Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Book Round-Up. Hurrah, after a long hiatus, we’re back. How has your summer been? For me, it’s been a super busy summer filled with some amazing reads. Everywhere I turn, I see people talking about binge-reads so I thought I’d share my must-reads. I’d love to know which books you inhale in one sitting and recommend to everyone who’ll listen.
Home (Myron Bolitar Book 11) by Harlan Coben
THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Ten years after the high-profile kidnapping of two young boys, only one returns home in Harlan Coben’s gripping Myron Bolitar thriller. A decade ago, kidnappers grabbed two boys from wealthy families and demanded ransom, then went silent. No trace of the boys ever surfaced. For ten years their families have been left with nothing but painful memories and a quiet desperation for the day that has finally, miraculously arrived: Myron Bolitar and his friend Win believe they have located one of the boys, now a teenager. Where has he been for ten years, and what does he know about the day, more than half a life ago, when he was taken? And most critically: What can he tell Myron and Win about the fate of his missing friend? Drawing on his singular talent, Harlan Coben delivers an explosive and deeply moving thriller about friendship, family, and the meaning of home.
Angelica: A Detective Mike Eiser Novel (The Detective Mike Eiser Series Book 4) by Clabe Polk
A LONG TIME AGO, ANGELICA VICETTI DID SOME VERY BAD THINGS WITH SOME VERY BAD MEN. Now, eleven years later, she’s built a new life for her family, far from her old life in Las Vegas. BUT IT'S ALL ABOUT TO COME CRASHING DOWN! Angelica Vicetti of Las Vegas has become Angela Cassetta of Poplar Bluffs, just outside Atlanta, Georgia. She's built a successful real estate agency, and the son she rescued from Vegas when he was a youngster is now a high school baseball star and destined for great things. But Antonio Scarpone, the mob boss in Vegas who forced her underground hasn't forgotten about her. A string of hit men are sent to kill her, but each time she saves herself and her son, with the help of her friends and Mike Eiser, a local Sheriff's detective who refuses to let Angelica die on his watch! Things get more complicated, when one of the hit men becomes strangely important to Angela in a whole new way … and a team of Federal agents come to town and ratchet up the odds. Suddenly, sleepy little Poplar Bluffs is awash in blood. ANGELA WILL HAVE TO TAKE IT ALL THE WAY TO THE EDGE AND BEYOND – INTO MURDER, KIDNAPPING AND LYING TO THE FEDS – TO SAVE HERSELF AND HER SON. BUT...CAN SHE SURVIVE THE FIGHT FOR HER FAMILY'S FREEDOM?
A Lady's Virtue (Everton Domestic Society Book 3) by A.S. Fenichel
Can a broken engagement ignite the spark of true love?
Sylvia Dowder had almost made it to the altar when her fiancé unexpectedly became a viscount, and dropped her like a stale crumpet to make a more “suitable” match. Though Sylvia’s heart has been crushed, her spirit has not. She puts her wits and social savvy to use as a secret gossip columnist—and as the Everton Domestic Society’s party planner to the ton. Luckily, she’s not in danger of ever falling for an aristocrat again…
Especially not one like Anthony Braighton, Earl of Grafton. Raised in America, Anthony sees no reason to marry when he can enjoy all the perks of being an eligible earl. Determined to convince his family he doesn’t need a wife, he hires Sylvia to act as hostess and decorator for upcoming parties. Yet Sylvia is as adept at captivating his interest as she is at beautifying his home. And despite this Everton lady’s aversion to titled men, some attractions can’t be denied—and love rarely does go where it’s told . . .
Order of the Dragon Knights: The Complete Series - A Digital Boxed Edition by Mary Morgan
Dragon Knight's Sword
Duncan MacKay encounters the woman from his dreams, literally. She is from the future, somehow has his lost sword, and can talk to the Dragon who is able to lift his family’s curse.
When an ancient sword lands at Brigid O'Neill’s doorstep, she starts dreaming of a rugged Highlander. Her quest to return the sword will alter everything she believes.
Dragon Knight's Medallion
Stephen MacKay is plagued with visions that threaten to destroy his soul. When Aileen Kerrigan falls through a time tunnel, he vows to keep the beautiful, half-blooded fae safe.
Aileen, armed with the medallion her mother gave her, and a matching one belonging to a long dead knight, is thrown into the past. When she encounters a handsome but surly warrior who is on a quest, she fears her future could be entwined with his.
Dragon Knight's Axe
When Alastair MacKay rescues a woman from a slave trader, he steps back into a world filled with magic—taking on the role of protector and leading him on a journey to confront his greatest regret and fears.
Research assistant, Fiona O’Quinlan loves translating ancient artifacts at Trinity College. When she falls asleep on an archeological dig, she awakens in another time. Yet, she is unprepared for the danger ahead—losing her heart and soul to Alastair “Beast” MacKay.
Dragon Knight's Shield
Angus MacKay is back on Scottish soil and encounters a woman who can wield a sword as mightily as his warriors, and takes her captive. With each passing day, the fire dragon inside him roars to claim the one woman fate has destined for him.
Famed mystery writer, Deirdre Flanagan, is on a vacation to Scotland, when she steps through the mists and enters into a skirmish alongside a Highlander. However, the fight has only begun, and now she must battle Angus as well as evil in order to claim the love of this Dragon Knight.
Dragon Knight's Ring
Crusader, Adam MacFhearguis is on one last quest to the standing stones in Scotland where he seeks to bury the past. However, a silent prayer sends him to an unknown future and to his beloved Meggie.
Margaret MacKay lives a life in the future without the memories of her past. With each passing day, she yearns to learn more from the stranger in her time.
Will love free the bonds to unite the two lovers who were doomed centuries ago? Or will evil finally claim victory over the Dragon Knights?
The Billionaire Boss Next Door by Max Monroe
Amazon Top 25 Bestseller
My new boss has it all. In spades.
Gorgeous green eyes? Check. Hard-and-sexy body? Check. Intelligence? Check. Success? A big fat billionaire... Check. Too bad I haven't started out on the best foot. My big mouth has already turned him against me, and tempting good looks and success aside, Trent Turner is no peach either. He's stubborn and thick-headed, and son of a fruitcake, he thinks he knows everything there is to know about the hotel business. With him running the development of the new Vanderturn New Orleans Hotel and me doing the design, our work relationship is far too intimate for two people who absolutely despise one another. But that's not all. See, he isn't just my billionaire boss from hell. He's my new neighbor, too. Same city. Same building. Same floor. Trent Turner is my billionaire boss next door. Holy moly, let's hope my career--and hormones--can survive. Disclaimer: If you generally love to suffer, hate fun of any kind, and are allergic to laughter, this book is not for you.
Is There Still Sex in the City? by Candace Bushnell
Set between the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a country enclave known as The Village, Is There Still Sex in the City? gathers Bushnell’s signature short, sharp, satirical commentaries on the love and dating habits of middle aged men and women as they continue to navigate the ever-modernizing world of relationships. Throughout, Bushnell documents twenty-first century dating phenomena, such as the “Unintended Cub Situation” in which a sensible older woman suddenly becomes the love interest of a much younger man, the “Mona Lisa” Treatment — a vaginal restorative surgery often recommended to middle-aged women — and what it’s really like to go on Tinder dates as a fifty-something divorcée. Bushnell also updates one of her most celebrated stories from Sex and the City, about “Bicycle Boys,” a breed of New York man who was always trying to bring his bike up to women’s apartments. Once an anomaly, Bushnell charts their new ubiquitousness, in addition to where, and how, to do your own man stalking via bicycle (and whether or not it’s worth it).
In Is There Still Sex in The City? Bushnell looks at love and life from all angles: marriage and children, divorce and bereavement, as well as the very real pressures on women to maintain their youth and have it all. This is a pull-no-punches social commentary and an indispensable companion to one of the most revolutionary dating books of the twentieth century.
The Summer Wives: A Novel by Beatriz Williams
“The Summer Wives is an exquisitely rendered novel that tackles two of my favorite topics: love and money. The glorious setting and drama are enriched by Williams’s signature vintage touch. It’s at the top of my picks for the beach this summer.”
—Elin Hilderbrand, author of The Perfect Couple
New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams brings us the blockbuster novel of the season—an electrifying postwar fable of love, class, power, and redemption set among the inhabitants of an island off the New England coast . . .
In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island as a schoolgirl from the margins of high society, still reeling from the loss of her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose summer house on Winthrop overlooks the famous lighthouse, Miranda’s catapulted into a heady new world of pedigrees and cocktails, status and swimming pools. Isobel Fisher, Miranda’s new stepsister—all long legs and world-weary bravado, engaged to a wealthy Island scion—is eager to draw Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop society.
But beneath the island’s patrician surface, there are really two clans: the summer families with their steadfast ways and quiet obsessions, and the working class of Portuguese fishermen and domestic workers who earn their living on the water and in the laundries of the summer houses. Uneasy among Isobel’s privileged friends, Miranda finds herself drawn to Joseph Vargas, whose father keeps the lighthouse with his mysterious wife. In summer, Joseph helps his father in the lobster boats, but in the autumn he returns to Brown University, where he’s determined to make something of himself. Since childhood, Joseph’s enjoyed an intense, complex friendship with Isobel Fisher, and as the summer winds to its end, Miranda’s caught in a catastrophe that will shatter Winthrop’s hard-won tranquility and banish Miranda from the island for nearly two decades.
Now, in the landmark summer of 1969, Miranda returns at last, as a renowned Shakespearean actress hiding a terrible heartbreak. On its surface, the Island remains the same—determined to keep the outside world from its shores, fiercely loyal to those who belong. But the formerly powerful Fisher family is a shadow of itself, and Joseph Vargas has recently escaped the prison where he was incarcerated for the murder of Miranda’s stepfather eighteen years earlier. What’s more, Miranda herself is no longer a naïve teenager, and she begins a fierce, inexorable quest for justice for the man she once loved . . . even if it means uncovering every last one of the secrets that bind together the families of Winthrop Island.
The Big Uneasy Bundle by Pauline Baird Jones
The first four installments in the Big Uneasy series!
The Big Easy ain't always easy for the law-abiding Baker family.
First up, Relatively Risky
A quirky artist must unravel her parent's secret past before the mob erases her future. But will the protection of a handsome homicide detective, Alex Baker, be her only hope of surviving the Big Easy?
The oldest of thirteen, Alex Baker does two things: he solves murders and avoids children. Until the day Nell Whitby foils a carjacking, knocks Alex off his feet and turns his life upside down.
When the shots start flying and every rock he turns over reveals another wise guy, Alex decides he needs to stick close to the quirky yet captivating children’s book author while he discovers who is behind a series of mob hits. But can he resist the urge to kiss the kid magnet now in the crosshairs?
A relative newcomer to New Orleans—with no family but her college friend—Nell spends her days in seeming obscurity, sketching tourists in the French Quarter and serving canapés for her friend’s catering business. When a chance encounter makes Nell the target of a mob hit, the only silver lining is meeting the cute cop who is determined to protect her.
But when she finds herself at the head of a second line made up of goons and gangsters, and secrets start bubbling up out of her own past, Nell must figure out what she's made of so she can live long enough to kiss the cop again…
In “Family Treed,” a short story, will Nell survive dinner with the “killing cousins?”
Nell’s not sure why the mob wants to have dinner with her. She is sure she wants a cop at her side.
Alex wouldn’t let Nell go in without him, despite much unease from his many siblings.
But will they get out alive?
And in Dead Spaces “be careful what you dig for.”
A forensic surgeon in the New Orleans Coroner’s Center—and part of her dad’s Baker’s Dozen—Hannah Baker thought she knew where to dig, how and what to slice, and when to walk away.
But when her big brother gets her involved in the exhumation of a couple of old coffins, she realizes the past can’t be ignored. Not when its been simmering up a big pile of trouble for longer than Hannah’s born days.
Only New Orleans could produce a “Baked” gumbo of the mob, shadowy figures from the past, annoying figures from the present, murders, attempted murders, and a really cute detective who is technically off limits on account of he’s her big brother’s partner.
Good thing NOPD Detective Logan Ferris doesn’t know the meaning of “off limits,” because once more the Big Easy is getting mighty uneasy.
In Louisiana Lagniappe...
A Reunion, a murder, and a wedding... What's next?
Becca Smith Poole should have known her forty-fifth high school reunion would be anything but normal - especially when a dead body turns up! Renowned for her problem-solving skills, Becca is determined to discover who the murderer is - and if her former high school crush is still as handsome as he was in their younger days. The first will take some time to solve, the second one took her breath away.
Retired detective Zach Baker has been lonely since the last of his Baker’s dozen moved out. When he sees Becca Smith’s picture in the “where are they now” brochure, he wonders if this might be a first chance for him with the gal he could never connect with in high school. But before he can ask her out, a murder breaks up the party.
Can a retired cop and a mystery reading problem solver unmask a killer before the wedding? Even more challenging, can Zach convince Becca that there is no end date for falling in love?
Pauline Baird Jones has won awards for her tightly plotted, funny, and fast-paced novels of romantic suspense. Get two complete novels and a bonus short story for one great price!
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail.
The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas.
With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey.
An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.
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MRS N, Book Addict