The Promise of Paradise (Hometown Heroes series) (affiliate link)
Do you believe in soul mates?
Ashton Kirk, youngest daughter of a prestigious senator, fiancée of a hotshot attorney, and fresh Harvard graduate, is headed for a promising law career when scandal breaks apart her family. To escape, she rents an apartment in the sleepy town of Paradise, New Hampshire, where no one knows who she is.
Ash hopes for solitude, but all bets are off when Eddie West, the town’s most eligible bachelor, moves in downstairs. Eddie likes his women and his cars shiny, sleek, and fast, and when he meets his new housemate, he wastes no time getting friendly. While he’s looking for a no-strings romance, though, he gets more than he bargained for in Ash, who sees through his macho exterior to the pain he carries each day, the heartbreaking loss of his kid brother.
Cold Blooded Brew (Killer Coffee Mysteries Book 4) (affiliate link)
Welcome to the Bean Hive Coffeehouse where the coffee is as hot as the gossip!
Meet Roxanne Bloom, ex-lawyer and who likes to be called Roxy by her close friends. She’s the owner and operator of The Bean Hive coffee shop in Honey Springs. Kentucky. But when a dead body is dumped on her doorstep like a sack of coffee beans, the cozy coffee shop becomes an all-out crime scene and everyone in the small town is hankering for some good gossip. Sheriff Spencer warns her to be careful because everyone is a suspect. Roxy’s snooping lawyer skills are on alert and she can’t help but brew up a few clues to help find the cold blooded killer.
Killer Coffee Cozy Mystery is a series about small town gossip, family, friends, and putting differences aside when troubles brews.
Do you love to read about family and friendships?
Lydia Ryder is trouble.
It’s what I told myself when I first saw her arrive in our small, rural town wearing stilettos. When she spilled an entire cup of coffee all over herself. And when I saved her from tripping off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic.
I lead a simple life as a single dad. I don’t have time for trouble. I’m too busy packing lunches, driving to soccer practices, and trying to fold a damn fitted sheet.
But she sees beyond the overworked, exhausted parent I am. She sees the real me. The me that I haven’t allowed myself to be since my wife died two years ago.
And she’s only in town for one week.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have kissed her.
But now that I have, I think I’ve gotten a taste for trouble… and it’s addicting.
All Things Quilting with Alex Anderson: From First Step to Last Stitch (affiliate link)
This comprehensive guide by the host of The Quilt Show covers everything you need to know to become a master quilter.
Alex Anderson has taught and inspired countless quilters around the world through her television programs, fabric lines, and numerous books. In All Things Quilting with Alex Anderson, she packs her most indispensable knowledge and advice into a single volume.
Encyclopedic in its scope, it covers quilting techniques, essential tools, binding basics, piecing and appliqué, and much more. It is both a master class for novices and an essential reference for experienced quilters.
Providing a cover for our delicate bodies, the skin is our largest and fastest-growing organ. We see it, touch it, and live in it every day. It is a habitat for a mesmerizingly complex world of micro-organisms and physical functions that are vital to our health and survival. One of the first things people see about us, skin is also crucial to our sense of identity. And yet much about it is largely unknown to us.
With rigorous research and lucid prose, Monty Lyman explores our outer surface through the lenses of science, sociology, and history. He covers topics as diverse as the mechanics and magic of touch (how much goes on in the simple act of taking keys out of a pocket and unlocking a door is astounding), the close connection between the skin and the gut, what happens instantly when one gets a paper cut, and how a midnight snack can lead to sunburn.
In 1936, classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African American expats. After being flat broke in segregated Baltimore, he is now living in a mansion with servants of his own, the toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure, and power, even as it ignores the rising winds of war.
Song Yuhua is refined and educated, and has been bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai’s most powerful crime boss in payment for her father’s gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage—and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party.
Only when Shanghai is shattered by the Japanese invasion do Song and Thomas find their way to each other. Though their union is forbidden, neither can back down from it in the turbulent years of occupation and resistance that follow. Torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and world war, they are borne on an irresistible riff of melody and improvisation to Night in Shanghai’s final, impossible choice.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3