She is introverted, owns a bookshop that is losing money at an impressive rate, and has been trying to finish writing a romance novel for longer than she would like to admit. A hockey game was supposed to be a low-stakes evening out. Then her dating disaster got caught on the jumbotron, the clip went viral overnight, and suddenly three very different, very attractive, very interested men are all paying close attention to a woman who has spent most of her adult life deliberately not being noticed. 🏒
Nathan Armstrong owns the team—sophisticated, older, commanding, and baffling in his apparent interest in someone who just made a fool of herself on live television. Michael Hughes is the team’s brilliant, quietly confident doctor who has a disconcerting ability to know what everyone in the room needs before they do. Crew McNeill is the new all-star player—golden retriever energy, genuinely enthusiastic, completely and immediately all in from the moment they meet. Each man is appealing in a completely different way. She cannot choose. 😍
She knows she should say no to all three. She doesn’t say no to any of them. When they collectively decide that sharing her attention is preferable to competing for it, the arrangement becomes equal parts exhilarating and genuinely complicated—and considerably more interesting than anything she has managed to write in her romance novel so far. Life, it turns out, is better research than imagination. 💋
What makes this a page-turner: Emma Foxx launches the Chicago Racketeers series with a why-choose hockey romance that is funny, genuinely steamy, and surprisingly charming—three men with completely different personalities, one reluctant heroine who deserves all of them, and a dynamic that somehow works perfectly for everyone involved. 🌟
Before she joined the FBI, Dana Blaze was a brilliant constitutional attorney with a future that seemed entirely secure. Then her father—a revered politician she adored—was brutally murdered, and the case that followed went cold and stayed that way. The injustice of it reshaped everything: her career, her worldview, her definition of what justice actually means when the system fails the people it’s supposed to protect. She rose through the ranks of the Bureau with the quiet determination of someone who has a very specific debt to collect. 🔍
Now a new killer is active, and Dana is the agent best positioned to stop him. The investigation pulls her into territory that is dark and dangerous in ways that feel uncomfortably personal—corridors of the case that keep brushing against the unresolved edges of her father’s murder in ways she cannot dismiss as coincidence. Every lead she follows risks reopening wounds she has spent years learning to work around rather than through. 😰
The race to stop this killer before he strikes again is also, whether Dana is ready for it or not, the closest she has come in years to answers she stopped letting herself expect. Someone knows more about what happened to her father than she does—and whoever that is, they are counting on her hesitation at exactly the moment she cannot afford it. She has spent her entire career making sure she doesn’t hesitate. 🌑
What makes this gripping: Katie Rush launches the Dana Blaze series with a propulsive, atmospheric thriller built around a heroine whose personal history and professional mission are knotted together in ways that keep tightening—a fast, compelling debut with a larger mystery underneath that will keep readers coming back. 🏆
Bobby Owen has worked his way up to Deputy Chief Constable of Wychshire, which is the kind of rank that generally means paperwork rather than ghost hunts. Yet here he is, joining an investigation of Nonpareil—a legendary haunted mansion with a reputation that has kept the credulous away for generations and drawn the curious in equal numbers. Bobby is neither credulous nor easily impressed by reputation, which puts him in a good position to notice what the more superstitious members of the group might prefer not to see. 👻
What he finds at Nonpareil is not a ghost but a corpse—specifically, the very real and very dead body of a paranormal investigator who came to expose the house’s supernatural claims and instead became its latest mystery. The list of people who might have wanted this particular investigator silenced is longer than comfortable, and every member of the assembled ghost-hunting party has something they would rather Bobby didn’t look at too closely. 🏚️
Complicating the picture considerably is a priceless Vermeer painting whose authenticity is now very much in question—a detail that transforms a murder investigation into something with considerably higher financial stakes than anyone initially admitted. Among the phantoms of Nonpareil, it turns out, are fakes of several different kinds. Sorting the genuine from the counterfeit, in art and in people, is the whole game. 🎨
What makes this a gem: E.R. Punshon’s long-running Bobby Owen series represents golden age British detective fiction at its most satisfying—clever, atmospheric plotting, a detective whose quiet intelligence makes the impossible look effortless, and exactly the kind of puzzle that rewards careful reading. A wonderful discovery for fans of Christie and Sayers. 🕵️
The Murder at the Vicarage
Colonel Protheroe is found shot dead in the vicar’s own study—and practically everyone in the village had reason to want him gone. His young wife Anne. Her lover, the artist Lawrence Redding. A local man given a ruinously harsh sentence by the colonel for poaching. Even Protheroe’s own daughter Lettice, who desperately needed money and said openly that if only her father would die, everything would be fine. 🕍
The vicar himself had recently remarked, to a room full of witnesses, that killing Colonel Protheroe would be doing the world a considerable favor. Suspicion, it turns out, is everywhere—and that makes solving the murder nearly impossible. Local investigators find themselves buried in conflicting alibis, false leads, and suspects who all seem equally capable of pulling the trigger. 🔍
The puzzle appears completely unsolvable—until the village’s quietly observant elderly spinster takes a polite but very pointed interest in the proceedings. Miss Marple sees what everyone else overlooks. She always does. 🧶
What makes this essential: The novel that introduced one of crime fiction’s most beloved detectives, The Murder at the Vicarage showcases Agatha Christie at her most cunningly plotted—a masterclass in misdirection, false leads, and the revelation hiding in plain sight that defined the cozy mystery genre. 🏡
Laura Frye has built exactly the life she always wanted: a twenty-year marriage to a man she loves, two wonderful children, and a successful catering business she built from nothing. Everything is in place. Everything is fine. Then her husband Jeff vanishes without a word, and the picture-perfect life she carefully constructed begins to crack apart at every seam. 💔
Laura refuses to believe Jeff left voluntarily. The man she knows wouldn’t do that—couldn’t do that. But as the days pass and his secrets begin surfacing one by one, she finds herself confronting a portrait of a man she thought she understood completely, realizing she may have been in love with a version of him that wasn’t entirely real. 😔
Left to hold her family together while the ground shifts beneath her, Laura discovers resources she never knew she had—a resilience that surprises even her, and the slow, difficult rebuilding of something she thought was gone forever. What she finds on the other side of betrayal is strength, clarity, and a love she had stopped believing in. 💪
What makes this resonate: Barbara Delinsky writes with unflinching emotional honesty about love, self-deception, and the long work of starting over—a compulsively readable domestic suspense novel with a heroine whose journey through shock and grief into genuine renewal feels both deeply real and profoundly moving. 🌷
The Greatcoats were once the finest travelling magistrates in the land—swords and legal writs working in tandem to deliver justice to every corner of the kingdom, regardless of rank or privilege. They were the King’s law made flesh. Then the Dukes put the King’s head on a spike, and everything they stood for was swept away overnight. ⚔️
Now the Greatcoats are reviled as traitors throughout the land, their legendary coats in tatters, their purpose stripped away, their names used as curses. In a kingdom where every noble is a tyrant and every knight is hired muscle, the law means nothing—and the men who once upheld it are outlaws scraping by on the edges of a society that has decided it doesn’t want justice after all. 🗡️
But Falcio val Mond and the remnants of his order still carry their blades—and old habits, old oaths, and old ideals don’t die as easily as kings. Justice has a way of demanding one more fight, even from men who have nothing left to fight for. 🔥
What makes this a must-read: Sebastien de Castell launches one of fantasy’s most swashbuckling series with razor-sharp wit, genuine heart, and swordplay that crackles off every page—essential for fans of roguish heroes, fallen idealists, and adventures that never stop moving. 🏆
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3