Fiction

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 Silicon Valley family buys a Queen Anne they cannot quite afford. The house eats anything already dead, and then it eats the memory of it from everyone who is not on the deed. Doty's debut is a domestic horror novel about the one thing grief has never offered anybody: an opt-out.

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 perfumer with white streaks in her red hair sells illegal magic by moonlight, and every bottle has cost her something she cannot get back. Bracken's first adult romantasy has the freshest magic system in the genre and an ending that refuses to be one.