Welcome back to Hide Your Wallet! This is where we discuss this week’s new releases that happen to be on our radar.
Shocker, it’s mostly contemporaries this week. We also have some romantic suspense and Jude Deveraux’s latest release, which falls into fantasy.
Which books are on your TBR pile? Let us know in the comments!
-
Book People
Author: Jackie Ashenden
Released: January 28, 2025 by Headline Eternal
Genre: Contemporary Romance, RomanceDon’t miss this utterly charming, spicy, enemies-to-lovers rom-com from Jackie Ashenden!
When Kate, a fledgling bookseller, decides to open a bookshop that celebrates the kinds of genre fiction she loves to read (popular and fun!), she’s surprised to find that not everyone in the town is as excited as she is.
Least excited of all? Sebastian, owner of the highbrow bookshop across the road, who has rules for everything: the kind of books he sells, the clothes he wears, and the people he dates (no-one local).
When the pair find themselves working together on the town’s literary festival, their growing attraction becomes harder and harder to ignore. Professional rivalry aside, just one steamy kiss can’t mean anything, can it?
Recently, we were wondering what Jackie Ashenden was up to. Now we know!
Add to Goodreads To-Read List →
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks! -
Order of Swans
Author: Jude Deveraux
Released: January 28, 2025 by MIRA
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Fantasy/Fairy Tale Romance, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Series: The Blue Swan Duology #1In this spellbinding, fantasy-rich novel, a woman is swept into a world where she has the power to alter fairy tales, and change a kingdom’s destiny…
To Kaley Arens, a PhD student and expert in folklore, fairy stories have always had a power and an allure beyond mere entertainment.
It’s only when Kaley accompanies her lifelong friend Jobi on a visit to his home that she realizes how much she still has to learn. Bellis isn’t the remote island that she believed it to be. It’s another world—a stunningly beautiful and seductive one, with its own royalty, its own rules, and inhabitants who breathe life into the tales she was taught were fiction.
Kaley’s presence is no simple holiday. She has a mysterious connection with Jobi and with Bellis, and abilities that may help determine this world’s fate. Tasked with locating a lost prince, Kaley and her companions—the enigmatic Tanek, a member of the Order of Swans, and Sojee, Kaley’s colossal bodyguard—journey through a land both thrilling and terrifying, where the uncanny and the familiar go hand in hand.
But in fairy tales, heroes and villains are easy to discern. Here, nothing is quite as it seems. And though Kaley is discovering that she can change the outcome of the fairy tales she knows so well, her own story is unfolding in ways impossible to predict, with a destiny she could never have foretold…
Jude Deveraux is releasing the start of a contemporary fantasy romance duology.
Add to Goodreads To-Read List →
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks! -
Out of the Woods
Author: Hannah Bonam-Young
Released: January 28, 2025 by Dell
Genre: Contemporary Romance, RomanceA married couple joins a week-long wilderness expedition to help them reconnect in this heartfelt companion novel to the viral TikTok sensation Out on a Limb.
High school sweethearts Sarah and Caleb Linwood have always been a sure thing. For the past seventeen years, they have had each other’s backs through all of life’s ups and downs.
But Sarah has begun to wonder… who is she without her other half?
When she decides to take on a project of her own, a fundraising gala in memoriam of her late mother, Sarah wants nothing more than to prove to herself—and to everyone else—that she doesn’t need Caleb’s help to succeed. She’s still her mother’s daughter, after all, independent and capable.
That is, until the event fails and Caleb uninvitedly steps in to save the day.
The rift that follows unearths a decade of grievances and doubts. Are they truly the same people they were when they got married at nineteen? Are they supposed to be?
In a desperate attempt to fix what they fear is breaking, Sarah and Caleb make the spontaneous decision to get out of their comfort zone and join a grueling, week-long hiking trip intended to guide couples through rough patches.
What follows is a life-affirming comedy of errors as two nature-averse people fight their way out of the woods in order to find their way back to their roots.
Bonam-Young’s books have been recommended before and this one is about a marriage in trouble.
Add to Goodreads To-Read List →
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks! -
Strike and Burn
Author: Taylor Hutton
Released: January 28, 2025 by Berkley
Genre: Romantic Suspense, RomanceA breathless romantic thriller that doesn’t just toe the line between danger and desire—it burns it to the ground.
Honor Stone is all alone in this world. No family, no money, no future. So when she locks eyes with Strike Madden—in the morgue of all places—she’s not in the mood to be seduced. Sure, he’s drop-dead gorgeous, and the sizzle of attraction between them is undeniable, but she’s reeling from her identical twin sister’s murder. It’s the wrong time, wrong place, wrong everything.
Still, the enigmatic billionaire hires Honor as an artist to spearhead his carefully curated erotic animation studio—a job they soon find to be a dangerous mix of business and pleasure.
But when her twin’s obsessive killer targets Honor, the painful secrets of Honor’s traumatic past will finally be exposed with devastating consequences. Strike will stop at nothing to protect her, uncovering his own bone-chilling demons—a beautifully broken, dark side that doesn’t scare Honor…
It consumes her.
Elyse’s pick!
Add to Goodreads To-Read List →
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks! -
Wedding Dashers
Author: Heather McBreen
Released: January 28, 2025 by Berkley
Genre: Contemporary Romance, RomanceAfter a case of mistaken identity and an almost one-night stand, two stranded wedding guests have to find their way to their final destination together, in this riotously fun debut romance.
Ada’s little sister is getting married. Which should be a happy thought, right? But the once close sisters have been in a year long fight, the wedding is all the way in Ireland, and Ada is so broke that she just barely managed to get a ticket on a budget airline. And as if things couldn’t get worse, said airline just cancelled her connection. Which means Ada is stuck in London with no way to make it to the wedding.
Surely she’s hit rock bottom?
So, there’s no reason for her not to spill her heart out about the over-the-top wedding, her sister’s worryingly quick engagement, and the womanizing best man she’s dreading meeting to a handsome also-stranded stranger at the bar. Until she realizes the stranger is headed to the same wedding. Oh, and he’s the infamous best man.
Now, Jack and Ada must put their simmering attraction behind them to make it to Belfast before they miss the nuptials. But between flat tires, missed trains, and suspect hostels, Jack and Ada start to question whether their feelings are worth going the distance, or just a distracting detour along the way.
Dahlia: Every single element of this book just sounds obscenely fun, with clever spins on so many great tropes – road trip, one-night stand, and per multiple blurbs, plenty of Only One Bed.
Add to Goodreads To-Read List →
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!
On my tbr this week:
Jackie Ashenden’s BOOK PEOPLE (January 28) looks like a change of pace for Ashenden (one of my Harlequin Presents Queens of Angsty Heartache), at least judging by the illustrated cover. Rival, antagonistic bookstore owners find common ground and, eventually, love.
Julie Kriss’s YOU GIVE ME THAT FEELING (January 30) seems to have flown in under the radar because I only knew about it when it popped up on my Kindle recommendations. YGMTF appears to be adjacent to Kriss’s Road Kings series of rock band romances. The hero is a rock bad-boy (referred to but not really seen in the previous Road King books) who needs to change his image. Fake dating America’s rom-com sweetheart might help. I love Kriss—can’t wait for this one.
Julia Connors’s CROSS-CHECKED (January 31), the third book in her Boston Rebels series of hockey romances, features an antagonists-to-lovers between the Rebels captain and the team’s GM—who is the first female GM of a professional hockey team.
Ooo, this week looks awesome! Excited for these. And some lovely covers—STRIKE AND BURN looks like a unique style for romantic suspense!
BOOK PEOPLE should obviously be categorized as fantasy or historical fiction, though—a town that can support TWO bookstores!
Strike and Burn must have been mentioned in the WAYR this past weekend, although if there’s one thing I have learned from HABO there’s no premise so outlandish there aren’t multiple examples of it. Maybe the combination of morgues and pants feels isn’t so rare – CS Poe, Kara Jorgensen, Stephanie Gayle are three culprits who spring to mind, which means I have read those books in the past few months. But having one or both of the characters *work* in the morgue is somehow very different to me.
A morgue-based meetsexy over a sister’s corpse? Is that a thing now, or is this the only one? Did she really hate her sister? Were they part of some experimental upbringing where they didn’t know one another? Death can certainly lead to life-affirming behaviors for survivors but idk, this seems… I guess I have to read this book, huh.
Singer-songwriter Neko Case (solo and as part of The New Pornographers) has a memoir out, “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” and she’s on tour to promote it. I already ordered the book and am debating getting the audiobook, which she narrates. She has such an amazing voice.
Order of The Swans drove me crazy: great worldbuilding, heroine who REFUSES to be proactive. Ashenden, Bonham-Young and McBreen are on my TBR!