As of this writing, my total count for the year is 304. That’s a lot of books!
I’m inserting links again to make it easier to find these authors. If a given title interests you, I recommend buying direct or through a platform that delivers an actual book file (like Smashwords and my own publisher, JMS Books LLC). If you’ve read any of these, I’d love to hear what you think. And if you loved any of these, be sure to say so, somewhere!
Even the occasional comment in a reader’s group can help other readers find an author, and trust me, all of us need it.
The next once-a-month newsletter will be coming out on October 1. If you haven’t subscribed, there’s a link at the bottom of this post. I use the newsletter to promote a backlist title that I’ve discounted and to talk a little bit about how and why I wrote it. Now, on to the report!
compiled July 17, 2026:
1. ‘Colton Gentry’s Third Act’ by Jeff Zentner, FM second-chance romance. POV character is an alcoholic country singer/songwriter who torpedoes his career with a few profanely anti-gun words at a concert not long after his best friend is killed in a mass shooting at a music event. His life implodes. After rehab, he retreats to hometown to live with his widowed mother and discovers that his high-school love is also back there running an upscale farm-to-table restaurant; she gives him a job. The relationship arc is terrific, also the arc of MMC discovering joy in using his creativity in a new medium. Some back-and-forth in the timeline, giving us the teenage love affair. I could have done without the epilogue but otherwise thought this was great.
2. ‘The Ranch Hand Diaries: Second Act, First Rodeo’ by Dave Nygaard. MM comedy featuring an established couple, slice of life covering nearly a year of story time as both of them contend with one getting laid off (on his 55th birthday) and the other’s firm becoming the target of acquisition. Set in Colorado. Excellent friend group, supportive family, fantastic main relationship, very funny.
3. [re-read] my own FM to FMM novella ‘A Secret Chord,’ the one about a jazz musician, her boyfriend, her tour manager, etc. Available at AMZ too.
4. ‘The Great Game: A Thriller’ by Arvind Ethan David. Considering the sources include the Raffles stories by E. W. Hornung, the Sherlock stories by A.C. Doyle, and the Tarzan stories by E.R. Burroughs, this should have been a lot more fun.
5. ‘A Murder of Magpies’ by Judith Flanders. Mystery series starter that my mother recommended, and I didn’t hate it, but I would have if the MC’s missing friend had turned out to be actually murdered. The amateur sleuth is a professional editor (aided by her mother, a high-powered lawyer, and an actual CID detective with whom the editor begins a highly inappropriate relationship). The title has nothing to do with anything so I immediately jump to ‘trying to invoke KJ Charles’ who was of course an editor, but … no.
6. ‘Five Dates from Hell’ by Alexander Young. ‘A Gay Romantic Comedy’ and not actually a romance, because it’s truly the story of five dates that go variously wrong; the last one results in ‘let’s try this again’ rather than ‘let’s never see each other again.’ It is funny and the POV character develops well, there are some acute observations, but I rounded down for sloppy construction. (author website not found)
7. [re-read] my own MM novella ‘Screw Your Courage,’ the one about a private-school teacher who falls for a ballet teacher and decides to come out at work, even if it costs him his job. Available at AMZ too.
8. [re-read] ‘Take the Lead’ by Alexis Daria, set in the world of reality TV. FMC is one of the pros on a dance competition, MMC is her partner, who’s on a ‘frontier living’ family reality show that is very fake. A lot of this is good but the MMC is on the pigheaded side and the FMC holds an unjustified grudge. Recommended, though - I like this author.
9. ‘Lucianus: An MM Fantasy Adventure’ by C. J. Beshara, in which a fearsome battlewizard executed for war crimes wakes up in the body of someone else, remembering his own horrible death. He realizes that he’s been summoned by a living wizard for revenge purposes, and commences to follow the summoning’s compulsion alongside a stranger. A quest with romance-adjacent male bonding that is bound to end in loss because once the revenge is accomplished, the summoned wizard will die again. This reminded me of ‘The Amberlough Dossier’ which is a good thing. Both MCs are morally gray, there’s destruction & violence galore. While the character development is good and the conclusion leaves the door open to finding each other again (hey, magic) it is not a romance.
compiled July 24, 2026:
1. ‘The Bones Beneath My Skin’ by TJ Klune, an action movie on the page, loved this. Slow-burn and minimally explicit MM suspicion to lovers story woven into adventure in which an AWOL Marine is trying to save an extraterrestrial, who’s embodied as a ten-year-old girl, from dark government forces who’ve kept her imprisoned for over fifty years. The POV character is a disgraced journalist who finds the runaways in his family’s Oregon cabin.
2. [re-read] ‘Bet Me’ by Jennifer Crusie, still loved this, and maybe because I am so disgusted with the behavior of American cisgender straight men as a group right now, I found the male friendship in this book really vital.
3. ‘When the Tides Held the Moon’ by Venessa Vida Kelley, MM historical fantasy starring a Puerto Rican ironworker and the merman he unwittingly helps capture and imprison. This is a (much) less dark take on the human/merman scenario than, say, Alexis Hall’s novelette ‘Sand and Ruin and Gold,’ which I also re-read this week. ‘Tides’ is very well researched in terms of 1911 New York and the relationship between the US and Puerto Rico at the time, discrimination, Coney Island, and sweatshoppery. I really loved it and am glad I acquired the beautiful hardcover as well as the ebook.
4. ‘His Truest Role’ by Kieran Lamour, MM set in Barcelona starring a theater writer/director and his leading man, soapy insta-love with too much sex and not enough thought about the HR nightmare and the shit these guys put their production collaborators through. (author website not found)
5. ‘Laser Visions’ by Kaje Harper, an MM spec-fic novel she wrote for the Goodreads MM group a few years back. MC1 is a rich tech guy whose cop sister, post water wars in around 2040, is in kidney failure; they are working with the FBI on a sting involving off-books organ transplant scheme in which people have been abducted, killed, and harvested. MC2 is a scientist who’s been abducted and is being kept in a coma pending conditions for harvest, but he discovers he can ‘spirit walk’ and makes contact with MC1. High stakes, high tension, some violence, other nonconsenting donors die, but MC2 is saved in time and the conclusion is HFN and hopeful. Really unusual book, well structured and maintains internal logic, plus the MCs are both credible and sympathetic characters. I got a link to this through Kaje’s newsletter.
6. [re-read, though I wasn’t sure about that till 2/3 through] ‘Wear it Like a Crown’ by Zarah Detand. I knocked off a point of rating for the duplication. Because it’s a republication under new publisher, may or may not have been revised, with the same title, but AMZ did not tell me I already had this. Grrr. It’s a royal/commoner MM where the royal decides to come out after a blackmail attempt, and the love interest is on the fixer team. Knocked off another point for using the living person Ed Sheeran as a character, meaning not just a reference but actually in a scene putting words in his mouth, with no indication he gave permission.
7. ‘White Hot Light: Twenty-five Years in Emergency Medicine’ by Frank Huyler. Meditative, occasionally almost stream of consciousness essays drawn from his life as an ER doctor in New Mexico. Very good.
8. ‘The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram’ by Ethelene Whitmire, fascinating though sad biography of a 1935 Harvard graduate (one of very few Black men who were allowed to enroll) and post-grad who managed to get funding for doctoral research in Europe … in 1937-38 … where he fell in love with a Danish man. They spent the next 7 years trying to stay together and stay alive. Both escaped from an Italian POW camp and were rescued by American Buffalo Soldiers, but were then separated. Peggram was sent back to the US and promptly institutionalized, eventually underwent electroshock therapy and, apparently, a lobotomy. Released after four years to live with relatives. Died in 1982 having never returned to Europe and never recovered to the point of resuming his academic career. This would make fantastic material for a happier MM fiction treatment.
9. ‘The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, the World’s Greatest Traveler,’ by Giles Milton. Thoroughly enjoyed this. It’s history plus travelogue plus context-clarifying biographical sketch (the best anyone can do for a person who died in the 14th century). Note, Mandeville called himself the world’s greatest traveler, because marketing (which worked). Milton’s research reveals that the second half of the book was probably written not while traveling from the Middle East to Pacific Asia, but while sitting comfortably in an abbey somewhere in France. That doesn’t make his book any less interesting as an artifact of cultural history. I’d say, for modern readers, pick up this history instead of Mandeville’s ‘Travels’ and get a much clearer picture of the real world in his time.