military history, operating in conditions of near-total isolation against overwhelming odds. SOG’s darkest programs are documented with the same unflinching honesty as its most celebrated missions. 🌿
What makes this essential: The definitive photographic record of America’s most secretive special operations unit — a visual history that was nearly lost forever, now preserved in extraordinary detail. Essential reading for anyone serious about Vietnam War history, special operations, or the human cost of fighting wars the official record was designed to hide.
Antigua, 1784. Lieutenant Evan Ross has been badly injured fighting Royal Navy deserters and abandoned in the Caribbean hospital by his own captain — which is a poor start to what turns out to be a far more interesting career. His recovery brings him into contact with a newly appointed Captain Horatio Nelson, charged with stamping out rampant American smuggling in the Leeward Islands and very much in need of good intelligence. ⚓
Lyle Garford situates his series opener at a genuinely fascinating historical moment: the years immediately after American independence, when British naval authority in the Caribbean was being tested by smugglers, foreign agents, and a political situation still raw from recent war. Nelson as a supporting character is rendered with historical care — this is the ambitious young captain of the 1780s, not yet the legend he will become, and the dynamic between him and Ross has real texture. 🏴☠️
The spy mission Garford constructs around his protagonist has the intrigue and physical danger of the best Patrick O’Brian tradition, with French and American agents in play, stakes considerably higher than mere smuggling, and a plot that builds toward genuine action. The Caribbean setting is vivid and specific. ☀️
Why this grips from page one: A sharp, historically grounded naval adventure that puts a resourceful lieutenant in the orbit of the young Horatio Nelson and drops him into a Caribbean conspiracy with consequences well beyond his original assignment. Perfect for fans of Patrick O’Brian and Dudley Pope who want their Age of Sail fiction intelligent, well-researched, and built for the long series haul.
The English country house mystery is one of crime fiction’s most enduring and beloved settings — the isolated manor, the assembled suspects, the body discovered before breakfast — and this British Library Crime Classics anthology collects some of its finest and most overlooked examples, spanning roughly 65 years of the form. Curated by crime fiction historian Martin Edwards, it is both a pleasure and a genuine piece of literary archaeology. 🏰
The well-known names are here: Anthony Berkeley, Nicholas Blake, G.K. Chesterton. But the real discoveries are the forgotten writers Edwards has unearthed — Ethel Lina White, whose suspenseful tale demonstrates exactly why her neglect is baffling, and J.J. Bell, a little-known Scottish writer whose contribution holds up entirely against the genre’s most celebrated practitioners. The range of approaches to the closed-circle plot is genuinely surprising. 🌹
Some stories play the conventions straight, delivering the pleasures of the form in their purest expression. Others subvert them with wit and ingenuity — there’s a send-up of the country house murder that manages to be both funny and genuinely tense. The anthology rewards reading in sequence and dipping into equally. 🔍
What makes this irresistible: A beautifully curated anthology of Golden Age and near-Golden Age country house mysteries that combines beloved classics with recovered masterpieces — the perfect companion for a long weekend or a dark and stormy evening. Essential for fans of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers who want to go deeper into the tradition that produced them.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3