Whether you are looking for a new romance, thriller or fiction book this month, you will find something great to bring to the beach to read! I plan on checking out Summer People and Single Girls:.
Every Version of You by Natalie Messier (romance)
For fans of The Love of My Afterlife and The Seven Year Slip, Reese’s LitUp Fellow Natalie Messier’s debut following a woman who gets a chance to relive her college years—with the opportunity to win back the one that got away—is “full of surprises and sneakily perceptive” (Yulin Kuang, USA TODAY bestselling author of How to End a Love Story).
Joey Vasquez’s life is the definition of good on paper. At thirty-two, she’s a Los Angeles lawyer on the cusp of making partner, but while she’s a professional success, she’s a personal disaster. Her social life mostly consists of nights spent watching TV with her elderly cat. Life isn’t quite what she dreamed when she was younger, but really, whose life is?
But a dinner party with the best friend she’s secretly pined after for years and its aftermath changes everything.
When Joey is given a second chance at life, she finds herself in college again. Armed with memories from her first life, Joey is certain she’s come back to finally convince the one man she ever loved to love her back—so why does she find herself strangely drawn to the man she thought she hated?
Three Reasons for Revenge by Dervla McTiernan (thriller)
From the #1 internationally bestselling author of What Happened to Nina? comes a gripping high-stakes novel of suspense about three seemingly unconnected people, caught in a lethal web of deceit and unhealed wounds.
Someone’s watching. Someone’s waiting.
Alexis Turner walks into the police station to report an assault. By the end of the day, she is nowhere to be found.
Soon after she disappears, three identical packages arrive at three very different doors: a respected psychologist’s home, a socialite’s mansion, and a struggling single father’s run-down apartment. Inside, each gift is perfectly tailored to its recipient — and each will tear apart the life of its intended victim.
Detective Sergeant Judith Lee is smart and experienced, but this is no ordinary case. Someone with intimate knowledge of their targets is orchestrating these attacks. Someone who knows exactly how to hurt each victim where they’re most vulnerable. And she’s convinced that somehow, it connects back to Alexis Turner.
As she races to uncover the connection between three unrelated people, Judith discovers she’s no longer just investigating the game—she’s being forced to play.
In Wonderland by Joyce Maynard (fiction)
In one golden summer, Frances trades her working-class world for an elite Maine lakeside estate—where privilege and betrayal play a deadly game in this coming of age drama.
For Frances, becoming a mother’s helper at Wonderland feels like stepping into a fairy tale. The marble lions, the wooden boats, the pristine grounds—it’s everything her modest childhood wasn’t. Even better, she gets to spend the summer of 1986 with Forrest Emerson, her father’s charismatic childhood friend who escaped their neighborhood to build this perfect world.
But beneath Wonderland’s shimmering surface, nothing is quite what it seems. When Forrest’s wife Regina draws Frances into her private world, the teenager finds herself witness to the intimate secrets of adult lives. As the summer heat builds, so do the tensions within Wonderland’s walls. By Labor Day, a death will shatter the crystal-clear waters of Lake Catherine, leaving Frances to question everything she thought she knew about privilege, power, and the price of belonging.
The Mash Up by Laura Marie Meyers ((romance)
It’s all fun and games until someone falls in love.
MANSION • APARTMENT • SHACK • HOUSE
Ruby Wynne is a staunch rule-follower who lives by the numbers. So when a surprising breakup – on her thirty-fifth birthday – ruins all her well-laid plans, Ruby makes an unexpected wish . . . Only to wake up inside a M.A.S.H. game from seventh grade.
Settled in a Technicolor mansion, driving a tie-dye Jeep, and running a roller-disco restaurant, Ruby is living out her childhood dreams come true—with one exception. According to the game, Ruby’s “other half” is supposed to be Penn Hayes, her brother’s annoying, and annoyingly handsome, best friend. But there’s zero romance between them. Just like in real life, all they share is sarcasm. With no rules to follow and desperate to return to reality, Ruby makes her best guess at an escape plan: win Penn’s heart so the game comes completely true and she can go home.
It’s unthinkable. On Ruby’s list of dos and don’ts, Penn Hayes is a lifelong don’t. But as Ruby navigates the magical world she dreamed up at thirteen, she wonders if, by finally throwing out her rules, she might just find her way home to the life and love she deserves.
The Death Row Club by V.A. Vazquez (thriller)
SOME THINGS RUN IN THE BLOOD…
A darkly twisted and wonderfully original debut thriller for fans of Riley Sager and Jessica Knoll – at an annual weekend getaway for the adult children of serial killers, the participants begin to wonder if somebody’s continuing the family tradition when one of their number turns up dead.
Plenty of people have lousy parents, but Nicola Fischer’s father has just been convicted of murdering five young women, including her best friend. Fired from her job and hounded by reporters, Nicola passes the time by doomscrolling and drunk-dialling Greer Woods, the alluring host of the hit show To Catch a Killer, who cracked the case and turned Nicola’s life upside down before disappearing along with her so-called ‘best intentions’.
When an email from Greer finally shows up in Nicola’s inbox, there’s no apology or explanation, just a cryptic invitation. The Death Row Club is an annual weekend getaway for the adult children of serial killers – and Nicola is the newest reluctant member. Desperate to escape her small town, she accepts the offer with barely a second thought, forging tentative bonds with her fellow club members, most of whom seem intriguing, and only slightly unhinged.
But when an uninvited guest shows up at their remote wilderness retreat, everyone is put on high alert, and the next morning paranoia turns to outright fear. Because one of their own is dead, and the rest of them are left with only one question.
If the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, which of them is the bad seed?
Summer People by Salley Blakely (romance)
One week. No drama. And absolutely no dating each other.
After graduating college, five friends make a pact. Every summer, they’ll meet for one week at the same beach house on the California coast to relive the golden days of college. There’s just one no dating within the group.
Simple enough, except Everett and Sutton already broke the rule before summer even began… and couldn’t seem to stop. What started as a one-time fling turned into an annual habit neither of them could quit, until the night everything fell apart.
Five years later, Sutton has no interest in seeing Everett ever again. Until one of their friends, newly divorced and looking for an escape, calls everyone back to the beach house. She expects awkward silences and forced smiles, but nothing could prepare her for Everett–still infuriating, still magnetic, and still capable of unraveling her with a single glance.
As the week stretches on and every re-lived tradition, shared meal and outing bring a flood of sun-soaked memories that feed the spark between her and Everett, Sutton begins to wonder if the promise that broke them apart was worth keeping in the first place… and if breaking it again will ruin the delicate balance their friend group has finally started to reclaim.
Matcha on Monday by Michiko Aoyama
Discover the beloved early classic from the million-copy bestselling author of WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS IN THE LIBRARY
Across a bridge in a quiet neighborhood in Tokyo, a charming little matcha café – open only on Mondays – offers a beacon of light and healing to all who pass through its doors.
All throughout the week, customers flock to the Marble Café that’s tucked away behind the trees – except when it’s closed on Mondays, when the Matcha Café opens in its place, offering its clientele a warm cup of matcha and restoration to start the busy week ahead.
On this one day of the week, people from all walks of life frequent this cozy haven and experience the joys of human connection. Among them include:
- A singer who has just broken up with his lover
- An unsociable young owner of a tea wholesaler
- A husband who has made his wife angry
- A designer and owner of a lingerie shop
- A Kamishibai artist who doesn’t get along with his grandmother
This heart-warming story spans Tokyo and Kyoto over twelve months, bringing together a community of untold unfolding lives – all starting with a cup of matcha.
Marble Cafe #2
Single Girls: A Novel About Helen Gurley Brown and the Women Who Revolutionized Cosmopolitan Magazine in the 1960s by John Searles
An infectious and utterly charming fictionalization of the iconic Helen Gurley Brown’s early years at the helm of Cosmopolitan, and the intrepid group of women she took under her wing to create one of the most talked about magazines of all time.
In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown, a soft spoken, self-professed “mouseburger,” is fresh off the runaway success of her book Sex and the Single Girl, a revolutionary call to single women urging them not to rush into marriage on anyone’s timeline but their own, and, even more radically, to enjoy their sex lives, gloriously free of shame. Upon the book’s publication, half the country is outraged (her mother, for one, hates it), and the other half will follow her anywhere. Moved by the thousands of letters arriving at her doorstep from readers desperate for advice, she marches from one Manhattan magazine conglomerate to another, looking for a perch from which to dispense her unconventional wisdom. At her last stop, she finally gets her shot: just three issues to turn around the flailing magazine Cosmopolitan.
Helen quickly assembles a team of smart, savvy single girls up to the task. Soon, their lives become the stuff of magazine cover lines: the gorgeous Book Editor’s doomed romance with a man she didn’t know was married—and her bold idea for revenge. The (unofficial!) Sex Editor’s trip to soak in the world’s first champagne glass hot tub, which takes a very wrong turn. The Entertainment Editor’s clash with Joan Crawford and interview with a Park Avenue call girl that leads to unexpected revelations.
Single Girls begins at the dawn of Helen’s storied tenure and journeys back to her youth, envisioning the devastations and people who forged her into a controversial legend. It imagines the way one unsinkable group of women navigated gender roles and workplace power dynamics long before these issues entered the headlines. With dazzling, high-energy prose, it recreates not just a movement, but a mood: one of ambition, reinvention, and the intoxicating thrill of being young when a new world was possible for a single girl if only she was fearless enough to reach out and grab it.
Our Marriage is Murder by Carol Goodman (mystery)
In the latest thrilling mystery from Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning author Carol Goodman, a writers’ conference at an Italian castle turns deadly when a killer begins using a husband-and-wife writing team’s novel as a blueprint for murder.
Fred and Thea Morgan-Lane are the envy of the mystery community, the perfect partners in life and in writing. Together they coauthor the wildly successful Death Takes a Holiday series, and they’ve been invited to the Italian castle where it all began for a mystery conference celebrating their first novel, Death Takes the Castle.
But their story isn’t quite the fairytale it seems to outsiders. Twenty years and twenty books after they met, Thea wants out. Their marriage and partnership haven’t been working for some time, and what better place to announce the end of the series than where it started?
Except shortly after their arrival at the beautiful Castellarosa, a shocking death takes place when the wrong person drinks a cocktail meant for Thea. The stunned conference-goers put it down to an unknown allergy, but Thea isn’t so sure. Could someone be trying to kill her? Perhaps her loving husband isn’t as ok with their series ending as he pretends, or maybe Nadine, the upstart young author who is vying to take Thea’s place, wants her out of the way. Suddenly, it seems like everyone has a motive, and when a second death occurs, a disturbing pattern emerges—these deaths aren’t random, they’re following the murders in Death Takes a Castle exactly. Murders that Thea and Fred wrote.
In order to save the day—and maybe even their marriage—the unhappy couple will have to work together to figure out who is using their book as a blueprint for a killing spree. That is, if they can trust the person they’ve spent twenty years plotting murders with…
This Changes Everything by Lisa Scottoline (thriller)
Julia finds her footing as a clairvoyant but upends her mental stability and her marriage when she and her best friend Courtney investigate a murder in a spooky and menacing town in Pennsylvania’s old mining region. This sequel will take the drama, action, and jeopardy to the next level, and will resonate with themes of identity, female friendship, and justice.
Dominion by Jean Kwok (fantasy)
A woman with no past. A warrior with no future. Their love could save the world—or burn it down.
Fourth Wing—by way of Chinese mythology—meets The Hunger Games in a perilous world where a young woman with no memory and little magic may hold the key to uniting the Dominions and saving the mortal realm, from the New York Timesbestselling author of Read with Jenna pick Searching for Sylvie Lee and Girl in Translation.
This deluxe limited first run edition features a cover with foil, designed sprayed edges, and gorgeous map endpapers—while supplies last!
“A page turner. Tender yet tense, loving yet steamy, dangerous yet darkly humorous…Dominion creates something entirely new.” —Brigitte Knightley, New York Times bestselling author of The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy
In a world divided into four rival Dominions, power is everything—and Rubi Morningtail has almost none. Three years after the Annihilation destroyed her homeland and shattered her memories, she lives as an Azure refugee in the Dominion of the Silver Tyger, scraping by as a ribbon dancer and hiding her little bit of singing magic. When she wounds a massive battle tyger on her doorstep, she draws the notice of Blake Axefire—supreme metal mage, leader of the royal tyger warriors, and the last man an Azure should trust. His sentence? Cast her into the Bonding, a brutal trial where tygers choose their riders and slaughter the rest. Surviving is unthinkable.
But survive she does. Now she’s stuck on Blake’s elite team racing to reseal the Anchors to the demon realm. With rebels striking, demons rising, and the Dominions at each other’s throats, Rubi must unlock the truth of her magic and her past…while resisting her dangerous attraction to the ruthless warrior who could be her redemption—or her ruin.
