Sydney Hughes goes to Dickens, New England, to help her Aunt Irma recover from hip surgery. Sydney works as an insurance actuary and lives a very structured life, so she figures the trip to her aunt’s place will be calm and uneventful. However, that plan...

In The Boy with the Butterfly Mind by Lorelei Brush, readers meet Julie, a math teacher juggling her job, marriage, and the nonstop energy of her four-year-old son, Patrick. She feels deeply proud of him, but also worried. His moods range from exuberant curiosity to...

How often are mental health issues pushed under the carpet and ignored? In Breaking Perfect, Elyse Heartwell brings the pain and suffering out of the shadows and into the light. The Dawson family appears perfect on the outside, wealthy and successful, but behind closed doors,...

In Weeping Boughs Don't Break by Staci Troilo, Claudia is a middle-aged woman trying to rebuild her life after her husband, Leo, cheated on her and their marriage ended. She is buried in bills, worn out from years of emotionally carrying their family, and embarrassed...

The Women Who Stand Between by Jeannee Sacken is a stunning novel of perseverance in the face of adversity. Top wildlife cinematographer Julia Wilde is working in Southern Africa when she finds herself in the line of fire. A tragic accident has left crew members...

A Dangerous Friendship by Robin Merle is a novel about grief, obsession, and the strange hunger for connection after loss. The narrator, Tina, begins the story in emotional turmoil, newly divorced and exhausted by a series of endings. Seeking distraction and a reset, she throws...

Vesper by Evan Marks follows the titular Vesper, who lives in New York and works as a senior consultant. After a chance meeting overseas leads to a second encounter in the city, Vesper begins seeing Caspian, a man whose life operates on a scale far...

Therein Lies the Pearl by Catherine Hughes is one of those historical novels that I devour with great pleasure. Set in Normandy and England in the eleventh century, in the years leading up to the Norman Conquest in 1066, it focuses not so much on...

Life in the West was tough in the early days of pioneering. In C.C. Harrison’s The Women of Bandit Bend, this life is particularly tough for the women struggling to make a life for themselves on an isolated homestead. Tally and Ivy Tisdale live on...

In The Lost Ballerina by Deanna Lynn Sletten, seventeen-year-old Maddie Carlson needs to earn money fast. Her boyfriend, Caden, crashed her car, and her father insists she pay for the repairs herself. Maddie takes a job mowing and weeding the lawn at a big, mysterious...