Published in April 2020, at the very onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, *Coming Apocalypse* represents Dr. Vernon Coleman’s early attempt to make sense of what was unfolding and predict what would follow. Coleman was a controversial figure throughout the pandemic period, advancing positions that placed him significantly outside mainstream medical and public health consensus. This book presents his analysis of the crisis’s origins and his forecast for the economic and social consequences of lockdowns. 📋
The book’s interest as a document lies partly in its historical specificity—it was written and published while events were still actively unfolding in real time, which gives it the quality of a primary source rather than a retrospective analysis. Readers approaching it in 2025 will be in a position to assess Coleman’s predictions against what actually happened, which makes it a different kind of reading experience than it was at publication. The gap between forecast and reality is itself informative. 📅
Coleman writes with the conviction of someone who believes he is delivering uncomfortable truths to an audience unprepared to hear them, and his prose has the urgent quality of that self-positioning. Whether readers find his analysis compelling or unconvincing will depend substantially on their prior views of institutional authority, media credibility, and the nature of the pandemic response. This is a book that generates strong reactions in both directions, and it is best approached as a document of a particular perspective rather than a consensus account. 🌐
Why this matters as a document: A snapshot of one controversial doctor’s pandemic analysis written in real time in April 2020—approached with appropriate critical distance, a genuinely interesting historical artifact.
Mitzy Moon thought she was an orphan. Then a special delivery reveals a grandmother she never knew—and a fortune and a bookshop full of rare magical tomes to go with it. She arrives in the quirky village of Pin Cherry Harbor to claim her inheritance, and immediately finds herself standing over a corpse with the handsome sheriff looking at her with professional suspicion. Trixie Silvertale launches the Mitzy Moon Mysteries with the kind of premise that stacks pleasures efficiently: surprise family, magical inheritance, murder, and an attractive law enforcement problem. 📚
The paranormal support team Mitzy is saddled with for her investigation is perfectly pitched—her grandmother’s entitled cat and a spirit from beyond the grave, neither of whom is particularly deferential to Mitzy’s inexperience or her preferences. Silvertale uses the cat-and-ghost dynamic as a reliable source of both comedy and genuine plot assistance, giving Mitzy helpers who are useful without making the mystery too easy to solve. The Pin Cherry Harbor community is warm and eccentric in the proportions that cozy mystery readers come for. 🐱
The magical bookshop is the series’ great atmospheric asset—a physical space that is both a business with actual demands and a source of supernatural resources that Silvertale develops across the series with increasing creativity. The Mitzy Moon Mysteries has grown into one of the more substantial paranormal cozy franchises, and this first volume establishes exactly why: the character is immediately likeable, the world is instantly inviting, and the mystery is genuinely fun to unravel. 👻
Why this enchants: An orphan who inherits magic, a murder on day one, a ghost and an entitled cat as unwilling partners, and a village with more charm than it knows what to do with—Fries and Alibis is paranormal cozy at its most winning.
Laurel McKay reluctantly signs up with The Love Club dating service, convinced by friends and her own loneliness to give it a shot. Date number one ends with her breaking the man’s nose with her cell phone in self-defense. He then turns up murdered the next morning, and Laurel has his blood on her clothes. Cindy Sample commits to the escalating disaster premise with full comedic commitment—this is a woman whose love life is actively trying to kill her, and the novel leans into that absurdity without apology. 😂
Date number two disappears during dinner, leaving Laurel with a bottle of Dom Perignon as her only alibi for the relevant time period. Sample handles the series of increasingly improbable romantic catastrophes with the timing of someone who understands that cozy mystery comedy works best when the protagonist has exactly enough self-awareness to be horrified by her own situation. Laurel’s voice throughout is consistently funny and consistently relatable—the jokes land because the emotional reality underneath them is real. 💔
The romantic subplot with the sexy investigating detective who thinks she’s innocent and is worried she may be the next target gives the mystery a personal dimension that goes beyond whodunit mechanics. The killer’s apparent targeting of dating service members puts Laurel in genuine danger, which Cindy Sample uses to give the comedy genuine stakes rather than keeping the whole thing at a safe comic distance. The Laurel McKay Mysteries series has a large readership that has followed the character across many books, and this first volume establishes the voice with confidence. 🔍
Why this makes you laugh: A dating service, two dates, one murder, one disappearance, and a heroine whose social life has become a crime scene—Dying for a Date is humorous cozy mystery with real comic timing.
Rice, Noodle, Fish
Matt Goulding’s 5,000-mile journey through Japan’s food culture is not a travel guide in any conventional sense—there are no hotel recommendations or bus schedules. What it is instead is immersive narrative food journalism: 195 color photographs, seven key culinary regions, and writing that treats the intersection of food, history, and culture as a single subject requiring a unified approach. Goulding co-created the enormously popular *Eat This, Not That!* series, but *Rice, Noodle, Fish* is operating at a different register entirely. 🍜
The seven regions Goulding explores each have their own culinary logic and identity: the kaiseki tradition of Kyoto, the sushi masters of Tokyo, the street food intensity of Osaka, the ramen culture of Fukuoka. Moving through these with the evocative voice that drives the award-winning magazine *Roads & Kingdoms*, he finds the human stories that give the food its meaning—the craftspeople who have spent decades mastering a single technique, the regional ingredients that can’t be replicated anywhere else, the rituals that transform eating into something closer to ceremony. 🏯
The book makes a compelling case that Japanese food culture is not a monolith but a geography—that what you eat in Kyoto and what you eat in Osaka are as different as the cities themselves, and that understanding that difference is the beginning of actually understanding Japanese cuisine. For anyone who has traveled to Japan or dreams of doing so, and for anyone who eats at Japanese restaurants and wants to understand what they’re actually tasting, this is one of the most ambitious and satisfying food books written about Japan from a Western perspective. 🌸
Why this is essential: Immersive narrative food journalism through seven Japanese culinary regions—evocative, beautifully photographed, and essential reading for anyone who loves Japanese food culture.
Three years after her husband Spencer’s death, Anna still calls his old phone number just to hear his voicemail greeting. It’s a small, private ritual of grief—something that costs nothing and hurts in a way she has come to find bearable. Then someone answers. Brody has inherited Spencer’s old number, and in the conversation that follows, something unexpected begins: two strangers who discover they understand each other’s losses in ways that their respective support networks never quite have. Fiona Lucas builds the romance on the most tender possible foundation. 📱
The phone call connection is both the novel’s central conceit and its genuine emotional insight—grief is isolating in specific ways, and the anonymity of talking to a stranger who asks nothing of you except honesty can create a kind of intimacy that real-world relationships, loaded with history and expectation, often can’t. Lucas develops the growing connection between Anna and Brody with real restraint, letting it build across many calls before either character fully acknowledges what’s happening. 💙
The secret Brody is keeping—which threatens everything just as Anna begins to find the courage to hope again—is handled with more emotional sophistication than the thriller-adjacent setup might suggest. Lucas is interested in the moral complexity of what Brody hasn’t said rather than a simple revelation-and-betrayal arc, and the resolution treats both characters with the care of a writer who genuinely wants them to be okay. *The Last Goodbye* is the kind of romance that earns tears rather than manipulating them. 🌹
Why this moves you: A widow calling her dead husband’s number just to hear his voice, and a stranger who answers—The Last Goodbye is a romance of rare emotional intelligence and genuine tenderness.
Peter Grant is widely acknowledged as the most powerful and effective rock music manager of the twentieth century—often called Led Zeppelin’s fifth member, the man who fundamentally changed the financial relationship between touring bands and promoters, and who built and protected Zeppelin’s career with an intensity that was sometimes brilliant and sometimes genuinely frightening. Despite his centrality to one of the great stories in rock history, no complete biography of Grant had existed before Mark Blake’s authorized account. 🎸
Blake’s access is exceptional: Grant’s family, Led Zeppelin’s surviving members, Grant’s extensive personal archive, and scores of previously unpublished material including Grant’s never-before-published final interview. The combination gives *Bring It On Home* a depth and intimacy that even the most thorough Zeppelin biographies have been unable to achieve when dealing with Grant as a supporting character in someone else’s story. Here he is the subject, and the full complexity of the man—brilliant, intuitive, flawed, sometimes dangerous—can finally be properly examined. 🏆
The music business transformation Grant effected is as important as the Zeppelin story itself. His insistence that the band receive 90% of gate receipts rather than the standard flat fee, his creation of Swan Song Records, his strategies for controlling the band’s image and distribution—these changed how rock music works financially in ways still felt today. Blake tells both stories simultaneously: the personal biography and the industry history, each illuminating the other. For anyone who cares about Led Zeppelin, this is essential. 🎵
Why this is essential: The first complete biography of rock’s greatest manager—the man who built Led Zeppelin’s empire and changed the music business forever, finally given the full account he deserves.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3