My Top Five Recent Release Romance Novels in a Series

Summer affords me some additional time to read, and here are some of my favorite recent releases from this summer.

I am grateful for prolific authors, especially ones who write series with interrelated characters. If you pull me in with the first book, I’ll buy them all. And I’m a fast reader, averaging a book a day, so please, keep writing.

Kendra Elliot—In the Pines (Columbia River Book 3)

Romantic suspense

It’s been a few years since Kendra Elliot completed her Mercy Kilpatrick Merciful series, neatly wrapping up the relationship of FBI agent Mercy Kilpatrick and Eagle’s Nest, Oregon police chief Truman Daly, with their marriage and happily ever after.

Elliot’s most recent series, Columbia River, revisits some of her characters—Zander Wells, Ava McLane, and Mason Callahan from the Callahan & McLane series, and most recently, Mercy and Truman in her recent release In the Pines.

Truman is dealing with the craziness that descended on Eagle’s Nest when a reclusive millionaire left clues to a $2 million hidden treasure in a poem. A prize that the fortune hunters believe is located somewhere near the remote town in Eastern Oregon. A prize someone is willing to kill for.

Mercy is investigating the disappearance of a woman and her baby daughter after the woman’s son approaches Truman in a café. As Mercy investigates the missing woman and her family, she finds secrets and intrigue going back decades.

What originally seems like two unrelated cases quickly merge once again, putting Mercy, Truman, and their loved ones at risk.

Pippa Grant—The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink Book 1)

An opposites attract, small-town romance

Pippa Grant is the best at off-the-wall, batshit crazy characters, and the characters in The One Who Love You don’t disappoint.

When Phoebe Lightly’s rich, entitled, egocentric grandmother, Gigi, has a near-death experience, Gigi decides that the path to redemption is moving to the town of Tickled Pink, Wisconsin, and following the path to moral transformation from the movie “Pink Gold.” And the entire family must go too—Phoebe, her parents, sister Tavi, and brother Carter. All uprooted from their self-absorbed and privileged lives and forced to live together in an abandoned high school in the name of saving their souls. No Wi-Fi, no trust fund, just family activities meant to get the family into heaven.

Teague Miller just wants to be left alone. He loves the town of Tickled Pink exactly like it is. Small, obscure, with plenty of fishing. He has a teenager to raise and goats to milk. The last thing he needs is to be hounded by a big city socialite on a mission to thwart her grandmother and get back to her life in the city.

Antics ensue with all the hilarity you’d expect from Pippa Grant, including escaping goats, an adult water balloon fight, and, of course, because it’s northern Wisconsin, snowshoe baseball. Which is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds.

But there are also secrets, both Phoebe’s and Teague’s, and those pesky things have a way of coming to the surface.

Ultimately, Teague and Phoebe find that they’re not so different from one another. He’s a bit more Upper East Side than he lets on, and she’s a little more small-town Wisconsin, and that all works out just fine in the town of Tickled Pink.