Murder on the Village Green (Lady Felicity Quick Mystery Book 1) (affiliate link)
England, 1921. Murder has stunned the peaceful Devonshire village of Lower Diddleton. Local resident and intrepid reporter Lady Felicity Quick is ready to write up the dastardly crime when a dashing and talented journalist arrives from London to steal her story.
Ignoring suggestions that a young woman of a certain standing has no business meddling in murder, Felicity uses her inquisitiveness, persistence, and natural charm to unearth Lower Diddleton’s secrets. With her mostly faithful canine accomplice at her side, she interviews everyone from the village baker to the president of the plant and floral society.
But when an innocent family friend stands accused of the crime, Felicity has no choice: to find the real killer, Felicity must join forces with her rival. Can she swallow her pride before the murderer gets away with it — or is Felicity risking a bullet through her cloche hat?
Murder and a Tequila Sunrise (Sunrise Cafe Book 1) (affiliate link)
A beachside brunch cafe, delicious cocktails…and a dead body!
When I left the big city, I thought l’d leave my worries behind. But soon after I return to my small hometown, an ex-boyfriend is found dead. Before you ask, I didn’t do it! I wasn’t surprised, though. He had muddled his money with the wrong people.
Now, I’m balancing bartending, rekindling my acting career, and trying to leave my past behind. Luckily, I have an adorable and rambunctious puppy by my side to sniff out the red herrings. Romantic sunset strolls on the beach with a handsome newcomer don’t hurt either.
When I start getting threatening messages from my ex-boyfriend’s enemy, my life is on the rocks.
Seaside Friends (Bay Harbor Beach Book 1) (affiliate link)
Thirty years after her mother’s mysterious disappearance, Mela returns to the old beach house in the small town of Bay Harbor. With grown children, a lackluster career, and an emotionally distant husband, she stands at a crossroads in her life and is ready for a new beginning. In the familiar and welcoming warmth of her hometown community, Mela soon reconnects with friends and neighbors, embraces a second chance at love and romance, and discovers a long-lost family secret.
When Amelie learns that her childhood friend has finally come home, the devoted pie enthusiast bravely reaches out despite some haunting memories.
Homeland Elegies: A Novel (affiliate link)
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation’s unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.
The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (affiliate link)
June 6, 1944: Nineteen boys from Bedford, Virginia — population just 3,000 in 1944 — died in the first bloody minutes of D-Day.
They were part of Company A of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division, and the first wave of American soldiers to hit the beaches in Normandy. Later in the campaign, three more boys from this small Virginia town died of gunshot wounds. Twenty-two sons of Bedford lost–it is a story one cannot easily forget and one that the families of Bedford will never forget.
The Bedford Boys is the true and intimate story of these men and the friends and families they left behind. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and relatives, as well as diaries and letters, Kershaw’s book focuses on several remarkable individuals and families to tell one of the most poignant stories of World War II–the story of one small American town that went to war and died on Omaha Beach.
You Can’t Be Serious is a series of funny, consequential, awkward, and ridiculous stories from Kal Penn’s idiosyncratic life. It’s about being the grandson of Gandhian freedom fighters, and the son of immigrant parents: people who came to this country with very little and went very far—and whose vision of the American dream probably never included their son sliding off an oiled-up naked woman in the raunchy Ryan Reynolds movie Van Wilder…or getting a phone call from Air Force One as Kal flew with the country’s first Black president.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3