Private Investigator Eva Roberts is hired by a former school friend desperate to save her life from a cruel domestic abuser. But all is not as it seems. The violence at home is sinister, but what if the real danger lies elsewhere? 🔍
But the domestic case soon feels like a distraction when a second body is found on the beach… And what started out as a day of relaxation soon turns into a dangerous nightmare. Eva came to the beach to clear her head, to escape the intensity of the domestic abuse case. Instead, she finds herself standing over a corpse 💀
The beach murders appear to have nothing in common. But the truth goes deep into the heart of a crimewave that is tearing the town apart. What looks like random violence starts revealing patterns—connections that shouldn’t exist between victims who shouldn’t know each other ⚡
The detectives must follow the clues to track down a killer… but Eva’s case takes a twist at the worst possible time. Just when she thinks she understands the domestic abuse situation, new information surfaces that calls everything into question. Her friend might not be the victim Eva believed her to be 💔
This is book 30 in the Roberts and Bradley series, which means Solomon Carter has built a world of recurring characters, established relationships, and ongoing dynamics. Eva is an experienced investigator by this point, but even veteran detectives can be blindsided by cases that seem straightforward before revealing their complexity 🌊
What drew me in: Solomon Carter’s 30th Roberts and Bradley mystery proves the series still has teeth—Eva investigates domestic abuse while beach murders complicate everything, revealing connections that expose a town-wide crime wave. Long-running series fans will appreciate the character development, while newcomers can jump in with a standalone mystery.
Sean Doran has spent twenty years as a nurse in Third World war zones and natural disaster areas, fully embracing what he’d always felt was his purpose in life: to do as much good as possible with whatever time he has 🌍
With a 50% chance of carrying the gene for Huntington’s Disease like his mother, he’s never married or had children, and has kept his relationships casual. Sean built his entire life around the assumption that he might develop a degenerative disease, making choices based on a coin flip he hasn’t taken. The genetic test exists, but knowing felt more frightening than not knowing 💔
But when Sean begins to question the basis for his life’s work and burnout sets in, he is reluctantly drawn back home to Massachusetts. Twenty years of bearing witness to humanity’s worst moments has worn him down in ways he didn’t realize until he stopped moving 🏠
There he discovers that his steely elderly aunt, drama-loving sister, and quirky nephew are having a little natural disaster of their own. Sean soon finds himself parenting a misunderstood boy, falling in love with a woman from his past, and realizing that the bonds of love and loyalty might just rewrite what he once thought he knew about destiny 💕
Juliette Fay writes family fiction that asks difficult questions about purpose, genetic fate, and what we owe to ourselves versus others. Sean spent two decades saving strangers while avoiding personal attachments, convinced his potential illness made commitment selfish. Coming home forces him to reconsider everything 🌟
Why this touches the heart: Juliette Fay delivers family fiction about a war zone nurse who spent twenty years avoiding personal connections due to his 50% chance of inheriting Huntington’s Disease—until burnout and family crisis bring him home. The exploration of genetic fate, second chances, and what makes a life meaningful creates deeply moving contemporary fiction.
The Laurent family has always been far from conventional, and Isabelle has every reason to panic when her father resurfaces and suggests a family gathering. Knowing her younger sisters will balk at the request, she invites them to France for her art gallery’s big upcoming show, but by the time they arrive, she is juggling more secrets than she can handle—or share—and her perfect Parisian life feels like it could be lost at any moment 🎨
Middle sister Camille has never recovered from her parents’ divorce. Now a single mother living in London, she’s content to co-parent her daughter with her best friend—but when he suggests making their family unit more official, she runs to the last place she ever wanted to return 💕
She tells herself that she’s only going to Paris to support Isabelle, but it turns out that hiding from her true self is more difficult than facing it. Paris has a way of stripping away pretense, of forcing confrontation with the questions you’ve been avoiding. Camille thought distance would solve her problems, but they’ve followed her across the Channel 🗼
Olivia Miles writes family drama set against Parisian backdrops, exploring how childhood trauma—in this case, their parents’ messy divorce—shapes adult relationships and choices. The Laurent sisters each carry different scars from the same event, processing their family’s dysfunction in wildly different ways 💔
The art gallery show becomes a deadline that forces resolution—Isabelle can’t keep her secrets forever, Camille can’t keep running from commitment, and their father’s reappearance demands they finally address the past they’ve all been avoiding. Paris becomes both escape and crucible 🌟
What makes this uplifting: Olivia Miles delivers Parisian escapism with genuine family drama—three sisters converge in France for an art show while juggling secrets, avoiding their father, and confronting how their parents’ divorce shaped their adult lives. Perfect for readers who want beautiful settings with emotional depth and sisterhood at its messy, complicated heart.
The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII’s Fifth Wife
From New York Times bestselling author of The Last Wife of Henry VIII, a novel about Catherine Howard, wife of Henry’s later years.
Amid the turbulent, faction-ridden late reign of the fearsome Henry, eager high-spirited Catherine Howard caught the king’s eye—but not before she had been the sensual plaything of at least three other men. She was barely a teenager when older men began grooming her, using her youth and beauty for their own pleasure. By the time Henry noticed her, Catherine already carried secrets that could destroy her 👑
Ignorant of her past, seeing only her youthful exuberance and believing that she could make him happy, he married her—only to discover, too late, that her heart belonged to his gentleman usher Tom Culpeper. Henry was aging, bloated, his leg ulcers oozing, his temper increasingly volatile. Catherine was young, vivacious, desperate for love that felt genuine. The tragedy was almost inevitable 💔
As the net of court intrigue tightens around her, and with the Tudor succession yet again in peril because of Prince Edward’s severe illness, Queen Catherine struggles to give the angry, bloated and impotent king a son. The pressure is crushing—produce an heir or face the consequences that befell Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and Anne of Cleves before her 👶
But when her relations turn against her, she finds herself doomed, just as her cousin Anne Boleyn was, to face the executioner. The Howard family, which elevated Catherine to queen, ultimately sacrificed her to save themselves. Her past lovers were tortured until they confessed. Tom Culpeper was executed. And Catherine, barely twenty years old, was condemned for treason ⚔️
Carolly Erickson writes Catherine with sympathy and complexity—not as the foolish girl of traditional histories, but as a young woman trapped by older men’s desires, political machinations, and a system that gave women no agency over their own bodies or futures. Catherine’s “unfaithfulness” becomes something more nuanced: a desperate grasp at genuine affection in a marriage to a terrifying, dying tyrant 🌹
Why this touches the heart: Carolly Erickson reclaims Catherine Howard from caricature, presenting her as a victim of predatory men and political forces rather than a wanton temptress. The tragedy isn’t her moral failure—it’s that she never had a chance, condemned by her past and her present in Henry VIII’s brutal final years.
A patriot by birth, John Quincy Adams’s destiny was foreordained. He was not only “The Greatest Traveler of His Age,” but his country’s most gifted linguist and most experienced diplomat. Born in 1767 into revolutionary fervor, John Quincy literally grew up with America—his childhood home overlooked the Battle of Bunker Hill 🇺🇸
John Quincy’s world encompassed the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the early and late Napoleonic Age. As his diplomat father’s adolescent clerk and secretary, he met everyone who was anyone in Europe, including America’s own luminaries and founding fathers, Franklin and Jefferson. By age fourteen, he was serving as translator for American diplomats in Russia. By eighteen, he’d lived in more European capitals than most adults would visit in a lifetime 🌍
All this made coming back to America a great challenge. How do you adjust to provincial New England after dining with European royalty? But though he was determined to make his own career he was soon embarked, at Washington’s appointment, on his phenomenal work abroad, as well as on a deeply troubled though loving and enduring marriage. His wife Louisa struggled with depression and the isolation of diplomatic life, yet remained his partner through decades of service 💍
But through all the emotional turmoil, he dedicated his life to serving his country. At 50, he returned to America to serve as Secretary of State to President Monroe, where he essentially authored the Monroe Doctrine—one of the most consequential foreign policy statements in American history. He was inaugurated President in 1824 in one of the most controversial elections ever held 📜
After which he served as a stirring defender of the slaves of the Amistad rebellion and as a member of the House of Representatives from 1831 until his death in 1848. His post-presidency career might have been his finest hour—he became known as “Old Man Eloquent,” fighting tirelessly against slavery expansion even when it made him wildly unpopular. He literally died on the House floor, collapsing at his desk while fighting for what he believed 💫
What drew me in: Phyllis Lee Levin chronicles the most remarkably educated president America ever produced—a man who spoke eight languages, negotiated with Napoleon’s ministers as a teenager, and spent his post-presidency fighting slavery in Congress. John Quincy Adams’s extraordinary life spans America’s founding to the brink of Civil War, making this essential reading for understanding early American history.
Gorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize–winner Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present.
In the wake of her mother’s death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. She’s running from grief, but she’s also chasing a ghost—a memory of a man who connected her childhood to a world beyond her sheltered existence 🏔️
Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. Bashir had been a fixture of her youth, bringing stories and goods from distant Kashmir, representing everything exotic and unknowable. His disappearance haunted her mother, and now haunts Shalini 🌄
But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir’s politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. The Kashmir of her romanticized memories—beautiful, mysterious, enchanting—collides with the reality of a region torn by violence, military occupation, and generations of trauma. Her privilege as an outsider becomes impossible to ignore 💔
And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love. She arrived seeking answers about Bashir and closure about her mother, but instead finds herself implicated in conflicts she barely understands, where her good intentions mean nothing against the weight of history ⚠️
Madhuri Vijay writes with stunning prose that captures both the physical beauty of the Himalayas and the psychological complexity of a woman grappling with complicity, class, and the limits of understanding. Shalini’s journey becomes an interrogation of privilege, grief, and what we owe to the places and people we claim to care about 📚
What makes this special: Pushcart Prize-winner Madhuri Vijay delivers literary fiction that combines gorgeous prose with unflinching examination of privilege and politics in Kashmir. Shalini’s journey from privileged Bangalore to conflict-torn Kashmir becomes a reckoning with complicity, belonging, and the dangerous naivety of good intentions—essential reading for understanding modern India.
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