London, 1851. The Great Exhibition is the event of the decade — a vast celebration of technology, design, and human ingenuity housed in the spectacular Crystal Palace. Miss Kara Levett is thrilled to be there as both exhibitor and spectator, demonstrating her elaborate automatons to astonished crowds. Then a man is murdered inside the Crystal Palace and Kara becomes the prime suspect, which focuses her attention rather sharply on finding who actually did it. 🏛️
Deb Marlowe has constructed a series opener with a setting that does much of the atmospheric heavy lifting — the Great Exhibition is a genuinely inspired backdrop for a murder mystery, a space where the cutting edge of Victorian technology mingles with international intrigue and the full social spectrum of mid-century London. Kara’s automatons give her a distinctive identity within the period that goes well beyond the standard historical heroine. 🔍
Her unlikely investigative partner Niall Kier — a reserved Scottish blacksmith and artist with secrets he’s also not advertising — provides the romantic tension and the practical muscle the investigation requires. Marlowe sends them from Victorian high society to the London slums and back, chasing a conspiracy that turns out to be considerably larger than a single murder. 🌹
What makes this irresistible: A brilliantly conceived Victorian historical mystery set against the spectacle of the 1851 Great Exhibition — featuring an inventor heroine, a secretive Scottish hero, and a murder investigation that unravels into international espionage. Perfect for fans of C.S. Harris and Anna Lee Huber who want their historical mysteries atmospheric, intelligent, and built around a partnership worth following for a long series.
Superstar actress Claire Jordan has everything except what she actually wants: a regular guy who sees her rather than the celebrity. So she goes undercover — disguised as an ordinary woman, set up by her romance book club with a perfectly vetted date. What the book club didn’t know is that the date would be covered by his identical twin brother Jake, a billionaire tech CEO equally exhausted by people who see his bank balance first. Two people hiding who they are, both looking for something real. 🎬
Kylie Gilmore executes the double-mistaken-identity premise with real comic confidence — the setup is inherently funny, the escalating complications are well-timed, and the Happy Endings Book Club provides a warm ensemble backdrop that gives the series an identity beyond the central romance. The twins concept allows Gilmore to generate comedy from both sides of the deception simultaneously. 💫
Claire and Jake are well-matched as protagonists: both genuinely tired of the performance their respective lives require, both finding in each other something unexpectedly unguarded. The identity reveal — and its aftermath — is handled with the kind of emotional intelligence that separates romantic comedy that lands from romantic comedy that merely executes its genre mechanics. ⭐
Why this delights from page one: A sparkling romantic comedy built on the best kind of mistaken identity — a movie star pretending to be ordinary meeting a billionaire pretending to be his twin — with genuine heart beneath the laughs and a book club community worth spending a whole series with. Perfect for fans of Meg Cabot and Rachel Gibson who want their rom-coms clever, warm, and impossible to put down.
Charlie Grace Rivers is managing a guest ranch in Thunder Mountain, Wyoming, a cantankerous father who opposes every decision she makes, and — as of her father’s latest hire — her philandering ex-husband showing up for work. When she runs to her lifelong girlfriends for support, their advice helps, but it’s the new guest at Teton Trails who cuts through the noise: a TV producer from out of town with good looks, genuine wisdom, and an inevitable departure date. 🏔️
Kellie Coates Gilbert writes clean romance with the kind of emotional warmth that makes the genre’s optimism feel earned rather than assumed, and the Wyoming setting is rendered with the wide-sky spaciousness that suits Charlie Grace’s situation — a woman who has been managing everyone else’s needs for so long she’s almost forgotten she has her own. The guest ranch backdrop gives the romance a specific texture and a natural clock. 🌲
The question at the novel’s center is one the best clean romance always asks: is the promise of something real worth the risk of disruption? Gilbert complicates Charlie Grace’s choice by making the community stakes genuinely meaningful — the friends who worry about the TV show’s impact aren’t wrong to worry, which gives the romance a moral dimension beyond the personal. ☀️
What makes this irresistible: A warm, beautifully written clean romance set on a Wyoming guest ranch — featuring a resilient heroine, a man who arrives at exactly the right moment, and the question of whether love is worth the upheaval it inevitably brings. Perfect for fans of RaeAnne Thayne and Susan Wiggs who want their romance set against spectacular landscape, built on genuine connection, and resolved with real heart.
When the World Goes Quiet
Bruges, 1918. German occupation, nearly four years in, has taught Evelien exactly how to survive: keep her head down, complete her work, and wait out the war for the painting she’s been promised in exchange for protecting her employer’s possessions. Then a resistance operative appears with a different kind of offer — steal a list of names from the house, and receive a letter from her long-missing husband. The letter that arrives makes everything Evelien thought she knew about her own life uncertain. 🌹
Gian Sardar writes historical fiction with a rare sensitivity to the interior lives of women caught in historical forces they cannot control — Evelien’s emotional situation is as complex as her physical danger, and the novel holds both with equal care. The soldier she befriends through their shared love of art gives the story a secondary relationship that complicates the central question of what Evelien actually wants her life to look like after liberation. 🎨
The occupied Bruges setting is rendered with beautiful specificity — the canals, the paintings, the particular silence of a city living under constraint — and Sardar uses art throughout as both plot mechanism and thematic touchstone, a means by which people under occupation maintain their interior lives against extraordinary pressure. ⚔️
What makes this irresistible: A beautifully realized WWI historical novel set in German-occupied Belgium, following a woman navigating resistance, loss, and the terrifying possibility that survival might mean becoming someone different from who she was. Perfect for fans of Kristin Hannah and Kate Quinn who want their wartime fiction emotionally precise, historically grounded, and genuinely moving.
On her fortieth birthday, Madame Wu makes a decision that shocks her household: she will select a young concubine for her husband, move to her own quarters, and finally — after two decades of managing a sixty-person compound — have time to think. What she discovers in that space is a mind she never knew she had. Books previously forbidden her. The English language. And eventually, an excommunicated Catholic priest whose ideas about the world are unlike anything she has encountered before. 🌸
Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Pavilion of Women — set in pre-revolutionary China and published in 1946 — remains one of her most quietly radical novels. What appears to be a story about a woman withdrawing from life is actually the opposite: it is about a woman finally beginning to live one that belongs entirely to herself. Buck renders the compound’s rhythms and rituals with the loving precision of someone who understood Chinese domestic life from the inside. 📖
The relationship between Madame Wu and the priest is the novel’s most intellectually alive element — two people from utterly different traditions finding, through genuine dialogue, a shared understanding of what it means to be free. Buck handles their exchanges with the same care she brings to the seasonal life of the compound. 🕊️
What makes this essential: A luminous, quietly revolutionary classic about a Chinese matriarch who discovers at forty that the life she’s been managing was never actually her own — and what she does about it. Perfect for readers of Amy Tan and Lisa See who want their literary fiction rooted in Chinese domestic culture, written with genuine insight, and built around a heroine whose awakening feels both inevitable and thrilling.
Ursula K. Le Guin spent her career asking questions that science fiction is uniquely positioned to explore: What makes us human? How do societies organize themselves around gender, power, and belief? What would we look like from the outside? This collection of eight stories — including a previously unpublished novella — returns to the Ekumen, the sprawling pseudo-universe that anchored her most celebrated work, and uses it to probe those questions with her characteristic precision and moral seriousness. 🌌
Le Guin is the five-time Hugo and five-time Nebula Award winner, recipient of the National Book Award, and widely regarded as the greatest science fiction writer of the twentieth century — and the stories collected here demonstrate exactly why that reputation is warranted. The range is extraordinary: explorations of gender and sexuality, meditations on slavery and transformation, examinations of loyalty and introversion, investigations of what religion means to a species that didn’t originate the gods it worships. 🪐
What distinguishes Le Guin from nearly every other writer in the genre is the quality of the prose — these are not merely interesting thought experiments but beautifully written stories, crafted with the same attention to language and rhythm that characterizes the best literary fiction. The Ekumen setting provides continuity; each story stands entirely on its own. ✨
What makes this essential: Eight brilliant stories from the greatest science fiction writer of her generation, exploring gender, power, consciousness, and what it means to be human across worlds that feel both alien and uncannily familiar. Perfect for readers of Ted Chiang and Samuel R. Delany who want their speculative fiction philosophically rigorous, beautifully written, and permanently thought-provoking.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3