Contemporary

Twenty-three years after The Time Traveler's Wife, Niffenegger hands the disorder to Henry and Clare's daughter. Alba has two husbands, a safe house she has owned since 1947, and a stepsister made of code. The result is warm, unhurried and structurally unruly, and the machine turns out to be the most interesting person in it.

She will let him handcuff her. She will let him take her against a wall, in a barn, on a hayloft floor. She will not let him kiss her on the mouth, because kissing is the thing she misses most afterwards. That single rule is the smartest idea in Jessica Peterson's new cowboy romance.

A burned-out New York divorce lawyer inherits a crumbling Tuscan antique shop, a hundred acres of leased vineyard, and one non-negotiable clause: live there for three months or get nothing. The romance is charming. The dead woman who arranged all of it is the best character in the book.

One sister has built a career on catching liars. The other lies the way most people clear their throats. Nina Simon strands them both on the Colorado River with a corpse, a wellness startup and no way out, and the result is the most entertaining locked-canyon mystery of the year.

A bodyguard is shot on a Tuscan doorstep and left with a misspelled note signed by a Swedish billionaire nobody can find. The second We Solve Murders novel sends Steve, Amy and Rosie after a man that half of Europe insists does not exist.