Summer is here. The solstice has officially come and gone; the days are long and hot, and the question we keep coming back to is: what are you reading? In this episode of Fully-Booked: Literary Podcast, Meaghan and Arthur ditched the usual format and did something a little more laid back.
No adaptation dissection, no deep dive into a single title. Just recommendations. Books that felt right for this time of year. Books you could throw in a beach bag without worrying too much about keeping a timeline of characters or a glossary of made-up kingdoms.
We covered a lot of ground, and the picks skew all over the place. Romance, legal thriller, sci-fi, horror, gothic classic. There really is something here for everyone, whether you’re a mood reader who only picks up books when the vibe is right or someone who, like Arthur, just grabs whatever’s next and reads it no matter the season or the weather. (Meaghan had words about this. Many words.)
Here’s the full list.
Note
The following is an editorialized transcript of our weekly literary podcast. If you would like to listen to the podcast, click the play button above orlisten on your favorite platform with the links below.
Beach Read by Emily Henry (2020)
This was the first Emily Henry book Meaghan ever read, and she still thinks it’s one of the best entry points into Henry’s work. January is a romance writer spending the summer at her late father’s beach house in Michigan, trying to finish a book she can’t seem to write.
She’s grieving, she’s struggling, and she’s also just discovered some things about her father that she’s not quite sure how to process. The twist is that her college rival, literary fiction writer Gus, has rented the house next door. They’re both stuck. They make a deal: she writes serious fiction, he writes romance. Nothing happens between them. Obviously.
It’s funny and warm and a little unexpectedly sad in places, which is exactly the combination that makes Emily Henry novels hard to forget. As Meaghan put it;
A lot of romance can be very forgettable to a degree. If you’ve read one, you’ve read many, sort of. Her writing is the type in which I find I remember the characters specifically.
A film adaptation starring Phoebe Dynevor and Patrick Schwarzenegger is in the works, with a release date of May 7, 2027.
Fast and Fastidious by R.M. Caldwell (2026)
Arthur’s pick, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: Bridgerton meets Fast and the Furious, set in 1810 England. Lucy Elliot is a sharp, rule-following young woman with one scandalous secret. She sneaks out to watch the Night Races, illegal carriage races where class lines disappear, and speed is the only thing that matters. What starts as a guilty pleasure pulls her into a spy mission, a murder plot, and something that could destroy England entirely. There’s also physics. People modify their carriages. It’s genuinely incredible.
“I was like, how do you even mix all that together? And it fucking works,” Arthur said, and he’s right. Fully-Booked has a review of this one on the site at fullybooked.ca if you want more before you pick it up. R.M. Caldwell is a New Zealand theater director and escape room puzzle designer writing under a pen name. This is a debut novel, which makes it even more impressive.
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren (2019)
Christina Lauren is actually two people: Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, longtime writing partners who have produced a stack of contemporary romance novels together. The Unhoneymooners is one of their most popular, and Meaghan thinks it deserves every bit of that reputation. Olive Torres has always been the unlucky twin. Her sister Ami, on the other hand, wins everything. Including, apparently, an entire wedding funded by contest prizes.
The catch: when the entire wedding party comes down with food poisoning at the reception, the only two people left standing are Olive and Ami’s new brother-in-law Ethan, who Olive actively cannot stand. Rather than let the honeymoon go to waste, the two of them go to Maui together. As enemies. Pretending to be newlyweds.
It’s funnier than it sounds and more genuinely touching than you’d expect. The enemies-to-lovers setup is solid, the banter is good, and there’s a real emotional core to it once things get going beyond the honeymoon portion. Perfect tropical read for a non-tropical day.
The Right to Remain by James Grippando (2026)
Arthur came into this one skeptical. Legal thriller, lots of courtroom time, the kind of book where he braced himself for scenes that felt like “you can’t handle the truth.” He was wrong. The Right to Remain is the twentieth installment in James Grippando’s Jack Swyteck series, but it works perfectly well as a standalone.
Swyteck is a Miami criminal defense attorney whose new client, Elliott Stafford, is facing a murder charge and has decided not to speak. To anyone. Not his lawyer. Not the judge. Not his girlfriend. For no apparent medical or psychological reason, Elliott has simply gone silent, and it’s Jack’s job to figure out who or what he’s protecting.
The setup is very clean. It is very tense. It is very easy to kind of like picture what is going on.
Arthur said. Things escalate well outside the courtroom as the story develops, and the pacing keeps it from ever feeling like homework. A solid thriller that earns its twists.
The Resort by Sara Ochs (2024)
Meaghan’s thriller pick for the season, and it’s got exactly the kind of setting that makes you want to be somewhere with a drink in your hand while you read it. The island of Koh Sang, Thailand. Dive instructors, expats, a travel influencer, and a group of people who have all, to varying degrees, come here to leave something behind. When a tourist turns up drowned the morning after a bonfire party, everything starts to unravel.
Memories of the night before are fractured across different characters. The tourist had been reaching out to people. Nobody knows why, and nobody wants to know.
It was fast-paced. There are a lot of twists and turns within it.
Meaghan said. The epilogue apparently has an additional twist that hits even after you think you’ve figured everyone out. The kind of book you actually would throw in a beach bag. Definitely do that.
Rhino: The Rise of a Warrior by Nicholas Sansbury Smith (2025)
If you know Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Hell Divers series, this one functions as a prequel. If you don’t, that’s fine too; the story stands on its own. It follows Nick Baker, a frail orphan born in an underground bunker in a post-apocalyptic world, centuries after nuclear war has made the surface largely uninhabitable.
He gets captured during an early expedition above ground, taken by a brutal faction that operates on cannibalism, violence, and a survival-of-the-fittest logic that’s somewhere between ancient warrior culture and something out of a nightmare. What follows is the story of him becoming Rhino.
It follows him of becoming essentially this underdog top dog who becomes this crazy warrior and you follow all of the suffering that he has to go through and all of his successes and character building and everything.
Arthur said. It’s hot. Literally, the setting is brutal and sweaty and oppressively warm throughout, which Arthur pointed out makes it feel oddly appropriate for summer. Nicholas Sansbury Smith worked in Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management before becoming a full-time author, and that background shows in how he builds out collapsed-world logistics.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020)
This is the gothic novel that doesn’t look like one at first. Set in 1950s Mexico, it follows Noemí Taboada, a socialite summoned to a decaying estate called High Place after her cousin sends a disturbing letter claiming her new English husband is trying to poison her.
The estate belongs to the Doyle family, who made their fortune from a silver mine that has long since collapsed. The patriarch is strange and eugenic-obsessed. The son, Virgil, is mysterious and attractive in exactly the way that should make you nervous. And the longer Noemí stays, the more the estate itself seems to resist her, pulling everyone inside it toward a certain kind of madness.
Meaghan was on the fence about it when she first read it, but she keeps coming back to it as a recommendation because the prose is genuinely lush and the setting is unlike anything else in the genre.
It’s such a fascinating thing to have a very gothic tone set somewhere like Mexico, which is just not something that we’ve seen very frequently.
She said. “And it really fits.” If you’re into rot, moss, sprawling houses that feel alive and wrong, this one’s for you.
An Honorable Assassin by Steve Hamilton (2024)
Arthur’s spy thriller pick, and the title is exactly what it promises. This is the third entry in Steve Hamilton’s Nick Mason series, but like the others on this list, it reads just fine without the backstory. Nick Mason is an unwilling assassin, a man whose freedom from federal prison came with strings attached, and in this one those strings send him to Jakarta on a mission to eliminate an international fugitive known as the Crocodile.
His team doesn’t care if he makes it back. The target gets away. Now Mason is on his own, trying to complete a mission that nobody wants him to survive.
“He’s like, no. We need to plan. We need to do this. Where is our plan? And they’re like, fuck it, let’s go,” Arthur said. “And he’s like, no. No. No.” The double-crossing is constant, the action escalates steadily, and Hamilton does something thoughtful with the character’s backstory: he doesn’t dump it on you. You learn who Mason is through what he does, not through anyone standing in a room explaining his history. Steve Hamilton has won the Edgar Award twice; it shows.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938)
Meaghan’s classic pick, and maybe her most confident recommendation of the bunch. Rebecca was published in 1938 and it still hits. A young woman, never named in the novel, meets the widower Maxim de Winter while working as a companion in Monte Carlo.
They fall into a rapid marriage and return to his sprawling Cornish estate, Manderley. But from the moment she arrives, the shadow of his first wife Rebecca, who died under murky circumstances on the property, makes it impossible to settle. The housekeeper Mrs. Danvers is icily devoted to Rebecca’s memory. Everyone speaks of the first Mrs. de Winter as though she were irreplaceable. The narrator is young, uncertain, and increasingly convinced she can never measure up to a woman she never met.
There’s so many layers to what the legacy of Rebecca does to the narrator of the novel herself.
Meaghan said. “Like how it affects her psyche as such a young person.” The estate itself functions almost as a character. Du Maurier writes it with so much atmospheric weight that Manderley feels like it has a personality and a memory of its own. The book isn’t especially long, which makes it surprisingly easy to get through even if classic literature usually feels like a commitment. A Hitchcock adaptation exists and is worth watching afterward. Avoid the 2020 Netflix version.
That’s nine books across romance, thriller, sci-fi, horror, and gothic fiction. Some are new, some are recent, one is nearly ninety years old and still holds up completely.
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