Hi reader,

Wednesday is romance, and Jennie Wren Foster has two books out as of Friday, at opposite ends of the map. One aching and cosmic. One masked and dangerous.

Out now: The Broken Script of the Stars (Chronicles of the Celestial Fold, Book 2)

The library is at peace. The peace is the lie.

Three months after they broke a god and remade the Last Library into a place that keeps instead of consumes, Elara, Valeriana and Caelum have something the world rarely lets the wronged keep: an ordinary morning, and each other. Then a student's name goes missing from every mouth in the school, and only the three who love her most still remember the girl ever existed.

Something is unwriting people again. Not the god they buried. Something older, patient and grieving, ruling a choir of two thousand souls the god erased and never freed. It calls itself the first ink. It was the god's first love, fed to the door to prove the door would work, and it has waited a thousand years in the dark to end a world that builds furnaces out of the people it claims to love.

The book opens on peace, and on a woman who does not know how to hold it:

Sapphic-centered romantasy, open door, found family, and the kind of dark that keeps. Valeriana spent three hundred years believing love is a loss you take before it can take you. This is the book where she has to prove she has finally learned to stay.

Also out now: The Broker's Mask (Midnight Auction, Book 2)

The second descent into the Midnight Auction, where nothing changes hands without a price and every face at the table is a mask over a deal. Worldbuilding-forward romantasy, bond-driven and high-stakes, romance-forward and closed door. Book two of five, following The Midnight Auction.

Coming Friday, September 4. Three more, and the mix is a good one.

The Auction House Affair, by Jennie Wren Foster, the third Crabapple Antiques Mystery. A regional auction house rolls into Kettlebrook to disperse a reclusive collector's hoard, and Addie Wrent goes home with a box lot containing a 1920s brass cash register and a slip of her late great-aunt's handwriting reading "make sure 47 comes home." Then Lot 47 vanishes from a locked hall and the cataloguer turns up dead at the foot of the loft stair. The register does not ring things high because they are valuable. It rings them high when they are lying.

And two from Kira Deveraux: Ashmarked to the Exiled Dragon, book three of the Ashpeak Alphas, in which a woman rides three days through bad weather to keep her sister from the fated bond that nearly destroyed her, arrives to find the enemy kneeling at the gate, and discovers she has no defense at all against a man who hands her every choice instead of taking one. Plus The Shatterfield. High heat, 18+, more on both in the next letters.

I gave both of Jennie's August books a proper look in last week's letter, if you want the longer version.

Still on the shelf from August 7. Hostile Intent, by Kira Deveraux, a hostile corporate takeover and a woman who never folds, book one of The Halcyon Group Series, high heat. And Hidden Truths at Mercy General, by Clara Langford, in which a doctor who is very good at keeping people alive and even better at keeping them at arm's length meets a paramedic who will not stay at arm's length. Over 40, closed door, hard-won happy ending.

The ask. If either of Jennie's August books landed for you, an honest review right now is worth more than anything else you could do for them. Launch fortnight is the whole ball game. And if you want to read a Jennie romantasy first and free, join Read It First, our launch team, and tick Jennie on the signup form. The September 4 titles go out shortly, and you can tick Kira and Clara too: https://readitfirst-jlcollinspublishing.beehiiv.com/p/read-it-first

Worth a listen this week. The house podcast, Story Worlds from JL Collins Publishing and Glassbound Ink, opens with an episode called "Every Book Is a Doorway." Given that this letter is mostly about a library that keeps instead of consumes, it felt like the right week to mention it. Watch or listen here.

Tell me where you landed: the library where love is the only thing the dark cannot unwrite, or the auction where every face is a mask over a deal? Hit reply. I love knowing which lane you are in.

Happy reading,

Jennie, Kira and Clara

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