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She fled her own wedding four years ago. Now she has six weeks to convince London she's respectable. The only man willing to help her is the one who despises everything she represents. Eliza Thistlewood has mastered two arts: embroidery and invisibility. After a ruined engagement left her reputation in shreds, she's lived in quiet disgrace with her aunt, taking up as little space as possible. But her only chance at financial security comes with an impossible condition - she must be respectably betrothed before the Season ends. Enter Gabriel Stone. Self-made. Broad-shouldered. Contemptuous of the aristocracy in a way that is entirely personal and entirely justified. His shipping empire is built on sweat and spite, but it can't buy him entry into the drawing rooms he needs. A temporary engagement to a faded gentlewoman is the perfect arrangement. Simple. Business. Nothing more. But Eliza is not the haughty noblewoman Gabriel expected. She's sharp and guarded, and she carries a sadness that mirrors his own in ways he doesn't want to examine. The forced proximity of their charade works on him slowly - her wit at dinner, the careful way she protects herself in every room, the sorrow she tries so hard to hide. One reckless night behind a locked library door shatters every rule they set. And then the man who destroyed Eliza four years ago walks back into London with a scheme designed to expose Gabriel's origins and reclaim her for himself. The scandal is coming. The only question is whether they'll face it together or apart. A Scandal in Spring is a steamy and emotionally rich Regency romance about second chances, class wounds, hidden pasts, enemies-to-lovers tension, and the terrifying courage it takes to trust someone with the truth. Perfect for readers who love slow-burn Regency romance, brooding self-made heroes, runaway bride tropes, fake betrothal plots, and swoon-worthy romance in the tradition of Helen Scheuerer and Carley Fortune. Standalone romance with a hard-earned happy ending.
She came to sell the inn. He came to make sure she couldn't. Neither of them expected to fall. Annie Callahan hasn't set foot in Port Willis since they buried her husband. Three years of silence and guilt have brought her to one conclusion: sell the Sandpiper Inn, outrun the memories, and finally stop punishing herself for what she couldn't fix. She arrives in Maine ready to sign the papers and leave before anyone notices she's back. But Griffin Cole is already there. Her late husband's childhood best friend. The man who inherited the other half of this crumbling coastal inn. The man who has spent three years channeling his grief into the only place that still feels like home - and who will not let Annie cash it out and disappear. He came ready for a fight. A cold one. Controlled. He didn't come ready for the way she flinches when someone raises their voice. He didn't come ready for the way she scrubs the kitchen alone at 3 a.m., like she's trying to wash away a stain only she can see. Forced under one roof through a coastal summer, they wage war with renovation plans and old accusations. She wants distance. He won't give it to her. He thinks he knows who she is - the woman who failed his best friend. But the closer he gets, the less certain he becomes. And Annie is starting to realize the man she thought was granite has a laugh that feels like coming home. Then the town's annual regatta pushes them into the public eye together. One reckless night unravels the fragile truce they've built. And the secret Annie has carried across three silent years - the one that could change everything Griffin thought he knew - can't stay buried any longer. Before You Go is a slow-burn and emotionally wrought contemporary romance about grief, guilt, forced proximity, enemies-to-lovers tension, and the devastating courage of choosing to stay. Perfect for readers who love small-town romance, coastal settings, brooding heroes, fake-relationship slow burns, and emotionally charged love stories in the tradition of Zoe Dod and Elle Kennedy. Standalone romance with a hard-earned happy ending.
Her son is turning to stone. The only man who can save him is the one whose family massacred her father. Samara has spent ten years bleeding for Ashara. As queen, she has held crumbling borders together through drought, betrayal, and salt-winds that scour every field bare. She has done the impossible before. But she cannot save her son. The salt-curse is calcifying twelve-year-old Prince Adil from the inside out. The healers give him months. And the only known antidote is a relic held by Prince Rukh of Kemet - the rival kingdom, the old enemy, the family that murdered her father at the negotiating table twenty years ago. Rukh's price is her hand in marriage and a unified throne. Samara sees the trap. She steps into it anyway. She invites the enemy into her bed and her war council. The wedding fires burn. And for a moment, she almost believes it might work. Then the poisonings accelerate. The salt-curse isn't slowing - it's spreading. Someone inside Samara's own household is still feeding it, still carving out the heart of Ashara one dose at a time. Every thread of evidence points toward a truth she cannot bear to face: the traitor wearing a sister's smile. The woman who raised Adil while Samara was on the battlefield. The woman who has been salting the earth for a decade. Now Samara must weigh the impossible: execute the last of her blood, or watch her child turn to stone while the enemy who was supposed to be her salvation watches from across the marriage bed. Crowns of Salt is a slow-burn and high-stakes epic fantasy about reluctant alliance, devastating family betrayal, desert kingdoms, cursed heirs, and a love that grows in the cracks of an impossible truce. Perfect for readers who love epic fantasy with political intrigue, enemies-to-lovers arranged marriages, morally complex queens, and sun-scorched worldbuilding in the tradition of Mark Lawrence and Leigh Bardugo. An epic standalone fantasy of magic, sacrifice, and destiny.
A crowded quay. Two sisters. One ship. Only one of them makes it aboard. Odessa, 1919. The White Army is collapsing. The Bolsheviks are coming. In the crush of desperate refugees and burning warehouses, their father makes a choice: Anya, the elder, the practical one, will sail for Constantinople. Katya, the dreamer, will stay behind with their dying mother. On the gangplank, with seconds left, Anya presses a stolen letter into Katya's hand. A letter their father never meant anyone to find. A letter that holds a secret capable of destroying the family's honor - or saving them both. "I will find you," Anya whispers. "No matter what." Then the ship sails. And the world splits in two. In Constantinople, Anya is a refugee in a city choked with exiles. She sews in a squalid tenement. She moves through the treacherous politics of the White émigré community, chasing every rumor, every coded message that might lead her back to Katya. And she falls, helplessly, for an American journalist who offers her a door out - if she is willing to stop looking. In Odessa, Katya endures the Red Terror. Famine. The slow erasure of everything she knew. She hides the stolen letter in the lining of her coat and reads it by candlelight, using its secrets to bargain for survival. But the Cheka is hunting for exactly that kind of secret. The letter is her lifeline. It is also a death warrant. Both sisters face the same impossible question: forget the past and live, or honor the promise and risk everything. Across four years and two crumbling worlds, Anya and Katya Volkova must decide how much a promise is worth - and whether love across an ocean of silence can survive the weight of all they cannot say. Daughters of the Black Sea is a sweeping and richly researched historical novel about sisters separated by revolution, the secrets that bind and endanger, forbidden friendship across class lines, and the fierce, fragile power of a promise that refuses to die. Perfect for readers who love dual-timeline wartime fiction, sisters separated by war, richly researched historical settings, and the emotional depth of Kristin Hannah and Kate Quinn. A sweeping standalone historical novel.
Her brother is dying. The only thing that can save him is somewhere in the Alaskan wilderness. So Thea goes in alone. Seventeen-year-old Thea Linwood has a forged permit, a stolen raft, and a year-old letter her missing father supposedly left behind - directions to a hidden gold cache somewhere in the Chugach backcountry. Selling it would pay for her brother's treatment. Getting there means whitewater rapids, grizzly territory, and ridgelines that have killed more experienced hikers than her. She goes anyway. But the wilderness isn't the only thing hunting her. The map is a lie. The gold is bait. And the boy who saves her life - Elias, a quiet and watchful local who seems to know these mountains too well - knows far more than he's saying. Every mile strips away another layer of the girl Thea used to be. The fear. The performance. The secrets she's carried about who she is and who she loves, packed down so tight she almost forgot they were there. Out here, with death crouching behind every ridge, the truth claws its way to the surface. And for the first time, she lets it. But the prospector who set this trap is closing in. He'll do anything to protect what the map really leads to - and Thea is running out of trail to stay ahead of him. She has to decide: trust Elias with everything, knowing he might be part of the deception. Or risk the final stretch alone, the way she started. Into the Wild Alone is a gripping and deeply felt YA survival adventure about courage under pressure, identity claimed in the wilderness, a first love that demands honesty, and the moment a girl stops surviving and starts becoming herself. Perfect for readers who love fierce heroines, wilderness survival stories, coming-of-age identity journeys, and the page-turning momentum of Rob Baddorf. An unforgettable, heart-cracking coming-of-age story.
She just wanted a blue ribbon. She found a body instead. Lily O'Connor has poured everything into her Sweet Hollow bakery. The Harvest Festival is supposed to be her moment - the one day a year her prize-winning pumpkin muffins get the recognition they deserve. Instead, she finds the town's most feared food critic face-down in her display batch, stone-cold dead. The poison came from Lily's own pantry. The footage shows her hot-headed younger sister slipping something into the batter. Now Detective Nick Marlowe has what he thinks is an open-and-shut case, and Lily's sister is sitting in a cell. Lily knows what she saw. She knows her sister. And she knows this town. So she starts asking questions. Every crumb leads deeper. The critic had enemies from the mayor's mansion to the corner bookshop - jealousies simmering for years, old grudges folded into the fabric of Sweet Hollow like a secret ingredient nobody wanted to name. He'd destroyed careers with a sentence and buried livelihoods with a star rating. Half the festival wanted him gone. And someone was willing to kill again to keep the real reason buried. With each clue Lily uncovers, the picture grows darker - and the killer more desperate. The coziest town in the county is hiding something rotten at its center, and the closer Lily gets to the truth, the more certain she becomes that the next body found at the festival could be hers. She didn't ask for this. But she's the only one who cares enough to dig. Muffins, Motive, and Mayhem is a charming and twisty cozy mystery about small-town secrets, sisterly loyalty, culinary rivalry, wrongful suspicion, and the truth hiding in plain sight. Perfect for readers who love amateur sleuth mysteries, small-town murder whodunits, culinary cozies, festival settings, and fans of Anthea Fraser and Rachel Ekstrom Courage. A twisty, cozy whodunit you'll devour in one sitting.
Rory Voss has a plan for everything. Color-coded planner. Breathing exercises memorized. Panic attacks catalogued and contained. She's not fine - she's never pretended to be fine - but she's functional, and that has to be enough. Then junior year starts, and Mina starts slipping. Mina is her person. The one steady heartbeat in a world that feels too loud. But something is wrong. Long sleeves in August. A laugh that comes half a second too late. Texts that trail off mid-sentence at 2 AM. Rory recognizes the signs. She's been dreading them. When the truth lands, it cracks her open: Mina is hurting herself. And suddenly Rory's carefully managed anxiety has a new command center - because if she can just do this right, if she reads enough, scripts the conversations perfectly, monitors closely enough - she can fix this. She tells herself it's love. It looks an awful lot like control. The tighter Rory holds on, the more Mina bristles. Being someone's project isn't the same as being seen. Being watched isn't the same as being safe. And Rory, who can chart everyone else's spiral from a mile away, can't see the shape her own fear is taking until it's too late. One desperate choice leaves them on opposite sides of a rift neither of them knows how to cross. Rory is left with the question she never planned for: what do you do when saving someone means letting them go? When being a good friend means trusting them with their own healing, even when it terrifies you? When the person who most needs fixing turns out to be you? Raw and aching and bracingly honest, The Anxiety Diaries walks the trembling line between helping and hurting, between holding space and taking over - and the quiet, terrifying courage it takes to loosen your grip on someone you love. The Anxiety Diaries is a tender and emotionally honest coming-of-age story about anxiety, codependency, best-friend betrayal, first love, and learning to trust someone else with their own pain. Perfect for readers who love YA mental health fiction, books about anxiety and friendship, coming-of-age emotional wellness stories, and fans of Hazel Hill and Tom Thelen. An unforgettable, heart-cracking coming-of-age story.
She can't touch without killing. The boy who crawls out of the dead grove calls her safe. Lira has survived a decade of exile in the Silent Barrens by staying far from anything that breathes. Her skin turns grass to ash, water to steam, flesh to cinders. She hasn't held anything without destroying it. She doesn't try anymore. Then Kael stumbles into her dead grove - six years old, terrified, trailing a blight behind him that devours stone and soil faster than her curse ever could. His name is already dangerous. He is the hidden heir to a stolen throne, a child the regent declared dead when he burned the capital to cover his coup. But Kael is very much alive. And the living rot hunting him doesn't just kill - it un-makes, erasing memory and matter until nothing remains but humming grey silence. Lira wants to run. Every instinct says run. But Kael looks at her hands - the hands that have destroyed everything they've ever touched - and he doesn't flinch. She can't leave him. Together they cross a dying continent, Lira burning paths through the blight while Kael's strange immunity buys them hours. The regent's hunters are behind them. His spymaster has loosed a tracker who wields the same forbidden old magic Lira was born with - a woman who knows exactly what Lira is, and what she could become. Because the ash Lira leaves behind and the nothing the blight creates are two halves of the same power. And that power is beginning to change. It's no longer just killing. It's calling. The blight answers her now, bending toward her fingers like a hound to the leash. She could command it. She could burn everything - the regent, the rot, the whole corrupted world that threw her away. The cost is carved into the oldest stones: every Ashwalker who seizes the flame becomes the fire that ends it. The Ashwalker is a dark and cinematic epic fantasy about forbidden magic, reluctant found family, a stolen crown, a devastating curse, and the price of being seen by someone who doesn't run. Perfect for readers who love morally gray heroines, found-family fantasy, dark magic systems, slow-burn bonds, hidden heir stories, and fans of Mark Lawrence and Leigh Bardugo. An epic standalone fantasy of magic, sacrifice, and destiny.
She taught people how to disappear. She never thought it would be used against her. Dr. Lena Voss left the Agency's covert extraction program in disgrace. She traded aliases for a small-town practice. She built a quiet life from the wreckage - one without ghosts, without handlers, without the cold mathematics of who survives and who doesn't. Then a rainy Tuesday dissolved everything. Her thirteen-year-old's bedroom: empty. A burner phone on the pillow. A voice she had been certain was dead on the line. Kessler. The rogue intelligence broker who torched her career five years ago, then died in a very public, very bloody car bombing in Zurich. He is not dead. He has her daughter. And he wants Lena to assemble her most dangerous former colleagues to steal a biotech prototype from a black-site laboratory in the Baltic Sea - a floating fortress with rotating security, biometric locks, and a failsafe designed to incinerate everything the moment an alarm trips. Seventy-two hours. An impossible job. A team she does not trust. Because someone inside that handpicked crew is feeding Kessler real-time intelligence. Every move Lena makes tightens the noose around her daughter's neck. And the one person who might have helped her - the handler who once loved her - is now the lead investigator hunting Lena for a murder she did not commit. The deeper she drills into the lab's secrets, the clearer it becomes: the prototype isn't a weapon or a cure. It's a key. A key to a conspiracy that reaches the highest corridors of power, and Kessler is only the frontman for people who will erase entire bloodlines to keep it buried. Lena built her career on making people vanish. Now she has to weaponize that skill in a way no one - not Kessler, not her betrayer, not the people pulling every string - sees coming. The Extraction Protocol is a fierce, claustrophobic psychological thriller about a disgraced operative, a stolen daughter, a heist with no margin for error, and the kind of betrayal that only a person who knows you completely can execute. Perfect for readers who love twist ending thrillers, morally complex heroines, spy-craft suspense, high-stakes infiltration, and fans of Seraphina Nova Glass and Megan Lally. A relentless, twist-packed standalone thriller.
She didn't mean to steal a goddess. She only wanted enough coin to buy her brother another sunrise. Ren has survived the canals and crumbling districts of Velmara the way she survives everything - by taking what she needs and disappearing before anyone notices. She's a thief. A ghost. A nobody with clever hands and a brother named Miro who is running out of time, poisoned by an affliction no healer can name. In the ruins of a drowned temple, her fingers close around something that is not gold. A whisper. The Moon's true name burns itself into her soul, and now the tides answer her. The moonlight bends toward her. The hidden threads between worlds hum just beneath her skin. She has taken something ancient and absolute - and she cannot give it back. Because the Moon Goddess can't reclaim her name without unraveling Ren entirely. So she sends the Silver Warden instead. Memory-wiped. Merciless. Moving like a blade through every city Ren has passed through. He is the Goddess's most relentless servant. He is also Ren's father. Hollowed into a weapon. He does not remember her face. With Miro fading faster, Ren strikes a desperate bargain with a rebel mage who claims to know a ritual - one that could save her brother, if she reaches the Starlit Spire before the next new moon. The journey takes her through cursed forests, across seas that remember every shipwreck, and into the heart of a celestial war she never wanted to join. But every time she uses the goddess's name, it uses her back. Ancient lunar myths overwrite her memories. She can feel herself thinning - can no longer tell where the thief ends and the divinity begins. The rebel mage has secrets. The goddess grows cunning. Her father closes in with every tide. Surrender the name, and Miro dies. Embrace the power, and Ren might not survive long enough to save him. The Girl Who Stole the Moon's Name is an unforgettable YA fantasy about stolen divinity, unbreakable sibling bonds, the cost of power, and a girl who refuses to become a legend when all she wants is to keep her brother alive. Perfect for readers who love mythic YA fantasy, morally gray magic systems, found family adventures, strong female protagonists, and fans of Kiera Azar. An epic standalone fantasy of magic, sacrifice, and destiny.
The lavender was supposed to bring peace. It led Iris Bellamy straight to a body. Iris has staked everything on Lavender Lane - the cottage garden nursery she inherited from her grandmother, the one thing in Meadowford-upon-Ash that is entirely hers. With the summer festival weeks away, her biggest worries are rooting cuttings, blending sachets, and keeping her spirited Aunt Cordelia from adding too much sherry to the lemon drizzle cake. Then a dawn harvest uncovers a man buried beneath her prize 'Provence Blue' rows. A controversial land developer. A hand-trowel from her own potting shed lying nearby. And every whisper in the village pointing straight at Cordelia. Iris knows her aunt is hiding something. She can see it in the way Cordelia avoids the back garden, in the stillroom door that is suddenly always locked. The sharp-eyed detective inspector in charge has a grudge against the family - and he is ready to make an arrest. So Iris starts digging. Not in the garden. Beneath her grandmother's meticulously kept records she finds contested land rights, a secret love affair, and a codicil to a will that changes the shape of everything. The dead developer had a silent partner on Lavender Lane. Someone who stood to gain everything from his death. Someone who has been pruning the truth for decades - and who smiles at Iris over the garden gate. The clues accumulate over scones in the village bakery, in the hushed aisles of the library, and at the craft fair where everyone talks too much and says too little. Then a second attack strikes close to home, poisoning the very herbs meant for the festival, and Iris realizes the killer is not finished. Expose the truth and shatter the family name forever. Or protect Cordelia and let a murderer walk free among the roses. She was never supposed to be a detective. But justice, it turns out, blooms exactly like lavender - late, fragrant, and impossible to ignore. The Lavender Lane Affair is a delightfully cozy mystery with a botanical twist, about suspicious inheritances, village secrets rooted deep, family loyalty tested by the truth, and one nursery owner who simply cannot leave well enough alone. Perfect for readers who love small-town whodunits, gardening heroines, amateur female sleuths, clean cozy reads, and fans of Anthea Fraser and Rachel Ekstrom Courage. A twisty, cozy whodunit you'll devour in one sitting.
Forty-one hours. That's how long the Meridian Space Elevator has before it tears itself apart and scours a colony world clean. Zak Decker knows this because he built the elevator. He knows the resonance signatures, the load tolerances, the precise mathematics of catastrophic failure. He was the chief structural engineer - until a disaster stripped him of everything. His clearance. His reputation. His daughter, Kestrel, who still works forty thousand feet above him on the very station he was banned from. He's spent seven years drinking the memory away in the gutter levels of Meridian City. He's got forty-one hours to climb back up. When impossible resonance patterns ripple through the tether, Decker is the only one who recognizes the signature. This isn't mechanical failure. Someone designed this. An elegant, vicious sabotage sequence built by someone who knows the structure as intimately as he does. And the final pulse will send the orbital platform - Kestrel and forty thousand others aboard - plummeting through the atmosphere in a debris storm. The security commander who drags Decker back into the crisis despises him. The evacuation timeline is already impossible. Every failsafe has been subverted by the same minds that designed them. And somewhere on the station, someone is actively blocking rescue operations. Then Decker finds the signal. Buried inside the sabotage code itself. A transmission from beyond the system's edge - the same pattern that ended his career seven years ago. The same signal that broke his family apart. It's back. And it's using the elevator's own frequencies to speak. As Decker fights his way up the tether through chaos, old enemies, and the suffocating weight of his own past, one question keeps cutting through the noise: why does someone need forty thousand people to die? The answer is buried in the signal. And it changes everything. The Meridian Collapse is a relentless hard science fiction thriller about sacrifice, redemption, first contact, and a father's race to save the daughter he abandoned before the sky falls. Perfect for readers who love Project Hail Mary, Children of Time, space adventure thrillers, first contact stories, countdown narratives, and hard SF with genuine emotional stakes. A relentless, twist-packed standalone thriller.
The empire does not protect widows. Mei Lin learned this the morning her husband's business partner arrived at her door and told her that everything - the house, the merchant stock, the legal future of her young son - now belonged to him. Merchant Gao is ruthless. He is connected. And he has already started the paperwork. But tucked inside her husband's belongings, Mei Lin finds something Gao hasn't found yet: a cache of imperial-grade silk threaded with a coded map. A map worth killing over. A map that could be her only leverage - if she can reach the magistrate at the distant Jade Gate garrison before Gao's men reach her. She has one night. One chance. One road. The Silk Road. Forced to conceal the treasure beneath her robes and disappear into the next westbound caravan, Mei Lin enters a thousand-li gauntlet of desert bandits, sandstorms, and imperial checkpoints. Her reluctant protector is Captain Li Jun - a scarred caravan guard carrying his own buried shame, the blood debt he owes her dead husband his only reason to keep her alive as far as Dunhuang. He demands absolute trust. Mei Lin has learned that trust is a luxury the widowed cannot afford. Trailing them by a day, always a day, are Gao's agents. Bribing guides. Leaving bodies. And traveling inside the caravan itself is her sister-in-law Bao - grief-hollowed and quietly dangerous, a woman who blames Mei Lin for her brother's death and whose loyalty fractures with every mile of sand. As the Taklamakan closes around them, something else begins to fracture too: the wall Mei Lin built between survival and feeling. The broken soldier guarding her is not who she expected. And the warmth kindling between them in the desert dark is as dangerous as the secret sewn into her silk. She must choose: surrender the evidence to protect the man she is learning to love, or risk his life to secure her son's future in a world where widows have no voice. The Silk Road Widow is a sweeping historical novel about a mother's courage, forbidden love across an empire, and the fierce cost of outrunning a powerful man's greed through the most dangerous road in the ancient world. Perfect for readers who love richly researched Tang Dynasty settings, fierce heroines, forbidden romance, survival journeys, and the immersive historical fiction of Erika Robuck and L. A. Couriel. A sweeping standalone historical novel.