Nick needs a wife on paper. Adelaide needs a place to land. A marriage of convenience between childhood friends seems like the most sensible arrangement in the world—completely platonic, no complications. Then they win a dream honeymoon and arrive on the island to find a reality TV crew waiting to film their every move. 💍
Playing passionate newlyweds for the cameras while trying to maintain a strictly platonic agreement turns out to be harder than either of them anticipated. Somewhere between the performance and the paradise, the lines start to blur. 🌴
What makes this essential: McClone keeps the tension light and the heart genuine—this is the marriage-of-convenience trope done with warmth and humor, and Nick and Addie are easy to root for from the very first page. 🌟
London, 1910. Dr. Margaret Demeray has fought for every inch of her place as a female pathologist in a world that didn’t want her there. When the deaths of two paupers raise questions no one else seems interested in asking, she starts digging—and draws the attention of Fox, an enigmatic stranger whose motives she can’t quite read. 🔬
The deeper Margaret goes, the more dangerous it gets. Her home is burgled. She’s attacked in broad daylight. Friends grow distant. And a conspiracy that began in London’s slums appears to reach all the way to the highest levels of society. Someone very powerful wants her to stop. 🕵️
What makes this essential: A sharp, atmospheric Edwardian mystery with a protagonist who earns every scene—Margaret is principled, brave, and thoroughly compelling, and Harmon builds her world with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly where she’s taking you. ⭐
Lord Donovan Trent would much rather be back in London, charming society women and living carelessly. Instead his father’s will has banished him to the Cornish countryside to run the family tin mines—and find himself a country bride. He arrived expecting inconvenience. He didn’t expect Corisande Easton. 🌹
The parson’s headstrong daughter has absolutely no interest in staying out of his affairs—and she’s not remotely intimidated by his title, his looks, or his considerable charm. The more he tries to keep her at a distance, the more thoroughly she disrupts every plan he had. 💨
What makes this essential: Minger is a veteran of the Regency romance genre and it shows—Corisande is the kind of spirited heroine who makes the brooding lord work for every moment of her regard, and Cornwall itself becomes a character worth savoring. 🌟
Perfume and Pain
Astrid Dahl is a mid-list author, lightly canceled, hiding in a Los Angeles bungalow with her perfume collection and her Sapphic writing group—and doing a fairly poor job of keeping her life from unraveling. 🌸
Anna Dorn’s Perfume and Pain is a sharp, funny, deeply LA novel about desire, creative desperation, and the particular chaos of falling for two women at once while your career finally gets a lifeline you’re not sure you deserve. 💜
Ivy smells like metallic orchids and is researching 1950s lesbian pulp. Penelope smells like patchouli, eats vegan, and is inexplicably everywhere. Astrid’s cocktail of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—the “Patricia Highsmith”—is not helping her think clearly about either of them. 🍸
Witty, queer, and delightfully chaotic—for readers who like their literary fiction with a little smoke and a lot of self-awareness. 😏
What makes this essential: A canceled LA author, two irresistible women, and a career resurrection that might cost her everything she’s trying to hold together. 🖤
Mike Rinder signed a billion-year contract with Scientology at eighteen. He spent the next three decades rising through its highest ranks—becoming its international spokesperson, brokering its IRS tax exemption, and eventually being locked in a makeshift prison known as the Hole. 😳
A Billion Years is the most authoritative insider account of Scientology ever written—by a man who was there for all of it, believed in it completely, and paid an enormous price for finally walking away. 📖
Rinder writes without sensationalism, which makes it more devastating. The slow erosion of faith—the nagging sense that Hubbard’s promises were never going to be kept, that David Miscavige’s cruelty was the system working as designed—is rendered with the precision of someone who lived it for decades. 💔
Essential reading for anyone interested in high-control organizations, religious manipulation, or simply one of the most extraordinary survival stories of recent decades. 🌿
What makes this essential: The definitive insider memoir of Scientology’s highest ranks—decades of belief, betrayal, and the long road to finally getting out. 🚪
One night. No names. Meant to be forgotten. Then she walks into his daughter’s summer program and he realizes he never actually forgot her at all. 💉
Iesha Bree’s Stat: Love in Scrubs is a warm, emotionally layered medical romance built on a second-chance setup with real stakes—Dr. Desmond Wilder is a single father gunning for Chief of Obstetrics, and the last thing he needs is a complication. Yara Sinclair built a school for grieving children. They are both carrying more than they’ve admitted. 🏥
The shared grief beneath the attraction gives this one genuine depth—it’s not just about chemistry, it’s about two people who understand loss in the same specific way and are terrified to open back up. 💕
A satisfying, heartfelt medical romance for readers who want the slow burn to mean something. 🌟
What makes this essential: A one-night stranger who turns out to be her daughter’s doctor—and a second chance neither of them planned for. ❤️
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3