Lucy Moretti has just taken charge of Alba, the restaurant her family has been running for two generations—a milestone she has worked toward and that represents everything she cares about professionally. The celebration is brief. A police officer knocks on the door to inform her that Donovan Fagan, a long-time employee, has been found stabbed to death on the front steps of the neighborhood church. The murder weapon is a knife from Lucy’s own kitchen. 🔍
The case has an immediate professional dimension that makes it impossible for Lucy to step back and let the police handle it alone: her restaurant’s knife at a murder scene is not a detail that will go unnoticed in the neighborhood, and the connection between her family’s business and a violent death requires explanation. With her best friend and executive chef Ally at her side, Lucy is drawn into an investigation that turns on the question of who Donovan Fagan actually was—because the police are asking questions, and the answers that surface suggest the long-time employee was considerably more complicated than anyone realized. 💀
Priscilla Baker writes the North End Mysteries with the culinary cozy mystery warmth and community texture that the genre delivers at its best—a protagonist whose professional world provides both the plot engine and the setting, a friendship at the center of the investigation that gives the sleuthing its human quality, and a neighborhood backdrop with the specific density of a place where everybody knows everybody and nobody tells the whole story. The bonus recipe and cooking techniques are a genuine extra for readers who want to bring the restaurant world home. 🍴
What makes this charming: Priscilla Baker launches the North End Mysteries with a culinary cozy of genuine appeal—a restaurant owner who just took the helm of her family’s institution, a long-time employee found stabbed with her kitchen knife, and an investigation that keeps revealing new layers of who Donovan Fagan really was. 🌟
1351 A.D. Geoffrey de Montfort and Merryn Mantel are that rare thing in medieval historical romance—a couple who actually love each other before the story begins. Betrothed young, they spend five years apart when Geoffrey leaves England to fight against the French. He returns after the English victory at Poitiers. They marry. They have one blissful night together, looking toward a future that seems finally possible. 💛
Medieval historical romance readers will understand immediately that one blissful night and a promising future are the narrative conditions that precede maximum complication. What follows tests everything that Geoffrey and Merryn have built across the years of separation and the single consummated night—their love, their honor, and their capacity to find each other again on the other side of whatever the reign of Edward III has planned for them. The code of chivalry that structures Geoffrey’s identity as a knight is not merely decorative backdrop but an active moral framework that shapes every decision the novel puts him through. ⚔️
Alexa Aston launches the Knights of Honor series with the couple who serves as the emotional foundation for the entire arc—Geoffrey and Merryn appear in each subsequent book, sometimes briefly and sometimes significantly, as new couples come together across Edward III’s England. The series establishes its world and its values here: honor as a lived code rather than an abstraction, medieval England rendered with period authenticity, and romantic love that has to survive the specific pressures that the era inflicts on everyone it touches. 🏰
What makes this captivating: Alexa Aston launches Knights of Honor with a medieval romance built on genuine love—a betrothed couple reunited after five years of war, one blissful wedding night, and the full force of Edward III’s England testing whether what they have can survive what comes next. 🌟
Konal the Red lost a drinking wager with his brother and ended up fighting for the Danish prince in Northumbria—not the military campaign he would have chosen. When his contract expires, he intends to go home to Norway. Instead, his exploits have earned him lands, respect, and a Saxon beauty named Silvia as a spoil of war. He is determined to win her trust and her heart alongside what he has already been given. 🛡️
Silvia is the only child of the church undersecretary, whose death in a Viking siege has left her with a single consuming purpose: revenge. It does not matter which Viking wielded the axe—an eye for an eye is the only thing that will satisfy her grief and her fury. When Konal claims her, she sees it not as captivity but as opportunity. Proximity to a Viking gives her the chance she needs. She never expected to find a pure heart beneath his barbaric exterior. 💛
Violetta Rand builds the Viking’s Fury series on the enemies-to-lovers premise at its most high-stakes—a woman whose entire identity has been organized around revenge, discovering in the man she came to kill the person who is slowly rekindling something in her that the siege extinguished. The historical Viking setting gives the novel its atmosphere and its moral complexity: a world where people are taken as spoils and where honor is a genuine code rather than a social convention, and where the distance between enemy and beloved is measured in trust that must be earned across repeated small gestures. 🌊
What makes this compelling: Violetta Rand launches Viking’s Fury with a medieval romance of genuine emotional heat—a Norse warrior who won a Saxon woman as spoil of war, a woman who plans to use captivity as cover for revenge, and the discovery that the man she came to kill has a heart she did not expect. 🌟
Restoring Grace
Grace Soudley is recently divorced and still living in the beautiful but crumbling old house her godmother left her—a house she loves and cannot afford to maintain. Without a fortune she does not have, the house will literally disintegrate around her. Her life is coming apart at the seams in multiple simultaneous directions, which is at least efficient. 💛
Ellie Summers’ life is also unraveling. She is pregnant, her boyfriend is unenthusiastic about parenthood, and her parents are not extending the invitation to move back home that the situation arguably calls for. She needs somewhere to live immediately. Grace needs a lodger. Each of them needs a friend. The practical arrangement produces exactly that, and together they begin the work of fixing up the house—which turns out to be more than a domestic project once an unexpected and disconcertingly handsome man arrives apparently determined to help, and Grace discovers beautiful paintings hidden behind the dining-room curtains that could be genuinely valuable. 🎨
Katie Fforde—whose Practically Perfect appears in this same batch of descriptions—writes British romantic comedy with the warmth, wit, and domestic specificity that has made her one of the genre’s most beloved voices across three decades and dozens of novels. Restoring Grace deploys her signature strengths: two women whose circumstances have pushed them together, the physical restoration project as emotional metaphor, the inconveniently attractive man who complicates everything at precisely the wrong moment, and the discovery that what looked like the worst possible situation contains the seeds of something much better. 🌅
What makes this charming: Katie Fforde delivers a British romantic comedy of genuine warmth—a divorced woman in a crumbling house, a pregnant lodger who needs a friend, an unexpected handsome helper, and valuable paintings hidden behind the dining-room curtains that make the whole business of restoration considerably more serious. 🌟
Just a few hundred genes separate humans from chimpanzees. The near-future world of Sims is one where genetic science has fulfilled its vaunted potential—where inherited diseases are being eliminated and where the gap between human and chimpanzee has been deliberately narrowed by splicing in human genes: enlarged cranium, reduced body hair, the capability for speech. The result is “sims”—creatures occupying a gray zone between simian and human, now being leased worldwide by SimGen for labor that is dangerous, boring, or simply beneath what humans prefer to do themselves. 🧬
SimGen owns the patent on the sim genome and presents itself as an innovator in a beneficial technology. It is also hiding something—secrets beyond proprietary processes, secrets it will go to any lengths to protect. The novel turns on the moment that lawyer Patrick Sullivan decides to try to unionize the sims, which forces SimGen to respond with everything available to it and forces everyone involved to confront the central question the novel is built around: what exactly are sims, what do they deserve, and what does the answer say about the civilization that created them? 💡
F. Paul Wilson—best known for the Repairman Jack series—writes speculative fiction with the legal and ethical rigor that the subject demands. The unionization premise is not gimmick but genuine inquiry: the labor rights of a being that was engineered to be exploitable is precisely the kind of question that science fiction at its most serious uses to examine what we actually believe about personhood, rights, and the responsibility of creators toward their creations. ⚡
What makes this essential: F. Paul Wilson delivers a genetic engineering science fiction novel of genuine moral depth—a near future where genetically modified chimps do humanity’s dangerous work, a corporation with dangerous secrets, and a lawyer who decides to try unionizing beings that were specifically designed not to have rights. 🌟
Exorcists are being murdered mid-ritual, their bodies desecrated in ways that signal the killer knows exactly what it is doing and what it is trying to communicate. The Church faces a threat it has no precedent for: something targeting its holy warriors specifically, with the kind of knowledge and capability that suggests a demonic intelligence operating with purpose rather than chaos. The response is Michael—an android engineered for spiritual warfare, immune to possession, fluent in occult ritual. A weapon even the Devil might fear. 🔱
Assigned to monitor him is Father Callum, a grizzled priest who has seen evil wear enough faces to approach the android exorcist with the specific wariness of a man who knows that novel solutions often carry novel problems. Their mission leads them to a remote village and a possessed teenage girl—but the demon occupying her is not operating according to the established rules. It is learning. Adapting. Evolving across each encounter in ways that suggest it has a specific goal beyond simple destruction. What it wants has never been available to evil before: if it succeeds, it will not merely claim a soul but rewrite the entire architecture of possession. 💀
William Massa builds the novel on a premise that earns its horror credibility—the android exorcist is not a gimmick but a genuine theological and philosophical problem dropped into the center of a supernatural horror story. What happens when the ritual requires a soul, and the practitioner has none? What happens when a demon encounters something it cannot possess? ⚡
What makes this gripping: William Massa delivers a horror thriller of genuinely original premise—the Vatican deploys an android exorcist immune to possession, a demon that is learning and evolving across each encounter, and the question of what happens when evil finally encounters something it cannot corrupt. 🌟
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3