Prepare to escape to Scotland with a gorgeous feel-good romance this summer…
Returning to the Scottish Highlands was never part of Poppy Summers’ plan. But life had other ideas.
With her parents’ cherished holiday cottages losing money, Poppy is determined to carry on their legacy and save the business before they’re forced to sell.
Revamping the cottages is Poppy’s priority until she meets Mason Cooper, a charming historian drawn to the highlands for research. As their newfound friendship grows, is it possible that something more might be enough of a reason to make Poppy stay for good?
Pre-order Links
Publication Dates
30th August 2026 for Ebook and 10th September 2026 for paperback
Author Bio –
Julie Shackman is a former journalist from Scotland, who has always wanted to
write feel-good romance.
As well as being an author, Julie also writes verses and captions for greetings card companies.
Julie admits to having an obsession with stationery and handbags.
She has two sons and a Romanian rescue pup, Cooper.
The Secret Castle in the Highlands is Julie’s fifteenth novel.
Social Media Links –
Julie Shackman Author
Julie Shackman (@G13Julie) / Twitter
Julie Georgina Shackman (@juliegeorginashackman) • Instagram photos and videos
Julia loves donning her gardening gloves for the first blooms of spring. But when out working in the local wildflower meadow, she does not expect to find a dead body…!
Spring has come to Berrywick, and Julia Bird is determined to enjoy the fine weather. But not all life is in flower when she stumbles across the body of building expert Basil Crow next to a bright yellow digger. And Julia believes this is no accident.
Julia’s suspicions are confirmed when forensics report a brutal blow to the head. Julia soon learns from pie shop owner, and Basil’s first wife Delilah, that he was not widely liked and left behind three failed marriages. Could one of his ex-wives have wanted revenge? Julia’s friend Tabitha was in a neighbourly dispute with him after he blocked her car in her driveway. But is this motive enough to kill?
Then local choir singer Esmeralda is found dead in the woods. The police think the murders are unconnected. Unlike Basil, Esmeralda was a well-loved soul. Who would want her dead? Digging for clues, Julia realises that both victims had a link to the proposed redevelopment of the meadow Basil was found in. But would someone really kill to save it? Can Julia find the murderer before someone else is pushing up the daisies?
A page-turning and totally charming cozy mystery set in the English countryside. Fans of M.C. Beaton, Faith Martin and Betty Rowlands will love the Julia Bird Mysteries!
Katie Gayle is the writing partnership of best-selling South African writers, Kate Sidley and Gail Schimmel. Kate and Gail have, between them, written over ten books of various genres, but with Katie Gayle, they both make their debut in the cozy mystery genre. Both Gail and Kate live in Johannesburg, with husbands, children, dogs and cats. Unlike their sleuth Epiphany Bloom, neither of them have ever stolen a cat from the vet.
My thoughts: Dog walker finds body, and once again it’s Julia Bird! This time she’s stumbled across the body of local council planning officer Basil, and it turns out there are plenty of people who might have a motive to kill him, including Julia’s librarian friend Tabitha, and it isn’t for defacing library books!
As the police threaten to stop Tabitha heading to Ghana for a family wedding, Julia goes into detective mode, determined to find the culprit and prove Tabitha’s innocence.
Could the develop of a local beauty spot, popular with picnickers and dog walkers, be the reason Basil, and his colleague Esmerelda, have met sad ends in the open air? Well, the only way to find out is to read the book!
It’s another entertaining installment of Julia’s misadventures, and as well as the murders, things could be moving to the next level with Sean and there’s changes ahead for one of the charity shop crew too.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour,but all opinions remain my own.
A high-speed train. A deadly game. Three hours to save your family.
A father and daughter are caught in a deadly game of ‘I Spy’ on a train journey from Paris to London in this brand-new claustrophobic thriller from C. M. Ewan, author of The House Hunt and One Wrong Turn.
Whilst queuing for the Eurostar in Paris, Mark’s four-year-old-daughter points out a fellow traveller – a ‘Bad Man’ – during a game of ‘I Spy’. As they board the train, he realizes her description may not have been wrong, as the man now carries a different suitcase – and is sitting very near to them.
This new high-octane thriller weaves an emotional family survival plot and will leave readers shuddering.
C. M. Ewan is a pseudonym for Chris Ewan, the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of many mystery and thriller novels. Chris’s first standalone thriller, Safe House, was a bestseller in the UK and was shortlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.
He is also the author of the thrillers One Wrong Turn, The House Hunt, The Interview, Dead Line, Dark Tides, Long Time Lost and A Window Breaks, as well as the Good Thief’s Guide series of mystery novels. The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam won the Long Barn Books First Novel Award and has been published in thirteen countries.
Chris lives with his wife and their two children in Somerset, where he writes full time.
Find Chris on twitter/X: @ChrisEwan and Instagram: @c.m.ewan
My thoughts: Travelling with children is stressful enough without one of them being kidnapped on the Eurostar between Paris and London, but that’s what happens to Mark as he returns from a solo parenting holiday with his young daughter and stepdaughter, teenager Freya.
He looks away for a few minutes and Freya’s gone. With his toddler in his arms, he can’t search as thoroughly as he’d like, but then a stranger tells him to sit down. If he does as he’s told then Freya will be fine. But if he doesn’t, she dies.
His wife Claire isn’t stuck at work dealing with IT chaos, she’s meeting someone, someone they all believed had died six years before. And the people who have Freya would like to talk to that someone. Mark has to make that happen. But with no way to talk to Claire due to the huge underwater tunnel he’s in, he’s stuck begging for the life of his teenage daughter and keeping his other daughter occupied. It might not be a long trip but for Mark it’s the longest train ride of his life.
It’s a really compelling and fascinating concept, they’re stuck on a train, there’s nowhere to go, no way to get help, but also super limited places to stash a teenage girl. Even when they arrive at St Pancras, with the millions of CCTV cameras everywhere, they still can’t rescue Freya from her captors without problems. And when you learn what it is the kidnappers want, and how totally beyond Mark and Claire’s normal life things have become, it’s jaw dropping.
Utterly gripping, very clever and filled with so many twists, you’ll be up all night!
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
We’re celebrating the March release of Return of Atlantis by Amy Cip! Read on for more details!
Return of Atlantis (Atlantis Rising Book 2)
Release Date: March 3, 2026
Genre: Fantasy/ Space Pirates/ Dragons
Ember Weathers and her friends successfully returned the lost city of Atlantis to the ground after it was cursed to the sky – you’d think that meant their troubles were over.
While Atlantis is a city built on magic and love, not everyone was happy to see it returned. Immediately surrounded by enemies – both from this world and Atlantis – now is their time to fight for peace. That’s not as easy as it sounds. As soon as Atlantis falls from the sky, it’s people are cursed with a sleeping sickness. Queen Aura binds the gates closed with a magical ward, and they’re just as trapped as they were in the sky. In order to break the curse and broker peace, Ember and her boyfriend, Shepherd, will need more than the help of their friends. They must find old and trapped magical beings, and travel through time to unravel the problems from the beginning.
But will this help things, or will it trap them forever?
Fans of Holly Black, Rebecca Ross, Sarah J. Maas, Lauren Roberts, Kiera Cass, Tracy Wolff, and Jennifer L. Armentrout will enjoy Amy Cip.
We’re proud to present the cover for The Truth-Teller’s Bargain by Camille Wolfewood!
If you would like to sign up for an ARC click here
The Truth-Teller’s Bargain (The Oracle’s Duet #1)
Expected Release Date: June 2, 2026
Genre: Epic Romantasy
Cover Designer: Lin Romanov @rlinarts
Enemies-to-allies-to-lovers
Slow burn
Found family
Touch her and die
Bargain magic
Alethea has never been free.
Born an Oracle with the power to speak the truth, she has spent her life in a gilded cage, her gift abused by her mother, the Queen of Lenorea, to maintain her rule and silence opposition. When Alethea speaks a prophecy that threatens the crown, she flees…
And falls right into the hands of Nakir Hasan, the cursed and exiled heir leading the rebellion against Lenorea’s throne. He takes her captive, expecting a loyal weapon of the crown, only to discover a young woman desperate to escape the very life she’s been forced to serve.
So they strike a bargain.
Alethea will help Nakir reclaim the crown, and in return, he’ll grant her the freedom she was never allowed.
But what begins as an alliance between enemies slowly becomes something far more dangerous. As war approaches and prophecy closes in, their unlikely pull to each other grows stronger, and soon, Alethea and Nakir are faced with a damning realization…
What if the greatest threat to the bargain they made isn’t the prophecy Alethea spoke… but the freedom she seeks, and what—or who—it will cost her to claim it?
Violence, death, implied torture, references to domestic violence, captivity, emotional abuse, substance use, and profanity. The Truth-Teller’s Bargain also contains explicit, open-door sexual content.
Winter came for the pancakes. Hollowvale fed him the dead.
Dane Winter is unemployed and on a lonely road to nowhere. Riding his motorcycle west from New York, he spots a sign on the Interstate: Hollowvale, Pennsylvania. A place he hasn’t visited since his Redwind Security days. Back then, the town was known for its coal mines and the best pancakes he ever tasted.
A chance encounter with a distraught local woman pulls him into investigating her friend’s disappearance. When Jacob Rhodes’ body is found at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft, the local authorities are quick to label it an accident. Winter isn’t convinced…
Between the death of Jacob and the unexplained illnesses spreading through the local population, it’s clear that nothing is as it seems in the town of Hollowvale. Worse still, Winter thinks it might have something to do with his time there two years earlier.
What starts as a quest for answers becomes a fight to expose a conspiracy that reaches far beyond the small town. But Winter is never one to give up, and he’s willing to burn it all down in order to uncover the horrific truth.
Sam Cogley is the author of popular action thrillers, melding suspense-laden espionage plots with the mesmerising world of high-tech innovations. He writes the high-octane Dane Winter thrillers for Boldwood Books. Sam lives in Victoria, Australia with his wife and children.
My thoughts: Stopping off for what he remembers as excellent pancakes, Dane Winter finds himself embroiled in a murder case and some dodgy dealings at the local plastic recycling plant after a teacher knocks him off his motorbike.
Her friend is missing, having gone camping in the woods, and she fears the worst. Dane offers to help her search for him, but what they find will send shockeaves through the local community when the truth is exposed.
Gripping, full of twists and turns, bent cops, evil corporations and one man with the skills to stay alive and shine a light on the misdeeds of others.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
On the 1st December 1838, all slaves were finally freed on South Africa, four years after slavery had officially been abolished.
First of December follows three people during the week of November 1838: James and Caroline Kendrick, and an unnamed runaway slave making her way to Cape Town along the coast, desperate to reach it by midnight on the 31st November.
Caroline is trapped in an unhappy marriage, in a place she hates, always longing to go home; bored, lonely, without purpose or any sense of belonging. James is forever on the move, desperate for success after a lifetime of failure and humiliation, seeing South Africa as his last great hope, preparing for the climax of his work, a bank to serve the city. Each resents the other, feeling trapped and unloved, yet with a wish for it all to change.
Meanwhile the slave-apprentice, fearful of being caught before the deadline, meets others living on the coast, at the edge of society, yet always remaining alone, without any clear idea of what to expect in Cape Town.
My thoughts: This is a slender book that packs some serious thought-provoking heft. As the true freedom for South Africa’s slaves approaches, the British settlers fuss and worry about whether they will be murdered in their beds (maybe you should have treated your slaves better) when the 1st of December arrives.
Caroline is miserable, her husband never comes anywhere near her after her battle with typhus, she doesn’t really have any friends and she misses her family back home. Lonely and frustrated, she relies on Leah, her maid, who she thinks will stay with her once she is free.
Caroline’s husband James is worrying about his standing, he doesn’t think much about his wife and her feelings, scared that his business plans will all fall apart, that his bank will fail and he will be forced to return to England in disgrace. He’s broke and keeping it hidden is causing terrible stress.
The unnamed slave heading for the city, looking for a new start, a fresh page, the safety of anonymity. She’s terrified as she travels alone through potentially dangerous places, unsure of what she will find in the city, but certain anything has to be better than where she’s left.
All three characters stand on the cusp of huge changes, in their personal lives, in their society and country. The British like James and Caroline might have to adjust to life without staff, or at least to paying their servants.
But the freed slaves, embodied by the Everygirl making her way to the city, face uncertainty too. Will they be able to find paid employment, will they be able to find safe places to live, feed their families, reunite with their families who have been sent elsewhere?
Thoughtful and quietly moving, the shift comes quietly with the new day, not with the violence the military believes they will have to quell, but with a slow understanding that things will be, must be, different from now on.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
If this whole saga was a fight between good and evil, then who had won?
As far as Miriam could work out, neither good nor evil had triumphed yet. Now she was having to confront the grim consequences of Will’s behaviour, and she was mortally afraid. Maybe he and his darkness would win after all.
The tragic suicide of a young student starts a shocking chain of events for William Marshall, his wife Miriam and their son, Ollie. As Will descends into madness, a ghostly presence appears in their old house to protect Ollie. However, when two strangers threaten Miriam and an attempt is made to snatch Ollie, mother and son are forced to flee.
Amidst ever-present danger, they shake off pursuers to seek sanctuary in Rock House in Dorset, where they meet Caitlin and her friends. Twenty years have passed since Charlie Bond helped Caitlin solve the mystery of her mother’s death. Now, it is the turn of Charlie’s sidekick, Sam Haskell, to investigate a mysterious cult and unmask a killer.
Gill Calvin Thomas has retired from academic life and lives with her husband in Swanage, Dorset. She finds inspiration while walking in the Isle of Purbeck. Here, she is able to escape into a world of her own making, getting to know her characters, whilst she plans the next twist and turn of the plot.
As writing has become a major part of Gill’s life, she has withdrawn from taking a leading role in many community volunteer activities, although she has retained her interest in local and national politics. A lifelong feminist, Gill likes nothing better than a spirited debate on the issues of the day with family and friends. As her writing career develops, she hopes to explore those issues in her stories.
My thoughts: Worried about the changes in her husband, Miriam and her son Ollie flee their home for the safety of her cousin’s home in Dorset. Unfortunately the other members of the cult her husband seems to have founded are still after Ollie.
Especially the rather malevolent Sister Olive, who has plans of her own for William, her own husband Leo and young Ollie.
But Miriam has some new friends who want to help her stay safe and Sam goes undercover in the group to try to discern their plans and find the missing William.
Twisted and strange, this cult has deviated from their original beliefs and now Olive has seized control, and no one feels safe.
The story is clever and full of twists and turns as Miriam and Ollie try to stay ahead of this dangerous woman.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own
Icelandic detective-in-training Sigurdís is studying criminal psychology in the US, but her plans are thrown into disarray when she discovers that her boss and mentor, Garðar, has been fired from Reykjavík CID over his investigation into Sigurdís’s father’s death.
Returning to Iceland to deal with the fallout, Sigurdís finds herself pulled into a disturbing case: controversial TV personality Olga Einars has been stabbed to death during the Reykjavík Marathon. Struggling to locate a runner waring the number 1407, who was seen near the murdered woman during the race, the police soon discover that several masked runners were wearing the same number.
As the mystery deepens, Sigurdís and her fellow detective Unnar soon learn exactly how unpopular Olga was – not just with the interviewees she humiliated on live TV, but with her own son, her business partner, a widower who insists that she had a hand in his wife’s death, and her ex-husband, who died in suspicious circumstances thirty years ago…
As her exploration into Olga’s past becomes ever darker and more harrowing, Sigurdís must also face the truth about her own father, while searching for an attacker who will go to any lengths to cover up their crimes…
Katrín Júlíusdóttir is a former Icelandic politician, elected in 2003 and serving as Minister of Industry, Energy and Tourism, Minister of Finance and Economy and Social Democratic Alliance’s vice-chair until she retired from politics in 2016.
Before she was elected to parliament, Katrín was an advisor and project manager at a tech company and a senior buyer and CEO in the retail sector, as well as the managing director of a student union at Reykjavík University, where she studied anthropology and received an MBA. She is now managing director of Finance Iceland.
Katrín won the Blackbird Award for best Icelandic crime debut for her first novel, Dead Sweet, in 2020, and it received immense critical acclaim, hitting the bestseller lists shortly after publication. In the UK, it was a Booksellers Circle Book of the Month and longlisted for the Waterstones Debut Novel Prize, debuting at No. 15 on the Sunday Times bestseller list.
Katrín was raised in Kópavogur, about fifteen minutes’ drive from downtown Reykjavík, and she now lives in the neighbouring town of Garðabær with her family. She is married to author Bjarni M. Bjarnason, who encouraged her to start writing, and they have four sons.
From two-million-selling author Steena Holmes, nine dark and gripping stories featuring Detective Meri Amber.
Nine missing girls. Nine cases the world wants to forget. One detective who never will.
Each file is someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. And if Meri Amber can’t bring them home, she’ll make sure their stories end with justice.
As the FBI’s leading child abduction specialist, Meri has spent her career chasing the vanished – from Minnesota to Montana, from abandoned barns to dark cellars that still echo with screams. But every case cuts deeper than the last.
“I’m Detective Meri Amber. I’ve been searching for my sister for twenty years. Every missing girl is a mirror. Every scream behind a wall could be hers. I’ll never stop looking. These are the stories of the girls I’ve found, the truths I’ve uncovered, and the cracks in my own past I can’t seem to seal.”
From the horrifying secrets of the House of Dolls, to a macabre twelfth birthday party, to the sinister truths buried in the Widow’s Barn: delve into nine intriguing mysteries which will chill you to the bone.
NINE NAIL-BITING STORIES FULL OF SHOCKING TWISTS BY A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR.
With 2 million copies of her titles sold world wide, Steena Holmes was named in the Top 20 Women Author to read in 2015 by Good Housekeeping. She continues to write books that deal with issues that touch parents heart, whether it is through her contemporary fiction or psychological suspense novels.
My thoughts: Over nine cases Meri Amber looks for missing girls, girls like her sister, who she still wants to find, even if she can’t save her. She’s building a case, missing girl by missing girl, tracking evil across the country.
Sometimes she can help a vulnerable young woman, sometimes all she can do is ensure they aren’t forgotten, that any family they might have gets answers.
The stories are shocking, dark and sinister, there’s no happy endings here. There’s a narrative running through the nine stories, as Meri and her colleagues try to get justice, and stop the men who exploit, kidnap, abuse and kill.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 