Meister, Ellen. Divorce Towers.

Seattle: Montlake, 2024.

Meister produces pretty good rom-coms and she writes them on several levels and with multiple, interlocking plots. The heroine of this one (because that’s the best descriptor in this case) is Addison Torres of Manhattan, now in her late twenties, who screwed up big time. She’s been working for several years as assistant to the premier professional matchmaker in the city — the personalized version of a dating app for the rich — and she was good at it. She had a live-in boyfriend who seemed about to become her fiance, but then she self-destructed by sleeping with a client.

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Lauren, Christina. The Exception to the Rule.

Seattle: Amazon Original Stories, 2024.

This author — which is actually a two-woman writing team — has become a favorite of mine in the genre of romance fiction. Every one of their first five novels has been first-rate, a nice balance between serious issues and humor,with excellent dialogue. This one is part of Amazon’s original “Improbable Meet-Cute Collection” and it’s novelette-length, running only 100 pages. And not only is it the ultimate “meet cute” story, it’s a whole lot of fun.

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Lee, Alan. Hollow Girl.

Np: The Author, 2023.

This well-written, self-published police procedural is set in Roanoke, Virginia, and features rookie police officer Andie Stackhouse, who, at the age of thirty, is the oldest graduate in her academy class. It’s a completely new career for her, having fled from a very lucrative job as a lobbyist in Washington, and you’ll learn all her extensive backstory as the narrative progresses. I wondered at first why the book is set in1995 — that’s not really far enough in the past to be considered “historical fiction,” not to someone of my age — but apparently the author has already produced a series of crime novels featuring Stackhouse and this is her “origin story.”

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Taylor, Jodi. The Ballad of Smallhope and Pennyroyal.

London: Headline Publishing, 2024.

If you like revenge stories, this is a really good one — and I mean Count of Monte Cristo-level good. But first, it’s necessary to issue a waning: If the two names in the title mean nothing to you, then I’m afraid you’re in the wrong book, at least for now. Because this is the origin story of two of two of the main supporting characters in the author’s immensely popular series about St. Mary’s Institute for Historical Research, now up to fourteen volumes, as well as its spin-off “Time Police” series (another five volumes), and the frequent casual references to earlier events over that many books means you’ll miss nine-tenths of the story. Sorry.

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LaCour, Nina & David Levithan. You Know Me Well.

NY: St. Martin, 2016.

Both these authors are very highly regarded for their young adult romances, especially for for the honesty of their plots and their multidimensional real-world characters, and also both are gay, so that gives you a solid idea of what to expect. The setting is San Francisco during Pride Week and this year, gay suburban high school junior Mark Rissil and his best friend, Ryan (who is desperate to come out but just isn’t ready yet), have slipped off to the city on the first night to experience the annual boisterous celebration for themselves. Mark has been desperately in love with his friend forever, and the two of them have “fooled around” (as Mark describes it), but Ryan just doesn’t see him that way. Maybe soaking up Pride Week will change things.

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Nayes, Alan. The Guest.

Np: The Author, 2020.

This is a not-bad science fiction adventure that reminds me of an updated version of the alien invasion films produced in the 1950s. I’ve never heard of the author, but he appears to have more than a dozen previous novels out. However, the fact that all of them are self-published also means that this one would have benefited from the attentions of an experienced line editor. (There are numerous instances of the sort of overwriting and narrative redundancy and jarringly weird punctuation that one would ordinarily expect in a first novel.)

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Sachar, Louis. Holes.

NY: Random House, 1998.

Stanley Yelnats (which is “Stanley” spelled backward) is a large, overweight middle school student somewhere in Texas, and he gets arrested for stealing a pair of sports shoes that belong to a famous baseball player. He didn’t do it, of course — they were thrown off an overpass and hit him in the head — but he gets convicted anyway and is given a choice between eighteen months in juvenile prison or a similar period at Camp Green Lake. Stanley’s rather naively optimistic parents pick the camp (“it sounds nice”), so off he goes to the middle of nowhere. The now-famous opening line” “There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.”

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