Thrillers Set in Italy & opposites attract romances - with Sports! 🏈
 | | Hello there! We’re officially out of the holidays and into the new year! January is a big month for thrillers and debuts, so we’re diving into the gripping new read from Rachel Hawkins and spotlighting the first of many big debuts this month. Plus, the opposites-attract trope we love to root for. |  | The Bookends |
| | | Authorial Intrigue in Italy | | | In The Bookends, we pick an exciting new release and pair it with an older title readers will also love. This week: Authors facing creative troubles head to Italy, where they face more threatening challenges to their work—and their lives. | | |
 | | The Villa | | In the new thriller from perennial fav Rachel Hawkins, two writers escape to an Italian villa for the summer. As one of them becomes obsessed with a murder that occurred at the villa decades earlier, their friendship begins to sour. | |
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| |  | | Palace of the Drowned | | After a shameful public spiral following a bad review of her last book, a British novelist retreats to a Venetian palazzo to lick her wounds and encounters a friendly young woman who claims they’ve met before. | |
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 | Ask a Librarian |
| | I’m looking for a grumpy/sunshine sports romance! Do you have any suggestions? - Emily | It’s deeply satisfying to watch a positive, upbeat character melt the exterior of a grouchy, uptight one. In m/f romances, women are often cast as the sunshine, but as a woman who’s occasionally grumpy myself, I love to see a grumpy female lead.
Fine Print
Susan Elizabeth Phllip’s Chicago Stars series is the original sports romance franchise, following the players on a fictional football team since the first book came out in 1994 — the ninth comes out this month. She tackled the grumpy/sunshine trope in the series’ second book, Heaven, Texas.
Between the Lines
More recently, Mariana Zapata has established herself as the queen of grumpy/sunshine sports romances, tackling everything from hockey in From Lukov with Love to soccer. The best sports romances have steamy love stories and absorbing athletic sequences — both love and the game are on the line in these three suggestions. | | | | | |
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 | | Beauty and the Baller | | A taciturn high school football coach still mourning his pro career and his fiancé agrees to fake date a cheerful woman who moved back to her hometown to care for her sister. | |
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|  | | Always Only You | | Self-proclaimed grump Frankie likes her job working for the local hockey team. What she doesn’t like is the ebullient, outgoing Ren, the team’s ridiculously handsome star. If she did like him, it wouldn’t matter; dating between coworkers is strictly forbidden. | |
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 | | Role Model | | When a fight with a teammate leads to Troy being traded to a team far from his friends and family, he discovers a chance to reinvent himself, and he’s hopeful that the team’s sunny social media manager Harris will want to be part of his new story. | |
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| Meet the Librarian
Emily Calkins has worked at public libraries across the US. Tell her what you’re looking for! | | |
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The Big Debut
This month’s GMA Book Club Pick is Parini Shroff’s darkly comedic debut, a novel that bestselling author Elizabeth McCracken calls “twisty, compulsive, bold, surprising, moving.” | |
 | | The Bandit Queens | | A young woman quietly benefits from the rumors that she killed her husband - until the other women in her rural Indian village come to her for help doing the same. | |
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