As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
The Cave: A Berry Springs Novel (affiliate link)
After getting trapped in a remote cave, two strangers must work together to survive while being hunted by a ruthless killer…
When rescue swimmer Owen Grayson is forced home on leave, the last thing he expects is to be dragged into a murder investigation. But in the depths of Crypts Cavern, the bodies are piling up—and the killer isn’t done.
Forensic Anthropologist Dr. Sadie Hart expected bones, not fresh corpses. But from the moment she steps into the cave, she realizes someone is watching. Someone willing to kill to keep its secrets hidden.
Then the storm hits. Trapped in the darkness, surrounded by danger, Owen and Sadie must unravel the truth—before they become the next pile of bones found deep in the catacombs of Crypts Cavern…
Cape Cod Cozies: Ivy Bloom Mysteries Books 1-3 (affiliate link)
Cape Cod, a bookstore, and three cozy mysteries. Ivy Bloom starts her life over again in her childhood home on Cape Cod. She and her sister Gigi open a bookstore in an old mansion they have inherited. With help from Gigi’s daughter Jen, one very handsome detective named Drake, and a small and adorable dog, Ivy tries to concentrate on selling books. The universe has other plans and keeps dropping dead bodies in her way. What can she do but investigate? If you like your cozy mystery heroines funny and frank, with a little bit of sass, then you’ll like Ivy Bloom because she’s your kind of woman!
Chocolate Centered Cozy Mysteries Box Set Books 11-20 (affiliate link)
Ally Sweet is loving her new life in her hometown of Blue River working in her grandmother’s chocolate shop. The bond between her and her much-loved grandmother is as strong as ever and she enjoys spending time with her, their pot-bellied pig, Arnold, and feline-friend, Peaches.
Along with a developing romance with a hunky detective and chocolate making at her grandmother’s chocolate shop, her days are filled with helping solve more than a few baffling murder mysteries with her grandmother, their animal sidekicks, and a few quirky, chocolate-shop regulars.
His Unexpected Mail-Order Bride (Historical Sapphire Springs Book 1) (affiliate link)
Tobias Townsend swore off marriage when he became a widow after being married less than twenty-four hours. He was devastated when she fled him on horseback and was thrown, leaving him to believe there was something about him that had frightened her.
Sadie Johnson left her home and everything she knew in hopes of finding a better life away from starvation and poverty. When she agreed to be a mail-order bride, all she was hoping for was a chance to be a good wife and mother.
Now, due to a meddling sixteen-year-old brother, Tobias is faced with a mail-order bride he hadn’t sent for, and Sadie life is even more uncertain than it had been before.
The Soul Collector: Borrowed Souls: Book 1 (affiliate link)
… I just sat in the silence, wondering why this day was destined to be so disastrous. There was nothing left for fate to deface.
Jack Duffy is the exemplification of average.
He lives a normal life with a less than desirable job. He’s a distracted husband, living in an ordinary apartment, and is married to an extraordinary wife. That’s how he would explain it. At the end of an unusually bad day, Jack’s life is turned upside down when he witnesses something truly harrowing. The only thing that can catch him from falling is the soul collector.
His primary concern: Will he be allowed to keep his soul, or will he have to give it back?
Aspen Haste struggles with things most teenagers have no problem dealing with. As a sixteen-year-old girl with crippling anxiety and currently on medication, her only solace is the same order she asks in Café de Fleur. This helps somewhat, but she still has to deal with the perils of teenage life, as well as her insomnia from the medication.
Well . . . there’s also Isaac Hensick, one of the “It Boys” of the school whose reputation precedes him. Nevertheless, Aspen is also aware of his other side, and that is the boy who draws on his sketchpad at the corner of Café de Fleur.
Maybe there is more to him than the school knows, but she didn’t think she would find out.
That’s what she thought. Now that she’s become the target of his attention, she’s going to need more than coffee to deal with the headaches.
Cornish Trilogy Omnibus (affiliate link)
Available in one volume, all three books of the darkly witty Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus.
The fate of the Cornish family unfolds in this trio of novels by acclaimed Canadian writer Robertson Davies . . .
The Rebel Angels. Set in motion by the death of eccentric art patron and collector Francis Cornish, a goodhearted priest and scholar, a professor with a passion for the darker side of medieval psychology, a defrocked monk, and a rich young businessman who inherits some troublesome paintings are all helplessly beguiled by the same coed.
What’s Bred in the Bone. This worthy follow-up goes back to Cornish’s humble beginnings in a spellbinding tale of artistic triumph and heroic deceit. It is a tale told in stylish, elegant prose, endowed with lavish portions of Davies’ wit and wisdom.
Jewelweed: A Novel (affiliate link)
When David Rhodes burst onto the American literary scene in the 1970s, he was hailed as “a brilliant visionary” (John Gardner) and compared to Sherwood Anderson and Marilynne Robinson. In Driftless, his “most accomplished work yet” (Joseph Kanon), Rhodes brought Words, WI, to life in a way that resonated with readers across the country. Now with Jewelweed, this beloved author returns to the same out-of-the-way hamlet and introduces a cast of characters who all find themselves charged with overcoming the burdens left by the past, sometimes with the help of peach preserves or pie.
After serving time for a dubious conviction, Blake Bookchester is paroled and returns home. The story of Blake’s hometown is one of challenge, change, and redemption, of outsiders and of limitations, and simultaneously one of supernatural happenings and of great love. Each of Rhodes’s characters—flawed, deeply human, and ultimately universal—approach the future with a combination of hope and trepidation, increasingly mindful of the importance of community to their individual lives. Rich with a sense of empathy and wonder, Jewelweed offers a vision in which the ordinary becomes mythical.
The complete “wonderfully entertaining trilogy” about three British friends approaching their twilight years with bittersweet humor (The Washington Post).
Jane Gardam’s beloved Old Filth Trilogy—including her masterpiece, Old Filth, voted one of the 100 greatest British novels in a BBC survey; The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends—are here presented in one volume.
Emotionally distant but highly successful Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth, a man who “belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters” (TheNew York Times Book Review), his beautiful wife Betty, and his devilishly handsome professional rival (and Betty’s onetime lover) Edward Veneering are the anchors of this series, with each novel focusing on a different character. Feathers was a “raj orphan”—children born in Far East British colonies and raised in England—while Veneering managed to get out of his fishing village-turned-industrial-town just before the German bombs dropped (and his luck has held up pretty well ever since).
Sons of the Wolf (affiliate link)
Two girls are thrust into the care of a shadowy relative with two unusual sons and a bewitching manor home in this historical gothic mystery.
Ada and Harriet don’t know what to expect when they meet their new guardian, Mr. Wolfson. Here is a strangely magnetic, darkly amusing man confined to a wheelchair and flanked by a pair of fierce, dangerous dogs—an enigmatic benefactor, at once welcoming and intimidating. Even more unsettling to the girls are Wolfson’s two sons, Julian and Francis. One of them is warm and good-natured, the other is pure malevolence. But young Harriet is about to discover a frightening truth: that evil runs rampant throughout their mysterious new home, Abbey Manor, and the surrounding moors—especially when the moon comes out . . .
Composed in Middle Babylonia around 1200 BCE, The Epic of Gilgamesh foreshadowed later stories that would become as fundamental as any in human history: the Bible, Homer, The Thousand and One Nights. But in 600 BCE, the clay tablets that bore the story were lost—buried beneath ashes and ruins when the library of the wild king Ashurbanipal was sacked in a raid.
The Buried Book begins with the rediscovery of the forgotten epic and its deciphering in 1872 by George Smith, a brilliant self-taught linguist who created a sensation—and controversy—when he discovered Gilgamesh among the thousands of tablets in the British Museum’s collection. From there the story goes backward in time, all the way to Gilgamesh himself. Damrosch reveals the story as a literary bridge between East and West: a document lost in Babylonia, discovered by an Iraqi, decoded by an Englishman, and appropriated in novels by both Philip Roth and Saddam Hussein. This is an illuminating, fast-paced tale of history as it was written, stolen, lost, and—after 2,000 years, countless battles, fevered digs, conspiracies, and revelations—finally found.
They Came Only to Die: The Battle of Nashville, December 15–16, 1864 (affiliate link)
The November 1864 battle of Franklin left the Army of Tennessee stunned. In only a few hours, the army lost 6,000 men and a score of generals. Rather than pause, John Bell Hood marched his army north to Nashville. He had risked everything on a successful campaign and saw his offensive as the Confederacy’s last hope. There was no time to mourn. There was no question of attacking Nashville. Too many Federals occupied too many strong positions. But Hood knew he could force them to attack him and, in doing so, he could win a defensive victory that might rescue the Confederacy from the chasm of collapse. Unfortunately for Hood, he faced George Thomas. He was one of the Union’s best commanders, and he had planned and prepared his forces. But with battle imminent, the ground iced over, Thomas had to wait.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 2Page 2