It’s one thing when your husband is arrested by the FBI for wire fraud but it is quite another when a social media account for the town of Juniper Shores, North Carolina, blasts this personal information and many updates in the latest beach read from Kristy Woodson Harvey, Beach House Rules, hitting store shelves on May 27.

Denied bond for white-collar crime, Charlotte Sitterly’s husband Bill has left her and their daughter Iris in a very vulnerable situation in which they cannot access their bank accounts, their house, their car, their personal belongings. But a stroke of luck in the form of neighbor Alice Bailey offering accommodation at her former bed and breakfast where she is already providing a safe harbor to two other families, is just the stroke of luck Charlotte and Iris need.

On the other hand, Alice’s beachfront home is a favorite target of social media gossip primarily because Alice is being targeted as a Black Widow having lost a husband to an avalanche on a ski trip, a second to a car accident, and a third to a fall from their three-story home.

But Charlotte and Iris are embraced by Alice and the other two families, and in this environment, they start to put their lives back together as Charlotte, always a homemaker, re-enters the job force and Iris is able to keep attending her school thanks to her popular friends who rally around her.

What are the chances that Bill has been framed, that someone else committed the crime? If he is guilty, can Charlotte possibly restore funds to those who have been cheated, especially to those who have had their entire retirement dollars wiped out? Will Charlotte and Iris ever be able to claim their home or will they continue group living in Alice’s home for the foreseeable future?

Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism, Harvey’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Southern Living, Parade, Traditional Home, and USA TODAY. She lives with her family in Beaufort, NC.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting May 3, 2025.

I would like to thank Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster LLC, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

The Love Haters by Katherine Center

 When Katie’s boyfriend cheats on her, her self-esteem takes a nosedive. Worse, her coworker assigns her a video profile of a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in Key West in The Love Haters, a contemporary romance from Katherine Center arriving on bookstore shelves May 20.

Katie does not want the assignment—not because the Coastie is a hunk—but because she cannot swim nor is she a fan of helicopters, which are used in these rescues. Not only does she need to be a swimmer but she also needs to train to be the person who needs rescue from the ocean. However, if she does not fulfill the assignment, she will become a candidate for lay-off.

Tom “Hutch” Hutchinson is said to be a love-hater having gone through an ordeal in which his brother’s drunk fiancé threw herself at him at his brother’s rehearsal dinner. That created a rift between the brothers, who were already on shaky ground.

Now a bit of a love-hater herself after being dumped, Katie finds herself drawn to Hutch as he is such a kind, considerate person, as well as a competent rescue swimmer. When he learns she cannot swim other than maybe a sloppy dog paddle, he starts meeting with her daily to make her a competent swimmer. The more the two spend time together, the more the love-hating may be wearing off.

Readers will be rooting for Katie and Hutch in the latest from Katherine Center whose The Lost Husband and Happiness for Beginners were both made into Netflix movies. The author lives in her hometown of Houston, Texas, with her family.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting April 18, 2025.

I would like to thank St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review. 

 

Where the Rivers Merge by Mary Alice Monroe

 In the first of two planned novels about the history of a plantation in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and its family, Mary Alice Monroe writes in the voice of an adult Eliza Rivers as she recalls her early years in Where the Rivers Merge being published May 13. The present is June 17, 1988, when Eliza, now Mrs. DeLancey, plans to protect Mayfield by putting 1,000 acres surrounding the farm into a conservation plan, a move her son Arthur protests as he tries to push her out of the DeLancey Group.

Eliza’s life as a young girl in the early 1900s consisted of plenty of chores but also time to explore the land, the pond, the forests, the birds, and other creatures. A horse lover, Eliza recounts a bit of history about the Marsh Tacky as she recollects her father’s purchase of the stallion Capitan. However, life on Mayfield was not all rosy as the Rivers family was “land rich and money poor” causing some of the strife in the often-dysfunctional family with a city mother and a country father.

Over the years, Eliza has been able to turn things around on Mayfield, creating a profitable truck market business, and she is developing the Mayfield Wildlife Foundation to preserve the land. With her second marriage, she gained a “collection of businesses into a conglomerate of corporations and subsidiaries” that became the DeLancey Group.

With her son’s limited vision for Mayfield and the company, Eliza seeks out her niece Savannah and grandniece Norah to visit Mayfield so she can share the story of her family’s history with them. A mural in the dining room of the house serves to prod Eliza to tell the stories that go with the scenes starting in the 1700s with construction of the fields for the farm’s original crop, rice.

This initial book in the series takes the reader up to Eliza’s first wedding in 1926 as she ends the telling with “This story is far from over.” Mary Alice Monroe, the Queen of Low Country Fiction and a go-to author of beach reads, has turned her hand to historical fiction, leaving this reader eager for the next book, to be called The Rivers’ End, to learn about all the tales remaining in the mural and the questions left unanswered.

Monroe is at her best when dealing with complex family situations and relationships. She lives on the Isle of Palms, a small barrier island just outside of Charleston, and has a mountain hideaway in North Carolina.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting April 12, 2025.

I would like to thank William Morrow, an imprint of Harper/Collins Publishers, and NetGalley for providing me with an Advanced Readers’ Copy in return for an objective review.

The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick

 Traveling back to the 1960s when Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique was a popular book club read, four women—Margaret, Viv, Bitsy, and Charlotte—struggle with their place in the world in The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick coming out April 22.

Living in a planned community in Virginia, the women call themselves the Bettys in a salute to the author of Mystique. Bonded by their book club, the four each deal with various struggles: raising children mostly single-handedly, dealing with troubling times in their marriages, and dissatisfaction with their current life.

Though Margaret is devoted to her three children and her husband, she wants to do something more with her life. A writing contest catches her eye, causing her to wonder if she could brush up on her skills to become a successful writer.

Viv is proud of her “six “terrific, respectful, clean-cut, all-American kids,” loves her sexy husband, and really wants to get back to work as a nurse now that the kids are all in school. Frustrated with her doctor who will not prescribe birth control pills without her husband’s signature, she realizes her back-to-work plan is a fail as the smell of greasy pepperoni sends her to the bathroom…twice.

Bitsy is the youngest of the wives at 23. Having grown up with horses, Bitsy has always wanted to be a veterinarian but has been frustrated when none of her college professors would write her a recommendation for vet school because she is a woman. She  marries a veterinarian and works as a stable hand where she gets to ride and care for horses.

Charlotte is new to the community of Concordia, quickly earning a reputation as an “oddball.” For some reason not yet known by the others, her husband has banished her from the New York she loves to suburban living in Virginia. Her marital problems seem most profound as her husband is rarely home and is known to have a wandering eye. She finds joy in her four children and her ambitious painting projects.

While they attribute their willingness to try new outlooks and actions to having read Friedan’s book, they also give credit to the bonds they have created as they deal with the past, cope with a changing world, and redefine themselves.

Marie Bostwick writes uplifting historical and contemporary fiction. Marie’s popular Cobbled Court Quilt series has been embraced by quilters and non-sewers alike. Her novel The Second Sister was made into the Hallmark Hall of Fame feature film “Christmas Everlasting.” If she is not reading a book, Marie most likely is in her office writing one. She lives with her husband in Washington state.

Nightshade by Michael Connelly

 Michael Connelly introduces readers to a new character in his police procedurals with Detective Sergeant Stillwell of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in Nightshade, arriving on store shelves May 20. Stillwell finds himself assigned to Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles off the Southern California coast, after the politics of the homicide department have forced him off the mainland.

On Catalina, Stillwell leads the sheriff’s substation where he finds most of his workload confined to drunk and disorderly arrests and petty theft cases. He starts most days watching the folks who disembark the Catalina Express, a ferry from the mainland. Many of the tourists expect to be gambling at the Catalina Casino not realizing that it is and has always been a ballroom and a movie theatre.

Today is going to be different because a hull scraper has reported his encounter with a  human body anchored down 33 feet under a private boat. Having been a recovery diver when he worked on the mainland, Stillwell suits up for the cold water and plunges into the ocean to verify the claim. Stillwell theorizes the body has been in the water for at least four days; he determines it is a woman who has dark hair with a distinct streak of purple dye.

As he surfaces, he plans the next steps in the investigation: call out the dive team, the homicide unit, and the coroner’s investigators from Los Angeles. Once he turns the murder over to the mainland team, he knows he should stand down but instead he works the case from the island side. He finds himself once again pitted against homicide cop Rex Ahearn, known by other cops as A-hole or King A-hole, who wants Stillwell to back off from the case.

Stillwell knows that much investigation can be done on the island rather than from a chair in the homicide unit. Soon, he is on the trail of the woman called “Nightshade,” but once he turns that information over to Ahearn, he finds himself called on the carpet by his boss on the mainland. When Ahearn pins the murder of Nightshade on the wrong assailant, will Stillwell accept that outcome or will he bring in the real killer himself?

Connelly has left the streets of Los Angeles behind for this island in the Pacific that was once owned by William Wrigley Jr. of chewing gum fame. Along with the change in law enforcement venue, the Nightshade novel introduces a wide-range of supporting characters as well as a few “bad guys.”

After Michael Connelly spent three years covering crime in Los Angeles, he wrote his first novel featuring Harry Bosch, The Black Echo, which he based partly on a true crime. Three of Connelly’s characters have found success on streaming platforms Amazon Prime and Netflix: Bosch, Bosch: Legacy, and The Lincoln Lawyer with a third character, Renee Ballard, promised her own series.

The River Knows Your Name by Kelly Mustian

 Author Kelly Mustian has followed up her debut The Girls in the Stilt House with a strong  sophomore novel The River Knows Your Name, coming out April 1. Set in 1971, the story introduces sisters Nell and Evie Brown who are concerned about their mother Hazel. She has started acting  opposite of her secretive and emotionally remote ways, doing things she had never done: inviting Evie out to lunch, taking her shopping, going to movies, and singing in a church choir.

Nell was six years old when Hazel did a favor for a friend by taking in a little girl around two for one night. The friend was never heard from again causing Hazel to uproot them all from their home in Mississippi to Clay Mountain near West Jefferson, North Carolina, to raise Evie as her own. When Evie was ten, she and Nell found inside a book a birth certificate for Evie naming  a stranger as her mother. The girls never let on to Hazel that they knew this secret. Because of Hazel’s change of personality, Nell decides to go back to Mississippi to learn more about Hazel and to track down the person listed on Evie’s birth certificate.

Becca, who had married Ben Chambers in 1932, was still a newlywed, when her “second mother” Lottie drowned in the Mississippi River. Upon hearing the terms of Lottie’s will, Becca learned that she had inherited a house in the near ghost town of Rodney, Mississippi. Orphaned at age six, Becca was aware that Lottie had once lived in Rodney with the only man she had ever loved. Becca did not realize that Lottie still owned a house there, a house that would provide refuge for Becca when her world turned upside down.

The lives of all four women will come together as they deal with love, loss, secrets, and “chosen family.” This book will be hard to put down until the last mystery is revealed. The River Knows Your Name is set in the Mississippi Delta as well as in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

Kelly Mustian received the Mississippi Library Association's 2023 Author Award for Fiction, while The Girls in the Stilt House was shortlisted for the 2022 Crook's Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. She has also written for numerous literary journals and commercial magazines. Born in Mississippi, Mustian lives in North Carolina.

                                                                                              

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting February 28, 2025.

I would like to thank Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

 

The Love We Found by Jill Santopolo

 

In The Love We Found by Jill Santopolo coming out March 18, Lucy recounts the life of her first love, Gabriel, who she met in college in New York City. Gabriel became a war photographer and Lucy produces children’s programming.

She lost Gabe almost ten years ago, and his editor at the Associated Press wants to do an update of Gabe’s book. Lucy has been asked to share Gabe’s photographs for the project. As she digs into the box of his old photos, an address in Italy written on a scrap of paper is intriguing. Impulsively Lucy buys a ticket to Italy to find who lived at the address.

As she uncovers Gabe’s secret, she encounters Dr. Dax Armstrong, a New Yorker in Italy working with a non-governmental organization. Lucy and the doctor become involved over two days in Italy though they promise to renew their acquaintance when he cycles back to New York.

For seven years, Lucy has been divorced from Darren with whom she shares three children. She had been unfaithful to Darren, having shattered their marriage with the information that their youngest child Samuel was not biologically Darren’s.

With her memories of Gabe renewed through the photo project, she believes it is the right time to tell Samuel about his biological father. Darren, adamant that the time is not right to tell Sammy, feels threatened and refuses. But Lucy wants to set herself free of this secret, hoping to chart a new journey for her broken heart with the doctor she met in Italy.

How will Sammy respond to the news that he has a father other than Darren? What will her two older children think about this change in their family dynamic? What are the next steps she can take to put her regret behind her and forge a life with a new love?

Designed as a follow-up to the Reese’s Book Club pick of 2018 The Light We Lost, The Love We Found can be read as a standalone.

Jill Santopolo is the Editorial Director of Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group. She lives in New York City.