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Must-Read Books February 2026 |
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| The Bookbinder's Secret by A.D. BellIn this "stellar debut" (Publishers Weekly), Lilian Delaney is an apprentice bookbinder in 1901 Oxford working at her widowed father's failing bookshop. When she's given a burned book by a customer, she finds a cryptic 50-year-old love letter hidden beneath the binding that speaks of murder. Drawn into the story, Lily looks for other books by the obscure author, discovering she's not the only one after them. Read-alikes: Jess Armstrong's Ruby Vaughn mysteries, starting with The Curse of Penryth Hall. |
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Half His Age
by Jennette McCurdy
Waldo is ravenous. Naive. Impulsive. Lonely. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all: Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn't know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films and things that she doesn't? Or is it rooted in their unlikely connection, their kindred spirits, the similar filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it's just enough that he sees her when no one else does. Startlingly perceptive, mordantly funny, and keenly poignant, Half His Age is a rich character study of a yearning seventeen-year-old who disregards all obstacles--or attempts to overcome them--in her effort to be seen, to be desired, to be loved.
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| The Case of the Murdered Muckraker by Rob OslerIn 1898, 21-year-old Prescott Agency junior field operative Harriet Morrow investigates when a journalist who'd found evidence of a corrupt government official is fatally stabbed in a Chicago tenement house. Going undercover, Harriet dons a variety of guises to get to the truth in her richly detailed 2nd outing, which also sees her find a girlfriend. For fans of: Stephen Spotswood, Lev AC Rosen, Cathy Pegau's A Murderous Business.
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Wreck Your Heart
by Lori Rader-Day
As part of Chicago’s country music scene, Dahlia is an up-and-coming singer in spangles and boots of classic country tunes. For a while, life finally looked promising. Then Dahlia’s boyfriend, Joey, vanished, taking their rent money with him. Suddenly, she’s homeless, alone, and desperate for a break. With nowhere else to turn, she leans on Alex McPhee, the pub’s owner and the man who once helped her escape a rough childhood. They say when it rains, it pours. One night, her mother—the woman she hasn’t spoken to in over twenty years—shows up at the pub without warning. The next day, a panicked young woman arrives asking about her missing mother. Dahlia’s mother. when a body turns up outside the pub, it becomes clear that this reunion is only the beginning of something much darker.
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| Murder Your Darlings by Jenna BlumCaught between an impending book deadline and a sudden, intoxicating romance with a famed novelist, Sam Vetiver is pulled into a world where charm masks danger. As a stalker closes in and bodies surface, shifting viewpoints reveal a sharp, darkly funny plot about trust, ambition, and the perils of desire.
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The Italian Secret
by Tara Moss
Pacific Ocean, 1907. A girl embarks on a journey to begin a new life far from home. Naples, 1943. A woman shelters underground from a wartime air raid, praying her husband will return home. Sydney, 1948. Billie Walker, returned from a stint as a wartime investigative journalist, uncovers a dusty box in her father's old office whose contents--correspondence with a woman on the other side of the world--just might explain how they all are connected.
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The Courting of Bristol Keats
by Mary E. Pearson
After discovering that her father's disappearance is linked to a hidden realm of gods, fae, and monsters, Bristol Keats embarks on a perilous journey to rescue him, making a dangerous pact with the fae leader Tyghan, who harbors his own dark motives and connection to her past.
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| Definitely Maybe Not a Detective by Sarah FoxWith her bestie's help, jobless Emersyn Gray creates a fake detective agency to scare her ex into giving back the money he stole from her, money she needs to care for her orphaned seven-year-old niece. Then her Bronx building superintendent is killed and the other residents find her fake business card. So she teams up with a hunky guy to solve the case. For fans of: Bellamy Rose's Pomona Afton Can So Solve a Murder; Elle Cosimano's Finlay Donovan series.
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Theo of Golden
by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from...or why... His name is Theo. And he asks a lot more questions than he answers. Theo visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang on the walls, portraits of the people of Golden done by a local artist. He begins purchasing them, one at a time, and putting them back in the hands of their rightful owners. With each exchange, a story is told, a friendship born, and a life altered.
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| It Should Have Been You by Andrea MaraWhen a new mother mistakenly shares a private complaint with her whole neighborhood, tensions escalate into violence and shocking deaths. What begins as a minor misstep spirals into a web of betrayal and fear, exposing the fragility of trust and showing how quickly social media can upend seemingly ordinary lives. For fans: of Lisa Jewell and B.A. Paris.
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Dead Money
by Jakob Kerr
As the unofficial problem solver for Silicon Valley's most ruthless venture capitalist, Mackenzie Clyde's an expert at wrangling tech bros and their multimillions. But now she's playing for higher stakes. Because the lightning-rod CEO of tech's hottest startup has just been murdered, leaving behind billions in dead money frozen in his will--and Mackenzie's boss is the company's chief investor. With a fortune on the line and the official investigation going nowhere, it's up to Mackenzie to step in and resolve things, fast.
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| How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigleyGrowing up in 1980s Wyoming as Reagan rules and the tabloids follow Charles and Diana's engagement, sisters Georgie and Aggie face racism as the only Brown kids around. Then, when their uncle and his family leave India and move in with them, the sexual abuse starts. The girls blame the abuse on various things as they plot to kill their uncle in this inventive short debut novel featuring magazine-style quizzes. Try these next: Essie Chambers' Swift River; Betty by Tiffany McDaniel.
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Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity
by Fergus Butler-Gallie
Christianity is the largest religion in the US with upwards of 200 million people, and its churches often possess an allure and beauty that fascinate even the most committed atheist. What fascinates Fergus Butler-Gallie is that each place of worship tells a story--of place, time, and most of all, people. It is in these sanctuaries that the complexities of life from birth and death to power, sex, violence, justice, and beauty are encapsulated, and here, in Twelve Churches, Butler-Gallie takes us on a journey through time to unravel the story of Christianity as told by the people who have lived it on every inhabited continent.
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The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland
by Michelle Young
On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and ultimately spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans' final line of defense ... Based on troves of previously undiscovered documents, The Art Spy chronicles the brave actions of the key Resistance spy in the heart of the Nazi's art looting headquarters in the French capital ... While Hitler was amassing stolen art for his future Führermuseum, Valland, his undercover adversary, secretly worked to stop him.
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The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-Of-The-Century America
by David Baron
In the early 1900s, Percival Lowell--the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion--observed “canals” etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities. The public fell in love with the ambitious amateur astronomer who shared his findings in speeches and wildly popular books. While at first people treated the Martians whimsically, the discussion quickly became serious. Today, the red planet maintains its grip on the public’s imagination. Many see Mars as civilization’s destiny―the first step toward our becoming an interplanetary species―but, as David Baron demonstrates, this tendency to project our hopes onto the world next door is hardly new.
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| Rumpelstiltskin by Mac Barnett; illustrated by Carson EllisThe traditional fairy tale about a magical trickster -- and the woman who outwits him -- gets a fresh take in this retelling. Quirky humor gives the text a contemporary edge, balanced by medieval-inspired illustrations in deep, rich hues. For fans of: The Three Billy Goats Gruff, another fairy tale remix by author Mac Barnett |
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Gumshoe
by Brenna Thummler
Perfect for fans of Paper Girls and This Was Our Pact. In the hot, gossipy town of Stony Lonesome, shy eleven-year old Willa interacts with others the only way that feels right to her--the mail. She loves the mail so much that she hopes to become a mail carrier herself one day. But her dreams of delivering birthday cards, thank-you notes, and love letters come crashing down when she's mistaken for the notorious Two Gum Tilly, a bandit rumored to be stealing mail for as long as folks can recall. Now an outlaw herself, Willa realizes the only way to clear her name is to bring the real crook to justice. But when a chance encounter introduces her to the Gumshoe Gang, a group of runaways looking to right the wrongs of the letter-looting thief, she finds that human connection might be her only path to freedom. Can Willa clear her name and revive her dreams of postal glory, or has she stamped her last letter . . . forever?
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The Secret Astronomers
by Jessica Walker
In Green Bank, West Virginia, two teens--grieving, artistic Copernicus and Kepler, a small-town overachiever--become secret pen pals through a forgotten astronomy textbook and join forces to unravel a decades-old mystery tied to Copernicus's late mother.
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Coldwire
by Chloe Gong
A dystopian story following a young soldier who is framed for a political assassination and must team up with her country's most wanted terrorist to clear her name.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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