He made a promise not to sleep with his new personal assistant. A reasonable, professional promise—the kind that is easy to make when the assistant in question is a hypothetical future hire and not a woman he met at a café over the last apple turnover, then ran into again that same night at a bar, then spent one exceptional night with under the mutual agreement that it would never be repeated. The agreement felt solid at the time. 😳
Then she showed up for work on Monday. Grayson, his human resources director, had hired her without anyone thinking to mention names. The shock on both their faces was, by all accounts, considerable. Now he is her boss, she is his assistant, and the one-night agreement they both signed off on is sitting in the room with them every single day making itself felt. 💼
He is not a relationship person—he has his reasons for that, built up carefully over time. Julia Benton has her own reasons for keeping her heart out of reach. A purely physical arrangement with clear parameters seems like the obvious solution: mutual, consensual, uncomplicated. The problem with that plan is that the more time they spend together, the more feelings start appearing that neither of them budgeted for and neither of them quite knows what to do with. 💛
What makes this irresistible: Sandi Lynn launches the Kind Brothers series with a workplace romance that delivers every bit of the enemies-to-lovers tension it promises—two people with excellent reasons to keep things casual, falling completely despite themselves, with heat and humor in exactly the right proportions. ❤️
Katy and her grandmother have always used coffee to catch ghosts. It is a reliable method, it keeps them in high-end beans, and it pays the bills without too many awkward explanations to the neighbors. It is, in every practical sense, a good business. Then her grandmother dies and a rival ghost hunter moves to town, and Katy’s straightforward professional life becomes considerably less straightforward in a very short period of time. 👻
The new complications arrive in quick succession. There is a beguiling and charismatic ghost whisperer whose motivations are unclear. There is her new partner’s brother, who has the alarming habit of swallowing ghosts rather than catching them, which raises several questions that Katy is not sure she wants answered. There is a brief and deeply inconvenient stint behind bars. And underneath all of it, something older and darker is taking shape—something that has been carrying a vendetta against Katy specifically for longer than she knows. ☕
She needs to uncover an ancient secret. She needs to brew the best Kona blend of her life. And she needs to trust allies who are unpredictable at best and baffling at worst, because the thing coming for her is not going to wait while she figures out the correct approach. The ghost-catching business has never been quite this personally complicated. 🔮
What makes this charming: Charity Tahmaseb builds a paranormal world with a wonderfully original premise—coffee as ghost-catching medium, a heroine navigating professional disruption and existential threat simultaneously, and a voice that balances warmth and wit with genuine supernatural stakes. A delightful series opener. 🌟
Zion Sawyer had a perfectly good life in San Francisco: steady job in insurance customer service, close friends, a loving family, a future that made quiet, reliable sense. Then a lawyer calls from the small town of Sequoia, California, with news that changes the shape of everything. She is the sole heir to the estate of her biological mother—a woman named Vivian Bradley who Zion has never met, never spoken to, and never allowed herself to think too much about. ☕
The drive to Sequoia is the easy part. What waits there is considerably more complicated—a town that knew Vivian in ways Zion never will, an estate full of objects that belonged to a stranger who was also, somehow, family, and questions about why Vivian gave up a daughter and then left her everything she owned. The answers Zion finds are not the answers she was looking for, and they pull her toward a past she wasn’t sure she wanted to excavate. 🔍
Because you can never fully escape your past—not even a past you didn’t know you had. The inheritance is not just property. It comes with history, with relationships Vivian left unresolved, and with a mystery that Zion is now the only person in a position to solve. The life she built in San Francisco was safe and knowable. The one she is stepping into in Sequoia is neither of those things, and it turns out she is not as willing to walk away from it as she expected. 🌲
What makes this engaging: M.L. Hamilton launches the Zion Sawyer series with a cozy mystery built around a genuinely compelling emotional premise—a woman discovering her origins through the lens of a death, a small town full of secrets, and a heroine whose search for identity keeps intersecting with the need to find a killer. 🌟
Rush
Cali Watkins has everything sororities claim to want—she’s kind, intelligent, makes friends naturally, and has the kind of long-term ambition that translates well in interviews. What she doesn’t have is pedigree, and in the world of Greek rush, family money and social connections do a great deal of quiet, invisible work. Her chances are already thin before anyone discovers the family secrets she has been carrying carefully for years. If those come out, she’s finished. 🎓
Lilith Whitmore is the House Corp President of Alpha Delta Beta, one of the most sought-after sororities on campus, and she has spent considerable energy ensuring that this year’s rush results in exactly the outcome she wants for her own daughter—regardless of what that requires. It is a plan pursued with the calm efficiency of someone who has never felt the need to be embarrassed by her methods. 💅
Then there is Miss Pearl, who has spent twenty-five years as housekeeper and quiet anchor for the Alpha Delt girls. When a promotion she has more than earned is denied for reasons that have nothing to do with her performance, the injustice sets something in motion—a chain of events that reaches further than anyone anticipated and forces Alpha Delta Beta, and possibly the entire Greek system, to reckon with itself. 🌟
What makes this memorable: Lisa Patton’s Rush is both a propulsive campus drama and a genuinely moving examination of privilege, loyalty, and the cost of belonging—funny and poignant in equal measure, with a cast of characters whose choices feel real and whose consequences land with satisfying weight. 📚
Shelby Price owns a charming bookshop in the seaside town of Hamlet on the North Shore of Massachusetts, which is exactly the kind of life she wanted—quiet, literary, and reliably uneventful. Then she falls off a decorating ladder during the holiday rush, hits her head, and wakes up to discover that her cat Harper is talking to her. Clearly and comprehensibly. This is new. 📚
She’s still adjusting to this development when she and her best friend Lucy attend a holiday festival at the grand Harris Estate on the outskirts of town. The evening is lovely right up until it isn’t—a creeping unease settles over Shelby as they tour the mansion, accompanied by a brief, inexplicable smell of smoke that vanishes before she can identify its source. She files it away as nerves and goes home. 🕯️
The next morning, a murder is reported at the Harris Estate. The body was found in a room that had been set on fire overnight—the same room where Shelby had felt that premonitory unease. The smell of smoke, the anxiety, the talking cat: it is becoming increasingly clear that the fall from the ladder may have opened something in Shelby that was closed before, and that Hamlet’s latest murder is not something she’s going to be able to simply read about from a comfortable distance. 🔍
What makes this enchanting: J.A. Whiting launches the Spellbound Bookshop Mystery series with a cozy that earns its paranormal premise—a seaside setting with genuine atmosphere, a bookshop owner discovering unexpected gifts, a talking cat with perfect comedic timing, and a holiday murder mystery that keeps the pages turning. 🐱
There are 43 quintillion different ways to arrange a Rubik’s cube. There are 177,000 different ways to tie a tie. The cornea is the only part of the human body without its own blood supply. Your body contains 60,000 miles of blood vessels. These are exactly the kinds of facts that make a person stop mid-sentence, stare into the middle distance, and say “wait, really?”—and this book is packed with more than a thousand of them. 🤯
Bill O’Neill has assembled a collection that covers history, science, space, sports, animals, and everything in between—organized into chapters that move between topics with the cheerful unpredictability of a genuinely curious mind. Each chapter ends with pop quiz questions and trivia challenges that test whether the facts actually stuck, which makes the whole thing interactive as well as entertaining. Reading it straight through is satisfying. Dipping in randomly is equally good. 🌍
It’s beautifully illustrated throughout, which helps the more abstract facts land with visual context. The presentation is clean and accessible—designed for curious readers of any age, though the cover category of children’s wonder books undersells it considerably. Trivia lovers, pub quiz enthusiasts, parents looking for dinner table conversation starters, and anyone who simply enjoys knowing strange and wonderful things will find exactly what they’re looking for here. 🚀
What makes this a treat: Bill O’Neill delivers more than 1,000 facts with the energy of someone who genuinely loves this material—the perfect gift for trivia addicts of any age, and the kind of book that gets picked up repeatedly because there is always something new to be surprised by on any given page. 🏆
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3