Callie has been Dawson Houser’s secretary long enough to know that she can handle him, his scowls, and every supplier or CEO who smiles knowingly at them across a conference table. He grumps around afterward like the very idea of the two of them dating is personally offensive. Fine. She can handle that too. What she cannot handle is his mother. When Lila Houser sweeps into the office with faux furs and fashion sunglasses, she has one question for her son: when are you getting married, darling? Callie expects Dawson to laugh. Instead he pulls her to his side and says, “Maybe sooner than you think, Mother.” Elana Johnson opens the Southern Roots Sweet RomCom series with the fake-relationship office comedy that BookBub called “witty and tongue-in-cheek because the characters are smart.”

What follows is the predictable-in-the-best-way progression from fake couple to something considerably more complicated, executed with the banter and warm characterization that Johnson’s readership comes for. Callie’s cat, Claude Monet, has opinions about everything including Dawson. Dawson is a grump who reserves his softer side for small moments Callie is increasingly positioned to witness. The pacing is clean, the stakes are charming, and the payoff is completely satisfying.

Johnson is a USA Today bestselling author and Top 50 Kindle Unlimited All-Star who has published over 130 books under two names. The Southern Roots Sweet RomCom series runs five books, all standalones set in the same world. Clean, closed-door romance.

Why this hooks you: His grumpy boss energy, her unflappable competence, one meddling mother, and the fake-relationship arrangement that was definitely not supposed to feel this real.

Jessica White and her husband are back in Georgia to celebrate a friend’s wedding—a rare break from hunting killers. It doesn’t last. When their friend’s fiancée Lena goes missing, Jessica and her husband find themselves entangled with the Russian mob and uncovering a plot that could kill dozens of innocent people. Book 2 of the Taken! series delivers everything readers returned for after the first installment: fast-paced action, a husband-and-wife team who operate well outside official boundaries, and the specific pleasure of watching two deeply capable people apply those capabilities to a problem that nobody else is equipped to solve. Remington Kane continues the series that established him as one of indie thriller fiction’s most prolific and popular voices.

Kane writes short, lean chapters with relentless forward momentum—the Taken! books are the kind of thrillers that reward a long flight or a quiet weekend, because they are genuinely difficult to put down once started. The Russian mob adds international stakes to what begins as a personal favor, and the escalation from friend-in-trouble to mass-casualty threat is handled with Kane’s characteristic efficiency.

Kane is the pen name of Donald Wells, a New Jersey author who has published over a hundred novels across multiple series including the widely popular Tanner series. The Taken! series runs 20 books. This installment stands alone but rewards reading in order.

Why this grips you: A wedding trip, a missing fiancée, the Russian mob, and a couple who handle these situations the way most people handle inconveniences—very efficiently.

Dalton Bishop comes from a wealthy family and has decided to conduct a social experiment: he’ll live as a homeless man in New York City to better understand what people in that situation actually need. What he doesn’t plan for is Greta Hansen arriving from the Midwest to intern at her family’s glittering Vanderhaven Corporation—only to discover she’s actually been hired to babysit her Instagram-famous cousin Cece and keep her out of scandal during awards season. When Cece’s adventures land her in a situation requiring rescue, the “homeless” Dalton steps in—and suddenly finds himself invited to the Forgotten Man Ball on Cece’s arm, standing close enough to the intern he has completely fallen for to finally find out if she feels the same way. Karen McQuestion delivers the charming New York romcom that is exactly what it promises.

McQuestion writes with the warmth and light comedic touch that has distinguished her Lake Union career, and the social media satire running through the novel—Cece’s manufactured image, the fishbowl of celebrity, the question of what’s real beneath the performance—gives it a specific contemporary flavor that ages well. The love story between Dalton and Greta is sweet and genuinely earned.

McQuestion is a bestselling author whose novel The Moonlight Child was adapted for film and whose Long Way Home sold over 200,000 copies as an early Amazon Publishing success. Good Man, Dalton has a companion sequel, Missing Her More.

Why this charms: A billionaire disguised as a homeless man, a Midwest intern navigating Manhattan glamour, and the social experiment that turns into a love story.

Mallory Beck never intended to investigate a murder. She’s still rebuilding after losing her husband, one home-cooked meal at a time, and delivering a casserole to a grieving family in Honeysuckle Grove, West Virginia, feels like exactly the kind of small, manageable kindness she’s capable of right now. Then she meets Amber—a distraught teenager whose father has just died in what the police are calling a hit-and-run—and finds herself elbow-deep in fettuccine, cat treats, and a murder investigation she definitely didn’t volunteer for. Denise Jaden opens the Mallory Beck Cozy Culinary Caper series with the mystery that Publishers Weekly called “entertaining, with surprising twists and sweet romance.”

The specific pleasure of the series is the combination of cooking—recipes are included in each book—with the amateur sleuth dynamic, embodied here by Mallory’s perceptive cat Hunch, who has opinions about everyone they encounter, and the seventh-grade crush who is now the most heart-stopping cop in town and keeps showing up to the investigation whether or not he’s supposed to. Jaden builds Honeysuckle Grove with the warm, quirky community texture the genre does best.

Jaden is a co-writer of the Rosa Reed Mystery Series with Lee Strauss and also writes the Tabitha Chase Days of the Week Mysteries. She acts in TV and movies and has appeared in When Calls the Heart. The Mallory Beck series runs nine books.

Why this charms: A heartbroken widow, a casserole delivery that becomes a murder investigation, a cat who always trusts his instincts, and a cop who keeps appearing at inconvenient moments.

Miss Celia Maynard has never managed to adhere to the ton’s standards, and at this point she has mostly stopped trying. Her reputation as a boisterous hoyden precedes her into every ballroom in London, and the mistakes of her debut Season are the kind society never lets a woman forget. Lord Cameron Bentinck, the Duke of Welbeck Abbey, encounters her at a house party he is hosting and immediately resolves to avoid her—his sophisticated life has no room for a hoyden. He quickly discovers there is considerably more to Celia than the gossip suggests. And she slowly discovers that the proud Duke, whose reserve she initially mistook for arrogance, has a surprisingly kind soul. Aria Norton delivers the Regency enemies-to-lovers romance with the guaranteed happily ever after her readers come for.

When an early-season rainstorm traps the entire house party at the estate, Cameron and Celia find themselves in the specific forced-proximity situation the genre produces perfectly—thrown together by circumstances, watched by jealous gazes and competing schemes, and increasingly unable to pretend their connection is nothing. Norton writes Regency London with attention to the social mechanics that make the stakes feel genuine, and the chemistry between the two principals earns the slow burn.

Norton is a London-born author whose Of Dukes, Dares, and Destinies series has grown to over 20 books. This one is a complete standalone with no cliffhanger. Clean with mild sensuality; guaranteed HEA.

Why this charms: A hoyden who has stopped apologizing, a Duke who thinks his life has no room for her, a rainstorm that disagrees, and jealous schemes that force their hand.

A year ago, Aarohi walked into the wrong apartment, found the wrong scene, and ended up on the receiving end of Lucian’s rage—words that stripped her down to her deepest insecurities and left marks she hasn’t recovered from. Now Lucian is a guest lecturer in her graduate school program, all easy charm and outstretched olive branch, and she doesn’t trust any of it. What she doesn’t know is that his charm is a carefully constructed lie—a slow-burn revenge served deliberately sweet. Until the day he shatters her for real. But here’s the thing about glass jaws: they take the hits, they break, and they cut back. AJ Bishop opens the Lamebrains series with the second-chance Desi romance that Goodreads readers are already calling an autobuy.

The novel builds around one of romance’s most demanding structural challenges—genuine grovel—and Bishop delivers it with real emotional weight rather than formulaic resolution. The Indian wedding setting provides both spectacular set pieces and cultural texture that distinguishes the novel from standard second-chance fare. The gut-punch moment arrives around the 30% mark, the grovel lasts, and both protagonists attend therapy, which reviewers single out with appreciation.

Bishop is a romance and fantasy author self-described as “obsessed with betrayal romances in all their messy, swoony, and gut-wrenching glory.” This revised edition includes two never-before-seen bonus epilogues. Standalone with HEA. This book contains mature content.

Why this hooks you: He shattered her with words once, now he’s engineering a second chance as revenge—until the plan stops feeling like revenge and starts feeling like something much more dangerous.

The glaciers have melted. The eastern coastline of the United States is underwater, battered by recurring superstorms that grow more violent every year. Thirteen-year-old Nonie and her family are among a small community of survivors who have taken refuge on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History—which they call Amen—tending a rooftop garden, hunting deer in Central Park, and carefully cataloguing what knowledge and artifacts remain. Then a superstorm forces them to flee across a Hudson River that has merged with the ocean, paddling a birchbark canoe north toward a fabled farm in western Massachusetts, through a drowned world where communities have adapted—or failed to—in radically different ways. Eiren Caffall delivers the debut literary climate novel that Bookreporter called “harrowing, beautifully written, and engrossing.”

Nonie is a neurodivergent narrator who has been keeping a meticulous Water Logbook—tracking weather patterns, recording what she sees—and whose voice gives the novel its specific poetic intimacy. Caffall received a 2023 Whiting Award in Creative Nonfiction and the book draws on her deep engagement with climate science and grief. Multiple reviewers compare it to Station Eleven for its literary quality and emotional depth.

Caffall is a writer and musician based in Chicago whose essays on loss, nature, and extinction have appeared in Guernica and Literary Hub. All the Water in the World was published by St. Martin’s Press in January 2025.

Why this matters: A girl keeping a weather logbook from the roof of a flooded museum, a canoe across the drowned Hudson, and a literary debut that makes the climate crisis devastatingly, gloriously real—for $2.99.

Melina Lloyd is furious. Her twin sister Cassie secretly took her place during a presidential photo op—impersonating her, getting close to the candidate, and now someone has murdered Cassie. The killer was almost certainly aiming for Melina. And the only person who seems to believe her theory—and has the proximity to help her figure out who wants her dead—is the presidential candidate’s chief of staff, a man she instinctively doesn’t trust. Sandra Brown delivers the romantic suspense thriller that puts a twin switch at the center of a political assassination plot and keeps the pages turning at the relentless pace her loyal readership has come to expect.

Brown’s gift for creating heroes the reader can’t quite read—and heroines who are stubborn in exactly the right amounts—is on full display here. The Washington political milieu gives the conspiracy real stakes, and the question of who within the campaign ordered the hit has enough suspects to keep the mystery genuinely alive until the final reveal. The Providence Sunday Journal called it “classic Brown—a smartly plotted, character-driven thriller.”

Brown is the author of more than 76 New York Times bestsellers with over 80 million copies sold worldwide. The Switch was one of her most widely read thrillers of the 1990s and has since been adapted for television. Each Sandra Brown novel stands completely alone.

Why this grips you: Her twin sister took her identity for one afternoon and paid with her life—now Melina is next, and the only man who can help her is the one she doesn’t trust—for $1.99.

All sorcerers are evil. Elisabeth has known this as long as she has known anything. Raised as a foundling in one of Austermeer’s Great Libraries—where magical grimoires whisper on shelves and transform into monstrous creatures of ink and leather if provoked—she hopes to become a warden, protecting the kingdom from their power. Then an act of sabotage releases the library’s most dangerous grimoire, Elisabeth’s desperate intervention implicates her in the crime, and she is torn from her home to face justice in the capital. With no one to turn to but her sworn enemy, the sorcerer Nathaniel Thorn, and his mysterious demonic servant Silas, she finds herself inside a centuries-old conspiracy that could burn the Great Libraries to the ground—and the world along with them. Margaret Rogerson delivers the YA fantasy that has become one of the most beloved standalones in the genre.

Rogerson builds Austermeer’s 19th-century-inspired world with the rich specificity that rewards attentive readers—the grimoires as living books with their own hierarchy and danger, the library warden tradition, the complex relationship between magic and institutional power. The dynamic between Elisabeth and Nathaniel is built on genuine character development rather than manufactured tension, and Silas, the demon servant, has the most compelling arc in the book.

Rogerson is the internationally bestselling author of An Enchantment of Ravens. Sorcery of Thorns is a complete standalone. For readers who loved The Name of the Wind and Lirael, this is a natural next read.

Why this captivates: A library apprentice accused of treason, a sorcerer she was taught to hate, a conspiracy that could destroy everything, and the living books that started it all—for $1.99.

It’s almost Christmas, but there is no joy in Jack Armstrong’s house. Terminally ill at thirty-four, he spends his last days writing letters to his beloved wife Lizzie and their three children—baby Jackie, twelve-year-old Cory, and rebellious teenage Mikki—preparing to say goodbye to the family he will leave behind. Then, unthinkably, Lizzie is killed in a car accident on Christmas Eve. With no one able to care for the children, the family is split up and sent to live with relatives across the country. Just when all seems lost, Jack experiences a miraculous recovery and rises from what should have been his deathbed, determined to bring his fractured family back together. David Baldacci delivers a deeply moving departure from his trademark thrillers.

The novel is narrated with Baldacci’s characteristic brisk momentum—short chapters, accessible prose, and genuine emotional intelligence about what grief does to a family. The South Carolina beach house setting gives the reconstruction summer its warmth and space, and the question of Jack learning to be a father in ways his illness never allowed him to becomes the story’s emotional core. Lisa Scottoline called it “beautifully and insightfully written—if you read one book this summer, make it One Summer.”

Baldacci is a #1 New York Times bestselling author with over 200 million copies sold worldwide. One Summer was adapted as a Hallmark Movies & Mysteries original film. A significant departure from his thriller work, in the tradition of Wish You Well.

Why this moves you: A dying man watches his family shatter, then gets a miraculous second chance to bring it back together over one unforgettable summer—for $1.99.

Gillian didn’t ask to become a vampire. She was turned against her will by an unknown assailant—which, as she quickly discovers, creates a bureaucratic nightmare: the Vampire Council has extensive paperwork requirements for new vampires, and without knowing who turned her or receiving official authorization, she is what the Council officially classifies as “unauthorised.” This could be corrected with their assistance. It could also be resolved by condemning her to death. Gillian is going to need to figure out who turned her before the paperwork problem becomes permanent. Iris Beaglehole opens the Burkenswood Mysteries with the paranormal cozy that existing fans of her Myrtlewood Crones series have been waiting for—and that stands completely alone for new readers.

Beaglehole has always excelled at the specific combination of warm humor, cozy mystery mechanics, and supernatural world-building that defines the paranormal cozy genre at its best, and Gillian’s voice—navigating a world she didn’t choose with the wry, slightly-bewildered energy that characterizes Beaglehole’s heroines—is an immediately winning addition to the Myrtlewood universe. Fans of the Crones series will find satisfying connections to familiar characters.

Beaglehole is a writer, researcher, druid, and witch who has published 24 books across multiple cozy mystery and paranormal fantasy series. The Burkenswood Mysteries is her newest universe.

Why this captivates: Turned into a vampire by an unknown assailant, now flagged as “unauthorised” by the Vampire Council, with paperwork that could mean death unless she solves her own origin story—for $2.49.