October 17th, 2026
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On Top Shelf
Fresh Pick
HAUNTED HULA-WEEN
📚 New Books This Week 📰 Latest News 🎪 Reader Games 👻 🎃 Halloween Contest Giveaways 🎃

October Reads Worth Falling For

Danger, desire, second chances, and unexpected romanceβ€”discover this month’s Fresh Fiction Featured Books.

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A poisoned cousin, a five-year-old's life, and a family with too many secrets.


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Supernatural sparks fly
between a bookseller
& her hard-boiled ghost.


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If Her Highness thinks I’ll let another man claim her and my child, she’s lost her royal mind. Sophaya’s mine.


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She found a body. Then she started asking the wrong questions.


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He ghosted her ten years ago. Now she’s stuck with him for Christmas.


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She’s the lady everyone overlooks. He’s the prince who can’t look away.

The Ninth Step by Barbara Taylor Sissel

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Also by Barbara Taylor Sissel:

Tell No One, May 2019
Trade Size / e-Book
What Lies Below, May 2018
Trade Size / e-Book
Crooked Little Lies, August 2015
Paperback / e-Book
Safe Keeping, April 2014
Trade Size / e-Book
Evidence Of Life, April 2013
Paperback / e-Book
The last Innocent Hour, December 2011
e-Book
The Volunteer, October 2011
e-Book
The Ninth Step, September 2011
e-Book

THE NINTH STEP
By: Barbara Taylor Sissel

Author Self-Published
September 2011
On Sale: August 30, 2011
Featuring: Livie Saunders
234 pages
Kindle: B005KDCOCE
e-Book
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Suspense

Livie Saunders is fluent in the language of flowers; she taught the meanings to her fiancΓ©, Cotton O'Dell, but then Cotton vanishes without explanation on their wedding day forcing Livie to learn the language of desolation. Heartbroken, she buries her wedding gown beneath a garden pond and resolves to move on, but there are nights when she slips . . . into a sequined red dress and a pair of stiletto heels, a stranger's bed, a little anonymous oblivion that is not without consequence. Still, she recovers a semblance of ordinary life and imagines she is content. But then, six years later, Cotton returns and her carefully constructed world shatters. The old questions bite like flies. Questions that Cotton O'Dell prays he can answer. He prays that Livie, whom he has never stopped loving, will be moved to forgive him. But there is more than Livie to be concerned about. There is Cotton's act of cowardice that caused him to become a fugitive in the first place . . . that crime he committed for which the legal clock is still ticking. That thing he did that will shock Livie to her core once she learns of it. Livie is desperate to trust Cotton, but then he goes missing again. Time telescopes, avenues of escape close, and as lives hang in the balance, choice dithers between mercy and revenge. And a decision that will take only a moment will carry the consequences of a lifetime.

The Ninth Step is a story of redemption, of being brought to your knees in the sober light of day to face a monstrous error and yet somehow finding the strength to stand up, to try and make it right. Even if that decision breaks your heart, endangers your freedom and ultimately threatens your life.