We’re officially in May!
This month is so busy when it comes to new releases. Sometimes I find it hard to keep up or even decide what to read. It’s a real paralysis of choice so then I wind up reading nothing at all. Anyone else in that boat?
What are you excited for this week? Let us know in the comments!
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Five Broken Blades
Author: Mai Corland
Released: May 7, 2024 by Entangled: Red Tower Books
Genre: Fantasy/Fairy Tale Romance, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Series: The Broken Blades #1It’s the season
for treason…The king of Yusan must die.
The five most dangerous liars in the land have been mysteriously summoned to work together for a single to kill the God King Joon.
He has it coming. Under his merciless immortal hand, the nobles flourish, while the poor and innocent are imprisoned, ruined…or sold.
And now each of the five blades will come for him. Each has tasted bitterness—from the hired hitman seeking atonement, a lovely assassin who seeks freedom, or even the prince banished for his cruel crimes. None can resist the sweet, icy lure of vengeance.
They can agree on murder.
They can agree on treachery.
But for these five killers—each versed in deception, lies, and betrayal—it’s not enough to forge an alliance. To survive, they’ll have to find a way to trust each other…but only one can take the crown.
Let the best liar win.
Amanda: Seems like a good about of fantasy and mystery and perhaps some romance.
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The Five Year Lie
Author: Sarina Bowen
Released: May 7, 2024 by Harper Paperbacks
Genre: Mystery/ThrillerShe thought it was love. Then he vanished.
On an ordinary Monday morning, Ariel Cafferty’s phone buzzes with a disturbing text message. Something’s happened. I need to see you. Meet me under the candelabra tree ASAP. The words would be jarring from anyone, but the sender is the only man she ever loved. And it’s been several years since she learned he died.
Seeing Drew’s name pop up is heart-stopping. Ariel’s gut says it can’t be real. But she goes to the tree anyway. She has to.
Nobody shows. But the text upends everything she thought she knew about the day he left her. The more questions she asks, the more sinister the answers get. Only two things are clear: everything she was told five years ago is wrong, and someone is still lying to her.
The truth has to be out there somewhere. To safeguard herself—and her son—she’ll have to find it before it finds her. And with it, the answer to what became of Drew.
With a heart-stopping romance that only Sarina Bowen can execute, The Five Year Lie is a page-turning, spine-tingling thriller that will have you guessing until the very end.
Sarina Bowen is coming out with a mystery!
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Love, Lies, and Cherry Pie
Author: Jackie Lau
Released: May 7, 2024
Genre: Contemporary Romance, RomanceA charming and clever rom-com about a young woman’s desperate attempts to fend off her meddling mother…only to find that maybe mother does know best.
Mark Chan this. Mark Chan that.
Writer and barista Emily Hung is tired of hearing about the great Mark Chan, the son of her parents’ friends. You’d think he single-handedly stopped climate change and ended child poverty from the way her mother raves about him. But in reality, he’s just a boring, sweater-vest-wearing engineer, and when they’re forced together at Emily’s sister’s wedding, it’s obvious he thinks he’s too good for her.
But now that Emily is her family’s last single daughter, her mother is fixated on getting her married and she has her sights on Mark. There’s only one solution, clearly: convince Mark to be in a fake relationship with her long enough to put an end to her mom’s meddling. He reluctantly agrees.
Unfortunately, lying isn’t enough. Family friends keep popping up at their supposed dates—including a bubble tea shop and cake-decorating class—so they’ll have to spend more time together to make their relationship look real. With each fake date, though, Emily realizes that Mark’s not quite what she assumed and maybe that argyle sweater isn’t so ugly after all… all…
Sarah: New! Jackie! Lau! New! Jackie! Lau!
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The Ministry of Time
Author: Kaliane Bradley
Released: May 7, 2024 by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Genre: Time Travel, Romance, Science Fiction/FantasyA time travel romance, a speculative spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingeniously constructed exploration of the nature of truth and power and the potential for love to change it Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machine,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But he adjusts quickly; he is, after all, an explorer by trade. Soon, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a seriously uncomfortable housemate dynamic, evolves into something much more. Over the course of an unprecedented year, Gore and the bridge fall haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences they never could have imagined.
Supported by a chaotic and charming cast of characters—including a 17th-century cinephile who can’t get enough of Tinder, a painfully shy World War I captain, and a former spy with an ever-changing series of cosmetic surgery alterations and a belligerent attitude to HR—the bridge will be forced to confront the past that shaped her choices, and the choices that will shape the future.
An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks the universal What happens if you put a disaffected millennial and a Victorian polar explorer in a house together?
Amanda: This gives me vibes of a lot of books I’ve previously enjoyed like stuff from Jasper Fforde and This Is How You Lose the Time War.
Elyse: This book looks like so much fun and reminds me vaguely of the series Loki.
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Mistakes We Never Made
Author: Hannah Brown
Released: May 7, 2024 by Forever
Genre: Contemporary Romance, RomanceBachelorette fan-favorite and New York Times bestselling author Hannah Brown delivers the perfect beach read with her fiction debut—“a fun, fast, epic rom-com” (Abby Jimenez, #1 New York Times bestselling author).
Emma Townsend can sum up her situationship with hot-as-hell romantic red flag Finn Hughes in one word: almost. They almost dated in high school. They almost hooked up after college. They almost took things too far one magical night. Their whole story is one series of “almosts” and “nearlys,” and now they just kind of can’t stand each other. Like, at all.
But this weekend, one of their mutuals is getting married . . . and Emma and Finn will have to pretend they don’t remember how disastrous it was the last time they were in a room together.
Emma’s doing a stellar job of playing it cool—until the bride goes missing. Now, with two days before the wedding, Emma and Finn are hitting the road in a sweet vintage sports car in hopes of salvaging someone else’s happily-ever-after.
Yet somewhere between Emma’s breakfast burrito throw down, a high-stakes kayak chase (it can happen), and an outrageous Vegas detour, these sworn enemies are crossing more than just state lines. As old feelings spark once more, Emma begins to question whether risking your heart is ever really a mistake.
Elyse: This book was co-authored by The Bachelor and Bachelorette‘s Hannah Brown so I’m intrigued.
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One Last Shot
Author: Betty Cayouette
Released: May 7, 2024 by St. Martin's Griffin
Genre: Contemporary Romance, RomanceFrom the creator of viral TikTok account Betty’s Book List, a debut romance about a supermodel and a photographer with a past marriage pact who meet again ten years later on a photoshoot in Cinque Terre, Italy.
From the moment Emerson and Theo met as teenagers, they were inseparable. But just when they finally expressed their feelings to one another, they were torn apart.
Now, supermodel Emerson is nearing her twenty-eighth birthday, and she’s tired of looking for love in all the wrong places. When the calendar reminder for the marriage pact she and Theo made as teens goes off on her phone, she realizes this is it—her chance to rekindle the only romance that ever really made sense. Emerson convinces her grumpy agent to book her as the face of the fashion campaign that Theo, now a fashion photographer, is shooting. The good news: the campaign is being shot in ridiculously romantic Cinque Terre, Italy. The bad news? Theo might not be as happy to see her as she’d hoped.
The two embark on a four-day campaign that tests not only their feelings, but their ability to keep their hands off one another. But as roadblock after roadblock keeps them apart, Emerson starts to wonder: will this photoshoot be the key to getting one last shot at love, or will it be a final goodbye?
Debut contemporary romance by a BookTok-er!
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The Takedown
Author: Lily Chu
Released: May 7, 2024 by Sourcebooks Casablanca
Genre: Contemporary Romance, RomanceLove and Vanity meets Succession in a clever, funny, and romantic uplit about wealth, power, family, and love from rising star Lily Chu.
For Dee Kwan, every day is the perfect day. No, really. She has a house she loves, a job she adores, and a ridiculously attractive “nemesis” who never seems to mind when she wins their favorite online game. How can life possibly get better? (It can’t, obviously. It can only get much, much worse.)
Soon Dee is forced to share her adorably cozy home with her parents and prickly estranged grandmother. Then she’s tossed into the deep end, tasked with cleaning up a scandal for intimidatingly chic luxury fashion firm Celeste. If that weren’t enough, she discovers her hot-nemesis works there, too…and Teddy is nothing like the man she thought she knew.
Before she can cry foul, Teddy comes clean about his double he’s the heir to the CEO and he needs her help to make Celeste a better place—for everyone. But that means taking down the old guard—including his father—intent on standing in their way. Now in the center of a dizzying corporate coup, Dee is forced to decide whether she’s ready to stop watching the world through rose-colored glasses and instead face the about herself, about her feelings for Teddy, and about what she’s willing to do to truly make a difference.
Elyse: I will read anything Chu writes!
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It’s a busy week, book-wise. In addition to the aforementioned THE FIVE YEAR LIE, I have the following on my tbr:
TWIN FLAME (May 8) is the next book in Amelia Wilde’s series of romances inspired by Greek mythology (similar to Katee Robert’s Dark Olympus, don’t expect the storyline to match up too closely with the associated myths). This one is about a contemporary Apollo & Artemis who are adopted siblings.
DAD NEXT DOOR (May 8) by Willow Dixon is the next book in her Club Crimson series of m/m romances. Stripper & p*rn star Quinn moves next door to single father Tristan. Bi-awakening begins when Quinn agrees to be Tristan’s fake date.
WORK: STRICTLY PROFESSIONAL (May 8) by Jesse H. Reign is the second book in her Bad Decisions series. Much as the first book (RENT: PAID IN FULL) was both transgressive and vastly entertaining, I’m expecting a similar experience with this story of a man who is roped into being his boss’s fake date for a wedding.
PROMISE ME THIS (May 9) by Karla Sorensen continues her Wilder Family series with a writer heroine suffering from writer’s block and the childhood friend who becomes her roommate and inspires her writing…with love!
Megan Crane (aka, Caitlin Crews) begins a new series, The Careys of Cowboy Point, with THE COWBOY’S MAIL-ORDER BRIDE (May 9). Crane knows how to write a cowboy romance…and the title is undoubtedly self-explanatory.
Wait, wasn’t there recently a request for Western mail order brides?
Love, Lies and Cherry Pie is adorable!
Rest are on my TBR
@Carol S: yes, but I didn’t include the Megan Cane because it hadn’t been published yet.
I finished an advance copy of THE MINISTRY OF TIME last night, and my thoughts are still percolating. I loved the time traveling characters, and I was delighted that the author was intrigued by Gore, a real member of a doomed arctic exploration, and decided to write a book about him. (I have had a crush on Richard, Duke of York, father of Richard III, for decades, so I can relate.) The research is excellent and the set up is fun. The book has time travel, mystery, adventure, romance, and spies. It is a complex book with a darker tone in places and is focused more on the spy/mystery aspect than the book description suggests.
I was confused about THE TAKEDOWN by Lily Chu being mentioned as a new release when I was sure I’d already read it. Turns out it was released as an audiobook on Audible last November, which is how I had consumed it. I wasn’t aware it’s only now been released as an ebook! Interesting choice!
Anyway, if anyone would enjoy listening to the audio version and you are already paying for Audible, it’s included in the subscription for free.
Disturbing the Dead by Kelley Armstrong, the latest in the Rip through Time series (not to be confused with the Stitch in Time series). More of a mystery but with a very slow-burn romance. You need to read the whole series.
A little late for this week’s post as it was released a couple of days ago, but I’m looking forward to reading the 5th book in Parker St. John’s m/m Down Home series – THROW DOWN. I’m hoarding books for next week’s flight to the UK but I don’t know if this will make it until then.
I pre-ordered The Ministry of Time based on Ron Charles’s review in the Washington Post. I get WaPo’s Book Club Newsletter and kind of adore Ron Charles’s POV. I haven’t read the book yet, but I have faith.