Books Publishing This Week
Books Publishing This Week: June 23 - 29
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Imagine this:
On a warm June evening, you find yourself at the beach, the sun slowly dipping below the horizon, painting the sky with shades of pink, orange, and purple. The air is filled with the soothing sounds of waves gently crashing against the shore, mingled with the distant laughter of children and the occasional call of a seagull. You can feel the soft, cool sand between your toes, and a light breeze carries the salty scent of the ocean, making you feel at ease. It's the perfect setting to start a new book.
You settle into your favorite spot, a cozy nook between two dunes that offers a bit of privacy and a great view of the sea. You've brought along a comfortable beach chair, a blanket to keep the evening chill at bay, and of course, the book that you've been eagerly waiting to dive into. As you sit down, you take a moment to appreciate the tranquility around you, letting the stress of the day melt away with each breath.
The book in your hands feels like a portal to another world. The cover is smooth under your fingers, and the pages have that delightful new-book smell that you can't help but savor. You flip it open, and the first page beckons you in with the promise of adventure, mystery, or perhaps a touch of romance. The anticipation is palpable, and you can't wait to see where this story will take you.
As you start to read, the words begin to weave their magic. The author's descriptions are vivid, and you can almost see the scenes unfolding in front of your eyes. The characters start to come to life, each with their own unique voice and personality. You feel a sense of connection with them, as if they're old friends you've just met. The narrative flows smoothly, and you find yourself getting lost in the rhythm of the prose.
The beach around you seems to fade away as you become more engrossed in the story. The setting sun casts long shadows on the sand, and the sky gradually deepens into twilight. The stars begin to twinkle overhead, one by one, as if joining you on your literary journey. The soft glow of the moon adds a touch of magic to the scene, making everything feel even more surreal and beautiful.
Every now and then, you pause to look up from the book, taking in the serene surroundings. The sound of the waves provides a gentle soundtrack to your reading, a rhythmic lullaby that enhances the experience. You feel a deep sense of contentment, a rare and precious moment where everything feels just right. The world outside the book seems to slow down, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in the story.
As the evening progresses, the beach becomes quieter. The families with children pack up and head home, and the occasional passerby becomes a rare sight. You feel like you have the entire beach to yourself, a private paradise where you can read to your heart's content. The blanket wrapped around your shoulders keeps you warm, and the book in your hands keeps you engaged and entertained.
The story takes you on a rollercoaster of emotions, from moments of suspense and intrigue to scenes of heartfelt joy and sorrow. You laugh at the witty dialogue, gasp at the unexpected twists, and even shed a tear or two at the poignant moments. The author's talent for storytelling is evident, and you find yourself completely captivated by the tale unfolding before you.
Eventually, the night grows darker, and you realize it's time to head back. You reluctantly close the book, marking your place with a promise to return soon. As you gather your things, you take one last look at the moonlit beach, feeling grateful for this peaceful evening spent in the company of a good book. You know that this experience will stay with you, a cherished memory of a perfect June evening by the beach, where the magic of a new story began.
Scroll down to find out what book you might be reading…
Filthy Rich Fae by Geneva Lee
The dark, decadent underworld of New Orleans comes alive when a human unwittingly binds herself to the devious prince of the Unseelie Court. To win her freedom, she must join the Wild Hunt and fight her way through a series of deadly rites -- without losing her head, or her heart, in the process. Don’t miss Filthy Rich Fae, the first in a new romantasy series from New York Times bestselling author Geneva Lee, for fans of A Touch of Darkness and A Court of Thorns and Roses.
Love Letters to a Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell
An aimless young woman starts writing to an accused serial killer while he awaits trial and then, once he’s acquitted, decides to move in with him and take the investigation into her own hands in this dark and irresistibly compelling debut thriller.
Recently ghosted and sick of watching her friends fade into the suburbs, thirty-something Hannah finds community in a true-crime forum that’s on a mission to solve the murders of four women in Atlanta. After William, a handsome lawyer, is arrested for the killings, Hannah begins writing him letters. It’s the perfect outlet for her pent-up frustration and rage. The exercise empowers her, and even feels healthy at first.
Until William writes back.
Hannah’s interest in the case goes from curiosity to obsession, leaving space for nothing else as her life implodes around her. After she loses her job, she heads to Georgia to attend the trial and befriends other true-crime junkies like herself. When a fifth woman is discovered murdered, the jury has no choice but to find William not guilty, and Hannah is the first person he calls upon his release. The two of them quickly fall into a routine of domestic bliss.
Well, as blissful as one can feel while secretly investigating their partner for serial murder…
Sapphire Dawn by C. Travis Rice
Donnie Bascombe has made a lot of people’s fantasies come true in his life, first in the bedroom, then on the set of his adult entertainment studio. To escape his difficult background, he made sex his business. But his best friend Logan Murdoch has just presented him with his tallest order yet — help plan the wedding of his dreams to wealthy hotelier Connor Harcourt. Desire has always been Donnie’s forte. But lavish nuptials at one of Southern California’s premier oceanfront resorts? For that job, he’ll need a partner. And a mentor. Preferably someone who can put up with the fact that his idea of elegant is a buffet with a salad bar.
Richard Merriweather has devoted his life to planning fairy tale weddings for celebrities and royalty — only to have his own husband shatter his heart into a million pieces. Remaking the special events office at Sapphire Cove is just the distraction he needs to get his fancy and luxurious life back on track. But turning the wedding between the resort's general manager and security director into the most stunning and talked about in its history will require him to work alongside the groom’s brash and undeniably sexy best friend. Worse, Donnie Bascombe has a powerful attraction to Richard Merriweather he can’t keep secret.
If Richard can show Donnie how to make his best friends happy, Donnie promises to behave himself. But the more Richard gets to know the sweet, affectionate hormone ball, the less he wants him to behave. And that’s a problem. Because Richard Merriweather doesn’t do hook ups and Donnie doesn’t do relationships. Or does he? The closer Donnie gets to Richard, the more he wants something different, something he’s never had before. Something more. Something that will force both men to confront the heartbreak in their pasts as they plan Sapphire Cove’s wedding of the decade and find an unexpected future for themselves.
Don't Let The Devil Ride by Ace Atkins
Hell is empty…and Addison McKellar’s husband is missing.
Addison McKellar isn’t clueless—she knows she and her husband Dean don’t have the perfect marriage—but she’s still shocked when he completely vanishes from her life. At first Addison is annoyed, but as days stretch into a week and she’s repeatedly stonewalled by Dean’s friends and associates, her frustration turns into genuine alarm. When even the police seem dismissive of her concerns, Addison turns to her father’s old friend, legendary Memphis PI Porter Hayes.
Porter and Addison begin to dig deeper into Dean’s affairs and quickly discover that he was never the hardworking business owner and family man he pretended to be. As they piece together the connections between a hook-handed mercenary, one of Elvis’s former leading ladies, and a man posing as an FBI agent, it becomes clear that Dean was deeply enmeshed in a high-stakes web of international intrigue, and Porter and Addison aren’t the only ones looking for him.
Dean angered some very dangerous people before he disappeared—people who have already killed to get what they want—and they won’t hesitate to come after his family to even the score.
Don’t Let the Devil Ride is a thrilling adventure about what can happen when you pull back the curtain on your life. Ace Atkins, long known for gritty Southern noir with a witty edge, has crafted an ambitious, globe-hopping story that comes home to Memphis in explosive fashion.
Storm Warning by David Bell
Author Interview with David Bell
A man living on a Florida barrier island must protect his family from both an approaching hurricane and a relentless killer.
A Happier Life by Kristy Woodson Harvey
Author Interview with Kristy Woodson Harvey
With “her signature warmth and Southern charm” (E! Online), the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer of Songbirds and the Peachtree Bluff series presents a tender and touching novel about a young woman who discovers the family she has always longed for when she spends a life-changing summer in North Carolina.
Present Day: Keaton Smith is desperate for a fresh start. So when her mother needs someone to put her childhood home in Beaufort, North Carolina, on the market—the home that Keaton didn’t know existed until now—she jumps at the chance to head south. But the moment she steps foot inside the abandoned house, she’s confronted with secrets about grandparents who died in a car accident before she was born. And as she gets to know her charming next-door neighbor, his precocious ten-year-old son, and a flock of endearingly feisty town busybodies, she soon finds she has more questions than answers.
1976: After meeting her adoring husband Townsend, Rebecca “Becks” Saint James abandoned the life she knew and never looked back. Forty years later, she’s made a name for herself as the best hostess North Carolina has ever seen. Her annual summer suppers have become the stuff of legend, and locals and out-of-towners alike clamor for an invitation to her stunning historic home. But she’s struggling behind the façade. Becks strives to make the lives of those around her as easy as possible, but this summer she is facing a dilemma that even she can’t solve. And as the end of the season looms, she is brought to a decision she never wanted to make.
As both Keaton and Becks face new challenges and chapters, they are connected through time by the house on Sunset Lane, which has protected the secrets, hopes, and dreams of the women in their family for generations. For fans of Summer of ‘69 and The Notebook, A Happier Life explores the power of family, the bonds of friendship, and the boundless nature of love.
A Ruse of Shadows by Sherry Thomas
Author Interview with Sherry Thomas
Charlotte’s success on the RMS Provence has afforded her a certain measure of time and assurance. Taking advantage of that, she has been busy, plotting to prise the man her sister loves from Moriarty’s iron grip.
Disruption, however, comes from an unexpected quarter. Lord Bancroft Ashburton, disgraced and imprisoned as a result of Charlotte’s prior investigations, nevertheless manages to press Charlotte into service: Underwood, his most loyal henchman, is missing and Lord Bancroft wants Charlotte to find Underwood, dead or alive.
But then Lord Bancroft himself turns up dead and Charlotte, more than anyone else, meets the trifecta criteria of motive, means, and opportunity. Never mind rescuing anyone else, with the law breathing down her neck, can Charlotte save herself from prosecution for murder?
Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren
In this brand new reimagining, Mary Jane—the red-headed spark from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, who stole Huck's heart in just 30 pages—comes to life with her own story of adventuring down the Mississippi River in the 1840s.
Meet Mary Jane Guild — she’s on a dangerous and unpredictable adventure down the Mississippi River — and she’ll steal Huck Finn’s heart along the way.
In his classic work Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain briefly introduces "Mary Jane, the red-headed one." In no time Mary Jane becomes the girl Huck thinks about "a many and a many million times." Now author Hope Jahren has created for Mary Jane a life as vivid and compelling as Huck's.
These pages will show you the real Mary Jane. A girl on her own dangerous, unpredictable journey down the Mississippi River in pre-Civil War America. Equipped with an uncanny ability for mathematics, a talent for sewing, and a bale of beaver skins, Mary Jane navigates deadly illnesses, angry mobs, treacherous landowners, outright thieves and swindlers, and more than a thousand miles of muddy water. What’s more, she thrives in the face of these challenges, thanks to support from strangers who become friends. Traveling solo requires Mary Jane to grow up fast, but it ultimately leads her to a new resilience, a love of adventure, deep and enduring sisterhood, and a blue-eyed, ponytailed boy she can’t stop thinking about.
Jahren offers a wealth of layered characters and deeply researched, authentic details of changing times in the North and South. Using the language and style of Twain and shifting the point of view to a smart and determined young woman, she explores timeless themes of duty, family, romance, and betrayal, with grit and courage at the core.
A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston
The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
A professor of literature finds herself caught up in a work of fiction…literally, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Year Slip and The Dead Romantics.
Eileen Merriweather loves to get lost in a good happily-ever-after. The fictional kind, anyway. Because at least imaginary men don’t leave you at the altar. She feels safe in a book. At home. Which might be why she’s so set on going her annual book club retreat this year—she needs good friends, cheap wine, and grand romantic gestures—no matter what.
But when her car unexpectedly breaks down on the way, she finds herself stranded in a quaint town that feels like it’s right out of a novel…
Because it is.
This place can’t be real, and yet… she’s here, in Eloraton, the town of her favorite romance series, where the candy store’s honey taffy is always sweet, the local bar’s burgers are always a little burnt, and rain always comes in the afternoon. It feels like home. It’s perfect—and perfectly frozen, trapped in the late author’s last unfinished story.
Elsy is sure that’s why she must be here: to help bring the town to its storybook ending.
Except there is a character in Eloraton that she can’t place—a grumpy bookstore owner with mint-green eyes, an irritatingly sexy mouth and impeccable taste in novels. And he does not want her finishing this book.
Which is a problem because Elsy is beginning to think the town’s happily-ever-after might just be intertwined with her own.
Moral Injuries by Christie Watson
When you're trained to protect the lives of others, how far will you go to protect your own?
Ruthlessly ambitious Olivia, anxious perfectionist Laura, and free-spirited risk-taker Anjali couldn’t be more different. Yet their friendship—which began the first day of medical school—has kept them inseparable these past twenty-five years. As wild all-nighters and exam pressure gave way to the struggles and joys of new motherhood and new jobs, their unbreakable bond helped them support each other through it all.
Long ago, they promised that nothing would come between them, and to do anything for one another—including burying that night they have never spoken about: a university party fueled by drugs, sex, and secrets that forced them to make a deadly choice that could have destroyed them. But is there a limit to what we would do for those we love?
When an eerily similar tragedy strikes involving the women’s teenaged children, everything the three friends have built threatens to crumble around them . . . forcing them to decide how far they can stretch their friendship before it snaps.
A taut and explosive novel about loyalty, ambition, betrayal, and revenge, Moral Injuries explores the sometimes-hidden costs of friendships, and the lengths people will go to protect themselves.
Trust Her by Flynn Berry
Three years after they narrowly escaped the IRA's worst punishment for informing, Northern Irish sisters Tessa and Marian Daly have built a new life in Dublin with their young children. Though Tessa is haunted by the abrupt and violent end to her old life, she does her best to immerse herself in the joys of Finn's childhood and the rhythms of her new job at the Irish Observer.
It's a small island, though, and just as quickly as they disappeared, figures from the sisters' past surface to drag them back into the conflict. Tessa is told she must track down her old handler from MI5, Eamonn, and attempt to turn him into an IRA informant, or lose everything.
Tessa's reunion with Eamonn revives a host of feelings she has long attempted to bury. As their relationship intensifies and the pressure mounts, long-held secrets rise to the surface, and Tessa must navigate a treacherous landscape of shifting loyalties, all while trying to protect her beloved son.
With her signature hair-raising suspense, razor-sharp prose, and rich emotional depth, Edgar Award winner Berry has crafted both an unforgettable portrait of two fierce women in the Daly sisters, and her most spellbinding thriller to date.
Known to the Victim by K.L. Armstrong
From nationally bestselling author K.L. Armstrong comes a new heart-stopping, propulsive, race-against-the-clock thriller.
How far will you go to protect the only family you have?
When Amy Gibson's mother is brutally murdered by her boyfriend, Amy's world is completely undone. Overcome with grief and heartache, she withdraws from everything around her—college, her friends, her entire life. Until her estranged half-brother, Oliver, saves her, pulling her back into her life and giving her family. Giving her a home.
Eight years later, she's picked herself up and has worked hard to move forward. She’s the host of a popular true crime podcast that focuses on crimes against women committed by their partners and is finding purpose and healing through helping women in ways she couldn't help her mother.
And then Oliver is accused of the unthinkable—something that is so unlike him. Something that horrifies Amy. But desperate to save the only family she has, she sets out to prove her brother's innocence.
But as the days pass and more information about Oliver and his past slowly comes to light, Amy begins realizing that nothing is ever as it seems—especially when it comes to family.
The Out-of-Town Lawyer by Robert Rotstein
The Quartz County, Alabama, district attorney has charged Destiny Grace Harper with murdering her unborn twins—a crime punishable by death. However, Alabama v. Harper isn’t your ordinary homicide case. Harper’s babies suffered from a rare disorder called TTTS, a fatal condition if left untreated, but correctable with minimally invasive surgery. Harper refused the surgery on religious grounds, resulting in the death of both babies, and now Harper is on trial.
Enter Elvis Henderson, a traveling criminal defense attorney who roams the country in his campervan. He receives assignments from Hazel Curnow, a once iconic trial lawyer turned recluse. When Curnow assigns Elvis the Harper case, he balks—Quartz County is his home turf. He left Alabama under a dark cloud at age eighteen and has no intention of returning.
When Elvis arrives to meet his paralegal, Margaret Booth, they immediately realize the case is fraught with complications: a desperate client whose story keeps shifting; a local populace who vociferously defend the rights of the unborn; a charismatic minister whose family lords over the town; a ruthless DA with political ambitions; an old-school judge who relishes handing down capital convictions; and a sheriff who might just want Elvis dead.
An action-packed ride to a shocking verdict, The Out-of-Town Lawyer is a gripping legal thriller that explores family love, reconciliation, and the moral and legal issues that draw a fine line between tragedy and crime.
