Last week I posted about my best reads of 2016. This week I thought I’d share a few books that I am VERY excited about reading in 2017. Some of these are part of on-going series so I’ll link both Goodreads, pre-order details where available and a link to the first book of the series so you can get caught up if anything looks interesting. These are in chronological order.
Let’s start 2017 off right, shall we? Charlotte Stein has the next book in the Dark Obsession series coming out February 14th, Never Better. The hero is going to teach a traumatized heroine how to fight. Yes, please. This whole series has been edgy and sexy in all the best ways so I am super looking forward to this one. All stand alone–they’re only thematically related–so no need to read the first two before this one comes out. And THEN later in the year Stein is going to have a new self-published series that starts out with, get this: COMPLETE NERD. How great is that title? OMG I can’t wait.
Ruby Lang wrote a really great contemporary romance last year, Hard Knocks, about a neurologist and a hockey player that I reviewed for the blog (with nutella pop tarts–go on, click, you know you want to). She’s got another stand-alone contemporary out this year called Clean Breaks. No cover or blurb yet, but Lang’s characters are so realistic. They work and have families and they’re very feminist-friendly so she quickly became an auto-buy author for me. Sorry no links, but I’m told this one will go up for pre-order on February 7th and be released on February 20th from Crimson Romance.
Next up is Unseen Attraction by KJ Charles. Charles is a perennial favorite of mine so this should be no surprise to long-time readers. This book kicks off the Sins of the Cities trilogy, a new m/m Victorian series for Loveswept that, thank goodness, have much better covers than last year’s Society of Gentlemen series. I loved those books. I did not love those covers. There’s going to be an over-arching mystery and lots of Victorian sensation goodness. Unseen Attraction is up for pre-order and comes out February 21st.
Elizabeth Kingston wrote one of my favorite books of 2015, The King’s Man, and she’s back in 2017 with another Medieval romance set in the same world. It’s still untitled, but it’s supposed to be out in late February. I have no links and no hard date for you. But I loved The King’s Man so much that I really, really need to read this. And let’s start lobbying now for Nicholas Boulton to do the audio book as he did for The King’s Man. Because calling his voice dreamy doesn’t even being to cover it. Seriously, go listen to the sample.
Kit Rocha completed the much-beloved Beyond series in 2016, but 2017 brings a spin-off series featuring Gideon’s Riders, the elite soldiers of Sector One. While some of the characters will be familiar to Beyond series readers, Rocha has said that the new series will be accessible to new readers. So if you’ve heard people talk non-stop about this author (which I’m sure you have), the first book, Ashwin, would be a good place to start. I’m just so happy that we won’t have to leave this world for good. Ashwin is up for pre-order and comes out March 7th.
Everyone has favorite tropes, right? Well, I’m a sucker for a guardian/ward romance. And while I see these a lot in contemporaries from the 1970s and in historicals, I don’t see many in recent contemporaries. Probably because the options for someone being a ward these days are rather…shall we say…limited? But if anyone can do it, Tamsen Parker can. So I am stupid excited for His Custody, out from Intermix on March 21st. And fans of Parker’s self-published Compass series will be pleased to hear that Rey is finally getting his book, The Cartographer! That should be out June 26th.
I love it when a really solid writer releases a book with a trope that I just can’t get enough of. Vanessa North’s Summer Stock features a TV star hiding out from tabloid scandals doing theater in a small town in the Outer Banks. Celebs hiding in small towns is just one of those things that always grabs me–like Kristen Callihan’s Idol from last year–so I’m really looking forward to getting my paws on this stand-alone m/m romance already up for pre-order from Riptide Publishing that comes out May 15th.
Jane O’Reilly has written a number of my favorite erotic romances, but she’s splashing out this year into a scifi romance. Since scifi romance was one of my major weaknesses this year (give me all your shifters, cyborgs and aliens, please!) and this author is always smart, sexy and has a great sense of humor, I can’t wait for this book. As of right now it’s called Blue Shift, but that might change. It will be out June 1st. In the meantime, you can get a taste of O’Reilly’s style with Indecent…Exposure. Smoking hot and kinky, but not in the typical BDSM romance way.
Theresa Romain has been writing a Regency horse-racing series and while a lot of the time I feel like I’m SO over Regency romances, I have loved every single one of these books. The horse-racing context gives them a different twist from the typical ballrooms and gaming hells and yet the problems the characters face are universal. The first book, A Gentleman’s Game, featured a hero with alcoholism and the next book, Scandalous Ever After, will feature a hero with depression. Romain is consistently smart, witty and poignant so I am very much looking to the next installment of this terrific series. Scandalous Ever After is up for pre-order and will be released July 1st by Sourcebooks.
In holy crap look at that cover territory is Alisha Rai’s Hate to Want You. Isn’t it gorgeous? I don’t normally flip over covers, but that’s just sexy y’all. Apparently the hero and heroine meet for sex once a year until one year when the heroine doesn’t show up. This is mighty intriguing and Rai’s writing is always super hot. Hate to Want You is available for pre-order and scheduled to be released July 25th by Avon.
It’s been almost three years since the most recent book in Joanna Bourne’s Spymasters series and my understanding is that Beauty Like the Night will probably be the last full-length novel. There’s no cover I’ve seen to date, but do we really need a cover to know we want this book? No, we don’t. Beauty Like the Night is due out August 1st from Berkeley and is already up for pre-order. In the meantime, you can get started with the first in the series, The Spymaster’s Lady.
Um, that’s a lot of books to be looking forward to and I only made it up to August. Guess I’ll have to do another one of these posts in June for the second half of the year. But I read a lot! I set a Goodreads goal of 150 books for 2017, which is actually less than last year because I’m trying to be better about posting. Like, maybe more than once a quarter. *blush* So read a little less, write a little more. It will be good for me! And good for you because more romance is definitely what we’re going to be needing this year.
February 17, 2017 at 4:09 pm
One of my most anticipated books for 2017 is Devil in Spring by Lisa Kleypas.