A traveling trader who has never stayed anywhere longer than a fortnight keeps coming back to Nine Ashes — and her saddlebags get lighter every trip.

Sylvaine tells herself the lighter load is good business. The truth is she's bringing more to give than to sell, sleeping in Talenis's back room between trade circuits, and learning which baker's loaves go fast and which well has the sweetest water. She is being included not because she is useful but because she is here — and she doesn't quite believe it yet. Because one respected elder loves her well enough to say what others only think: that visiting and belonging are different things, and Sylvaine hasn't proved she knows the difference.

Nine Ashes has welcomed strangers since its founding. But belonging has always been earned through showing up. And Sylvaine has to decide whether she's willing to be tested by a place whose memory is longer than her entire life.

What's at stake isn't the road or the village — it's whether Sylvaine can stop performing belonging long enough to actually learn it. The hardest distance she's ever traveled is the one between the gate and the porch.

Perfect for readers who love: Outsider earns belonging · Slow-build trust across difference · Found family · Warm elder who names the truth · Cozy elven village life · Stories where the real journey is staying

Pull up a chair. Mirabell has the kettle on.

The first time Flint lights the forge without striking flint, his father sets down his hammer and says nothing.

The Jinn blood of Azar surfaces when it chooses — not when it's called — and in Nine Ashes, the elders who recognize the gift treat it like weather: ordinary, elemental, nothing to fear. But Flint has to learn that for himself. The village needs a practical blacksmith who fills his father's commissions, not an artist chasing fire magic into metal no one has ordered. And his father, Brenn — widower, quiet man, awkward recipient of too many neighborly pies — has to decide whether loving his son means protecting the family trade or letting it become something he no longer recognizes.

The answer, of course, is neither. It's the third option. Finding it is the whole book.

What's at stake isn't the forge — it's whether a father and son can hold two truths at once: that the trade matters, and that the gift won't stop reaching. The anvil rings differently when both of them are listening.

Perfect for readers who love: Fire magic awakening · Single parent & child bond · The third option · Blacksmithing craft · Found family built through shared work · Cozy fantasy with no villains

Settle in. The forge is warm and the story doesn't rush.

At eighty, the elven weaver Pyrielle has been competent for fifteen years.
Every morning she opens the shutters of her grandmother Mirabell's cottage and weaves exactly the cloth the village asks for: cool grey runners, fine cloak linings, the kind of work no one in Nine Ashes can fault. Every dawn — alone, by candlelight, on a small frame hidden behind the loom — she weaves something else. Small panels with shadows that move when the light moves. She has made eleven of them. She has unraveled every one.
When a letter arrives from the Three Cities — a bride whose mother died this winter, asking for a cloth that holds wedding brightness and mourning shade in the same threads — Pyrielle says yes. Eight weeks. Then six. Then the cloth refuses to behave for her, because she is weaving it to please her grandmother, the buyer, and an idea of herself she never agreed to. Eleven private panels have not prepared her for one public cloth. And the village — the baker who leaves bread without asking, the smith who forges a finer beater bar and never says, the friend who arrives at midnight with tea and stays without advice — is watching her, kindly, while she figures out what her hands already know.
The Weaver's Thread is the first standalone novella in The Elves of Nine Ashes, a slow, sensory, deeply cozy fantasy series about craft, belonging, and the small magics of an ordinary village. No villain. No swords. No saving the world. Just one shuttle, one warp, and an eighty-year-old who is just beginning.
For readers who loved:

• Becky Chambers — A Psalm for the Wild-Built
• T. Kingfisher — A House with Good Bones
• Sangu Mandanna — The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
• Travis Baldree — Legends & Lattes
• Elizabeth Gilbert — The Signature of All Things

Jennifer Santiago can spot a special forces adrenaline junkie from miles away and knows the score. They’re great for a hook-up but lousy in the long-term relationship department. Lucky for her she was on the rebound and one of those junkies just walked into the casino.

Brian Allen had seen combat all around the world as a Navy SEAL and a paramilitary operations officer in the CIA’s Special Activities Division. When his team is given a cushy assignment as backup in Morocco, he quells the itch for action by taking a night to relax with a beautiful distraction.

When she proved too distracting, he was happy to take the Director’s call – until he realized his big distraction was the Director’s daughter.

Kissing the Frogman is Brian's standalone story in the Task Force 125 series — a fast, hot, salt-water-and-sunburn romantic suspense about a man whose motto includes the words 'good looking corpse' and the woman whose rules don't include letting him keep that motto. Can be read as a series standalone or as Book 5 after readers know the team. Steamy. Short. The one readers come back to.
For readers who loved:

• Susan Stoker
• Cindy Gerard
• Catherine Mann
• Toni Anderson
• Roxanne St. Claire

Konstantin has been very busy lately. Nikolai's grudges have kept his trunk full and his BMW running and his early-retirement fund growing. He is not asking too many questions. He is approaching the kind of bored that needs a real job to fix, and when Nikolai calls with three foreign targets and a bonus, Konstantin grins as he merges onto the highway.
Three time zones away, Vince Hennessee is finally back in his own bed. Sarah Stevens has finally said the thing she didn't say in Italy. Will Adams is finally cleaning his guns at the Camp instead of cleaning up a mess in Rome. The team is healing. The team is good. The team has no idea Konstantin is on a plane.
Stealing Liberties is the Task Force 125 ensemble book — the one where the whole team has skin in the game, where the slow-burn romances around Sarah and Vince's core get their own named pages, where the villain is a quiet professional rather than a screaming ideologue, and where the body count rises far enough that readers stop trusting Lisa Pietsch with their favorites. Steamy, ensemble-driven, and the binge readers' favorite of the series. Book 4.
For readers who loved:

• Suzanne Brockmann
• Maya Banks (KGI)
• Cindy Gerard
• Roxanne St. Claire
• Lori Foster

Vince Hennessee has been a hostage before. He knows the drill. Stay calm. Stay observant. Wait for the moment. Don't think about the woman.
Don't think about the woman.
He's thinking about the woman.
Sarah Stevens has spent every hour since the bad news from Rome on a private jet, a satellite phone, and a manifest of every favor Task Force 125 is willing to call in. Will is running ops. Jason is running guns. Chris is running every language he knows. And Sarah is running on the promise she didn't get to make at the front door of a villa in Italy when Vince said it first and didn't wait to hear it back.
Freedom's Promise is the hostage-rescue novel of the Task Force 125 series — Book 3, the direct pickup from A Taste of Liberty's cliffhanger, and the book where Sarah graduates from the woman they recruited to the woman they run plays around. Steamy, propulsive, the answer to every reader who finished Book 2 wanting to know if she got there in time.
For readers who loved:

• Suzanne Brockmann
• Maya Banks (KGI)
• Catherine Mann
• Toni Anderson
• Lynn Raye Harris

Sarah came to Italy for a job and stayed for the villa. She was supposed to be playing house with a retiring asset named Angelo — gentleman, gracious, exactly the kind of man who could give a woman like Sarah the life she'd given up dreaming of. He has a beautiful estate. He has Isabella in the kitchen. He has a ring on offer and a reason for offering it: he wants out, and he wants her with him when he goes.
The problem is the man on the other end of her radio. Vince Hennessee — task-force boss, former Force Recon, the man who hand-picked her — has been silent for months. When he finally comes for her in Italy, it isn't to bring her home. It's to watch her work. And then to say, at the front door, with a taxi already running, the three words he should have said before the mission started.
Then he gets on a plane to Moscow.
And the plane doesn't land where it was supposed to. By dinner, Sarah is sitting on a stone patio with Will Adams's Beretta on the table next to her wine glass, and she's listening to the bad news from Rome. Vince has been taken. The trail leads to Nikolai. And the only thing between Vince Hennessee and a dark room in the Middle East is the woman who finally, finally got him to say it.
A Taste of Liberty is Book 2 of Task Force 125 — and the kick that ends the first half of Sarah and Vince's arc. Steamy, propulsive, ends on a cliffhanger that lands directly in Freedom's Promise.
For readers who loved:

• Suzanne Brockmann
• Maya Banks
• Catherine Mann
• Cindy Gerard
• Toni Anderson

Sarah Stevens had nothing left to lose when what would have been a Vegas mugging ended with her standing and the men she beat leading to a job offer. Three weeks later she's in the Nevada desert learning to take down men twice her size, on a one-way path into Task Force 125 — a covert American counter-terrorism unit whose first mission for her is seducing her way onto a Mediterranean arms dealer's yacht. The man directing her in the earpiece — Vince Hennessee, former Force Recon, scarred and patient and watching her too closely — is the one she shouldn't want. The man on the deck is the one she has to take down. The path between the two is the path to freedom — and it's going to cost her something she didn't know she still had to lose.

The Path to Freedom is the first novel in the Task Force 125 series — a covert American counter-terrorism unit, an ensemble of operators worth loving, and the woman whose instincts make her dangerous and whose heart makes her theirs. Slow-burn into white-hot, with action that doesn't flinch and a found-family unit you'll want to read all five books to live with.

For readers who loved:

• Suzanne Brockmann
• Maya Banks (KGI series)
• Catherine Mann
• Cindy Gerard
• Pamela Clare

I have to say THE PATH TO FREEDOM is one genuinely impressive read.
I loved Sarah's gung ho attitude and her determination to reinvent herself and there's no doubt in my mind that she's wholly successful in achieving that goal. Vince has issues of his own - both personally and professionally - and Sarah's ability to stand up to him is a huge turn on for him. One of the things I especially enjoyed about this story was the closeness of the members of Task Force 125. There's a genuine caring and `openness' that's extended to Sarah and really says a lot about this group. Lisa Pietsch infuses this story with humor, lots of action, friendship, romance and suspense so that you're pulled into these characters lives and don't want to let them go. Fortunately Ms. Pietsch is working on more stories for both Sarah and her fellow `fat camp' roomy' Tracey Ballentine so I'll be anxious to revisit them both and find out just where their adventures have taken them.
~Chrissy Dionne (courtesy of Romance Junkies)