Amy Jacoby, the youngest of the Jacoby sisters and a recent MBA graduate, has built her entire identity around control, organization, and doing things by the book. That discipline gets tested the moment she takes a job as professional “handler” to Hamish McCormick, a Scottish football star with a well-earned reputation for scandal and a lucrative endorsement deal riding on his ability to stay out of the tabloids for the next several weeks.The assignment comes with a complication neither of them can pretend away: Amy and Hamish have history, including a long-ago three-in-the-morning phone call and a string of stolen kisses at family gatherings over the years, made all the more awkward by the fact that his cousin married into her family. Forced proximity reignites the chemistry both of them have spent years trying to ignore, with Hamish pursuing her through relentless flirtation while Amy clings hard to the professional boundaries her job requires.
As the two spend more time together, cracks start showing in both their carefully maintained personas. Amy’s need for control turns out to be protecting real vulnerability underneath, while Hamish’s playboy reputation masks a depth of feeling he’s never let anyone see fully. When Amy finally reveals a secret she’s been guarding, the fallout sends her running, convinced the relationship is over before it ever really had a chance to begin.
Shopping for a Highlander follows Amy and Hamish’s collision course from professional handler and reckless client to something neither expected, resolved only through family intervention, hard-won growth, and Hamish’s determined fight to win her back.
Why this delights: a control-driven handler hired to keep a Scottish football star out of scandal finds herself falling for exactly the kind of chaos she was hired to manage.
Elizabeth Fraser has survived four broken betrothals, and after enough disappointment, she’s made peace with the idea that she’ll remain unmarried, settling into life as a lady-in-waiting at Robert the Bruce’s Highland Court rather than chasing a match that keeps slipping away. What she hasn’t made peace with is Edward Bruce, the king’s adopted younger brother, whom she met briefly months earlier during a single dance and a quiet conversation on a terrace that neither of them has quite forgotten.Edward returns to court a weary warrior fresh from fighting in Ireland, looking to finally settle somewhere and build a life outside the battlefield. He recognizes Elizabeth immediately, and finds himself drawn all over again to her dry wit and stubborn independence, the very qualities that have made her difficult for other suitors to court. Convincing her his interest is genuine, rather than another disappointment waiting to happen, becomes Edward’s quiet, persistent project.
That courtship gets forced into urgency when danger arrives at court and threatens both their lives, pulling Elizabeth and Edward into an investigation neither of them expected to be running. With help from the Sinclair brothers and their wives, the two work together to uncover who’s behind the threat, the shared danger stripping away the last of Elizabeth’s guardedness even as it puts everything at risk.
A Spinster at the Highland Court follows Elizabeth’s reluctant surrender to a second chance at love, as she and Edward move from courtly intrigue toward the possibility of a life built together in the Highlands. Four broken betrothals have taught Elizabeth to expect disappointment, and shedding that hard-won caution proves nearly as difficult as surviving the danger stalking them both, leaving her to decide whether she’s willing to risk a fifth chance at happiness.
Why this delights: a four-times-jilted lady-in-waiting resigned to spinsterhood finds herself fighting for her life, and falling for the king’s brother, at the Highland court.
Wonder Falls is a small town near Niagara Falls where, unknown to most of its residents, three witches have been quietly living and working for years. Cath Greenstone, a thirty-three-year-old witch with the unusual gift of telepathic communication with cats, runs the town’s beloved café, Brew-Ha-Ha, alongside her cousin Bea and their matriarch, Aunt Astrid, with three magical familiars, Treacle, Peanut Butter, and Marshmallow, never far from the action.That careful balance shatters when the café burns down, and their baker, Ted Lanier, is found dead in the wreckage. Worse still, in the chaos of the fire, a powerful spell book, a family heirloom handed down from Salem, goes missing from its hidden place inside the café, leaving the family exposed to a threat far more dangerous than a simple insurance claim.
With the grimoire loose and the family’s secret potentially compromised, Cath, Bea, and Astrid have to figure out who among the townspeople might know what they really are, all while investigating who set the fire and who took the book. Suspicion lands quickly on Min Park, an old friend of Cath’s newly returned to town, but Cath refuses to believe he’s responsible, even as new arrival Detective Blake Samberg complicates the investigation with a past of his own.
Working the case with the help of their cats’ uncanny instincts, the witches uncover a secret society, a mysterious pendant, and a web of deception that puts all of Wonder Falls at risk if the stolen magic falls into the wrong hands.
Why this delights: three secret witches running a small-town café must solve a murder and recover their family’s stolen spell book before its dark magic destroys everything they’ve built.
Istanbul & Beyond: Exploring the Diverse Cuisines of Turkey
Istanbul & Beyond: Exploring the Diverse Cuisines of Turkey follows food writer Robyn Eckhardt and photographer David Hagerman across the length of the country, from the markets and kitchens of Istanbul out to the corners and shores of Turkey, discovering, tasting, and meticulously recording the culinary traditions they find along the way. The book treats Turkey not as a single unified cuisine but as a crossroads shaped by eight bordering countries, from Bulgaria and Greece to Syria, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, each leaving its imprint on what ends up on the table.The recipes span the full arc of a Turkish meal, moving through appetizers, pickles, and relishes into soups, salads, and breads, then on to pastas, grains, and vegetable-forward dishes before landing on fish, chicken, lamb, and beef preparations, and finally desserts and drinks. Signature recipes include pickled stuffed eggplants, corn and crème fraîche biscuits, turmeric-scented lamb and chickpea stew, whole roast fish finished with coriander and thyme, and oven-caramelized pumpkin served with tahini and walnuts.
What distinguishes the book beyond its recipe count is its commitment to context. Eckhardt and Hagerman document not just dishes but the people who make them and the land that produces the ingredients, capturing Turkey’s agricultural heritage and striking regional diversity through both the writing and Hagerman’s dramatic photography. The result reads as much as a travelogue as a cookbook, built from years of on-the-ground research rather than secondhand research.
For cooks looking to move beyond the handful of Turkish dishes familiar to most Western kitchens, Istanbul & Beyond offers a far deeper, more textured map of one of the world’s great and underexplored culinary traditions.
Why this delights: years of on-the-ground travel across Turkey’s eight-country crossroads produce a cookbook as rich in culture and photography as it is in recipes.
In an alternate, magic-touched vision of Imperial Russia, Saint Petersburg sits under threat from the Ottoman Empire and the Kazakhs, and the tsar has decided the empire needs an Imperial Enchanter to protect it. There’s just one complication: there are two enchanters in Russia capable of the job, and Russian law permits only one.Vika Andreyeva has spent her life in near-total isolation on Ovchinin Island, raised by her father to wield extraordinary power, able to command snow and transmute ash into gold, and she arrives in Saint Petersburg eager, finally, to show the world what she can do. Nikolai Karimov is an orphaned enchanter who has built himself a precarious foothold in society through his gifts for perception and construction magic, and sees the Crown’s Game as his only real path to lasting security and status.
The tsar’s competition pits them against each other in an escalating, spectacular duel of magic, with a brutal stipulation attached: the winner becomes Imperial Enchanter, and the loser dies. Both Vika and Nikolai enter determined to win outright, but the closer they come to each other through the competition’s twists, the harder it becomes to see the other purely as an obstacle to eliminate. Complicating matters further, Pasha, heir to the throne and Nikolai’s closest friend since childhood, finds himself falling for the mysterious enchantress he’s not supposed to know at all.
As the game intensifies and secrets buried at the empire’s foundations begin to surface, Vika, Nikolai, and Pasha are forced to reckon with a truth crueler than any of them expected: winning the Crown’s Game might cost far more than either enchanter’s life alone.
Why this delights: two of Russia’s only enchanters are forced into a duel to the death, only to find themselves falling for each other as the empire’s secrets threaten them both.
The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History traces the surprisingly turbulent story of how Western culture has defined, pursued, and periodically abandoned the idea of being clean, moving from ancient Greek public bathhouses, where bathing carried deep social significance, through the early Christian era, when ascetics deliberately embraced dirtiness as a badge of religious devotion, inverting entirely the values most readers take for granted today.Katherine Ashenburg carries the story forward through medieval etiquette manuals offering surprisingly basic instructions on washing one’s face, into the nineteenth century, when the American middle class elevated cleanliness into a full-blown moral virtue, one visible enough that people believed they could judge a stranger’s character by the glow of their skin alone. From there she moves into the early twentieth century, when advertisers discovered hygiene anxiety was an extraordinarily effective way to sell soap, and finally into the present day, where Ashenburg turns a critical eye on modern bathing habits and asks pointed questions about their environmental cost.
Throughout, Ashenburg favors narrative and anecdote over dry academic recitation, working in details like a real letter from Napoleon to Josephine and a pointed reference to My Fair Lady to illustrate just how dramatically ideas about cleanliness have shifted across centuries and cultures, often flipping entirely from one era to the next. Dozens of illustrations accompany the text, adding visual texture to a subject most readers have never thought to question.
The result is a history that uses something as mundane as bathing to reveal much larger truths about morality, class, religion, and the stories cultures tell themselves about what it means to be civilized.
Why this delights: from Christian ascetics who prized dirtiness to Victorians who judged character by clean skin, this history proves our idea of “clean” has never been fixed at all.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3