Agnes Lockwood is recently widowed and spending a few days on Tyneside in northeast England, catching up with her past and taking stock of her present. It’s supposed to be a quiet, restorative trip. Then expensive jewelry goes missing from the hotel, and the investigating Chief Inspector turns out to be an old schoolfriend — which is how Agnes ends up with considerably more access to a police investigation than anyone intended to give her. 🌊
Eileen Thornton writes traditional British cozy mysteries in the Miss Marple mold — an inquisitive woman of a certain age who ignores warnings to stay out of things and repeatedly proves more useful than the official investigation. Agnes has warmth and persistence in equal measure, and the Tyneside setting gives the series a northeastern English character that feels distinct from the usual Home Counties village mystery. 🫖
When a body turns up after dinner one evening, the case escalates beyond jewelry theft into something considerably more serious, and Agnes’s involvement deepens despite the Chief Inspector’s increasingly pointed advice to stay well back. She is constitutionally incapable of following it. The rekindled friendship between Agnes and Alan adds a pleasant secondary dimension to a well-constructed debut mystery. 🔎
What makes this essential: A warmly traditional British cozy with a thoroughly engaging amateur sleuth, a northeast England setting, and the satisfying pleasure of watching someone ignore official advice and be entirely right to do so. Perfect for fans of M.C. Beaton and Ann Cleeves who want their mysteries seaside, their heroines unstoppable, and their investigations fueled by curiosity rather than credentials.
The job was supposed to be straightforward: break into a collector’s place, free whatever supernatural creatures are being kept in cages, pocket a few trinkets to cover expenses, burn it down on the way out. Standard operations for someone in the monster emancipation business. What was not part of the plan: three very large, very attractive monsters following her home and refusing to leave until they’ve repaid the debt. 🔥
Eva Chase writes paranormal romance with a wickedly fun voice, and the heroine of Shadow Thief — a pyromaniac thief with strong opinions about supernatural exploitation — is one of the most entertaining protagonists the genre has produced in some time. The three monsters she’s accidentally acquired (an incubus, a demon, and an angel, because apparently she collects them) are each distinctive enough that the reverse-harem dynamic feels genuinely character-driven rather than formulaic. 😈
When it emerges that the conspiracy her new houseguests are tangled in connects to the murder of someone she loved, the stakes shift from comic inconvenience to something with real emotional weight. Chase handles the pivot smoothly, and the action sequences have the same propulsive energy as the comedic ones. 👼
Why this deserves your attention: A wildly entertaining paranormal romance that combines heist-adjacent adventure, genuinely funny banter, and a heroine whose moral code is unconventional but entirely consistent. Perfect for fans of Jaymin Eve and Leia Stone who want their paranormal romance with maximum personality, monsters worth rooting for, and a protagonist who is absolutely going to regret this — and absolutely going to do it anyway.
It begins with a scientist who loves someone dying and will do anything to save her. The something he does works — and then triggers consequences so catastrophic that the world he saved her for ceases to exist. The resulting zombie apocalypse is unlike most: these are superhuman, ravenous, and they outnumber the living by a margin that makes survival feel less like a plan and more like a postponement. 🧟
Mike Evans structures his series opener around a moral premise that gives it more weight than the average post-apocalyptic thriller: the disaster has a human cause, a specific act of desperation with a specific chain of consequences, and the scientist’s son must survive in the world his father accidentally destroyed. That father-son dimension gives Origins an emotional backbone that the action is built around rather than interrupting. 💉
The zombie threat here is treated with the seriousness of an actual extinction-level event — the odds are genuinely overwhelming, and Evans doesn’t soften that reality to make the protagonist’s chances seem more manageable. The survival thriller mechanics are solid, and the character work is strong enough to make you care about outcomes you’re not entirely confident will be good ones. ⚡
What makes this essential: A character-driven post-apocalyptic series opener that grounds its zombie apocalypse in genuine human tragedy and follows the consequences with intelligence and restraint. Perfect for fans of Robert Kirkman and Justin Cronin who want their end-of-the-world fiction with a moral center and survival stakes that feel completely real.
A Court of Betrayal
In 1301, fifteen-year-old Johane de Geneville is married to Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, and swept immediately into one of the most turbulent political stories in medieval English history. Her husband will go on to depose King Edward II and rule England alongside Queen Isabella in one of the most audacious power grabs the country has ever seen. Johane will spend decades navigating the consequences. ⚔️
Anne O’Brien is a Sunday Times bestselling author with a gift for finding the women at the center of history’s most dramatic events and telling their stories with both scholarly rigor and novelistic momentum. Johane de Geneville is a figure most readers won’t know — which is precisely what makes the novel so absorbing. She is not a passive observer of her husband’s ambitions but an active participant in survival, managing impossible circumstances with formidable intelligence. 🏰
When Roger is accused of treason, everything Johane has built — her freedom, her security, her children’s futures — hangs in the balance. O’Brien renders the Welsh Marches and the treacherous Plantagenet court with vivid historical detail, and the personal stakes give the political intrigue an emotional urgency that keeps the pages turning. 👑
Why this grips from page one: A richly researched medieval historical novel about a woman caught between a husband’s dangerous ambitions and a king’s merciless retribution — told by one of the genre’s most accomplished practitioners. Perfect for fans of Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory who want their history intimate, morally complex, and utterly unputdownable.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most cited and argued-about thinkers of the twentieth century — a linguist whose theories about the structure of human language reshaped cognitive science, and a political intellectual whose critiques of power have been equally influential and considerably more controversial. On Language collects two of his most accessible works in a single volume, making it the ideal entry point for readers new to his thinking. 📖
The first part, Language and Responsibility, is Chomsky in conversation — informal, wide-ranging, unusually candid about the relationship between his linguistic research and his political views. It is, as the description suggests, something close to a self-portrait. The second part, Reflections on Language, takes on the larger philosophical questions: what the study of language tells us about the human mind, and what it means that humans alone among species have developed the capacity for grammar in the way we have. 🧠
What makes the collection valuable is accessibility. Chomsky’s more technical academic work requires significant background knowledge; these two pieces are written for engaged general readers rather than specialists, and the editorial decision to pair them creates a natural dialogue between Chomsky the public intellectual and Chomsky the scientist. 💡
Why this deserves your attention: The most approachable introduction available to one of the twentieth century’s most formidable minds — two classic works collected in a single affordable volume. Essential reading for anyone curious about the science of language, the nature of mind, or simply how one of America’s most provocative thinkers arrived at his positions.
Huw Morgan remembers the valley as it was — green and prosperous and full of life, before the coal mines transformed it into something unrecognizable. Now the last of his family still living there, he looks back on a childhood and a community that exist only in memory: the Morgan family at their strongest, the valley at its most beautiful, a world that the Industrial Revolution consumed slowly and then all at once. 🏴
Published in 1939, How Green Was My Valley became an immediate sensation and has never gone out of print — a testament to the power of Richard Llewellyn’s prose, which manages to be lyrical without sentimentality and elegiac without self-pity. The novel won the National Book Award and was adapted into the John Ford film that famously beat Citizen Kane for the Best Picture Oscar. It remains one of the great novels of working-class life. ⛏️
What makes the book endure is its refusal to simplify. The mines bring wages and community as well as destruction; the Morgan family is loving and flawed in equal measure; progress and loss arrive together, inseparable. Llewellyn’s Huw is one of literature’s most fully realized narrators — a man who has lived long enough to understand what he lost, but honest enough to remember it clearly rather than just beautifully. 🌿
What makes this essential: One of the great novels of the twentieth century — a masterwork of memory, loss, and the particular devastation of watching a place you love destroyed by forces too large to resist. At this price, there is simply no reason not to own it.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3