The Avelrow shelf
These books match the feeling and story ingredients you chose. Adjust the mix whenever you like.
Historical
Cormac Ashdown
In 1879 Emerald Harbour, schoolmistress Eleanor Vale is pulled into a murder investigation when Lord Bellweather is shot during Harbour Day and a missing child’s pageant crown conceals a note in her dead brother’s hand. With a dockside stranger warning her that respectable power has buried more than one truth, Eleanor must choose between the obedience that preserved her family name and the evidence that could save a child, expose a town, and burn every reputation built on silence.
Holiday Family Fiction
Nollaig Caird
The letter arrived on Christmas Eve with no stamp, no return address, and ash caught in the fold like a secret that had survived a fire. Orla Devane knew better than to touch it. She had spent fifteen years building a life out of that exact discipline: do not touch what can burn you, do not ask questions that have already cost you a home, do not go back to Emerald Harbour simply because an old woman dies and the dead get sentimental with timing.
Psychological Thriller
Clara Vey
At eight forty-three on Thursday morning, Sive Moran repainted the white line around a parking space reserved for a woman who had not visited the prison in fourteen months. Nobody had asked her to. That was important. If somebody had asked, there would have been a form.
Small-Town Romance
Laura Carpenter
Ana Byrne learned the weight of a secret at half past six on a Tuesday morning, standing barefoot on the cold tile of her bathroom with the sea still black beyond the window and a white plastic stick balanced on the rim of the sink like a verdict too small for the crime. The house was silent around her. Not peaceful. Silence, Ana had decided years ago, was only peace when someone had chosen it kindly.
Celtic Fantasy
Sadhbh Éireann
On the day Bríd Ó Corráin is buried, blood boils beneath a kettle in the Blackwater Arms and her missing St Brigid medal rises from it with a warning: the fourth ash wakes. As Niamh confronts the enigmatic Cian Vale and the secrets her family kept in the name of survival, a drowned kingdom lights beneath Blackwater Harbour and an ancient oath tied to her blood begins to break.
Romantic Comedy
Laura Carpenter
Evidence The morning I finally take the tickets out again, I do it like I’m handling evidence. They’ve been living in the back of my handbag for months, wedged behind receipts and lip balm, as if hiding them could make them less real. Two names printed in neat black type. Two seats. Two weeks in Venice. A honeymoon that never happened because my fiancé left before the wedding and the world kept moving as if heartbreak were a weather system.
Psychological Horror
Lachlan Ashen
Independent investigator Mara Vale is publicly discredited at a national integrity hearing when impossible ash, a sealed childhood institution called Ash House, and the voice of her missing brother force her back toward the family secrets and official records she has spent her career exposing.
Medical-Legal Thriller
E. L. Doherty
The sea had a way of pretending it was innocent. From the lane above the cliffs it looked almost gentle — slate-grey, flecked with pale foam, breathing in and out like something asleep. The wind did the loud work, flinging rain sideways, rattling the gorse, making a song of the wire fences. Down below, the tide kept its own counsel. Nora Fallon walked that path with her coat pulled tight and her hair half loose, as if she’d forgotten she was meant to be careful.
Missing Person Thriller
Aidan Kerrigan
Emerald Harbour Missing • · Book 1
1989 By half nine the summer carnival had stopped pretending it belonged to children. The toddlers with painted cheeks had been carried home sticky with sugar. The parish raffle had ended in a dispute over a ham nobody admitted wanting. Teenagers had taken possession of the grass behind Saint Brigid’s Hall, the older boys leaning against the railings as if they had personally invented cigarettes, the girls moving in bright packs between the music tent and the harbour road.
Women's Fiction / Romantic Suspense
Rhys MacIan
On the Galway coast, Nora Fahey faces a possession notice that threatens Ardglass House and uncovers a buried family scandal, while Ciaran Vale returns with evidence that the fight over her home reaches far beyond property. A women's fiction romantic suspense novel about family, inheritance, truth, and the price of staying.
Mother–Daughter Fiction
Fiona Ainslie
The first war began with a seating plan and a dead woman’s handwriting. It was not the dramatic sort of war, not at first. No one threw a vase, no one fainted beautifully into the arms of a man with a square jaw and an inconveniently available inheritance, and no one announced a secret pregnancy over smoked salmon. It began, as most family wars do, with a woman standing alone in a kitchen at midnight, holding a piece of paper that should have been blank.
Belfast Crime Thriller / Romantic Suspense
Rowan Kincaid
Belfast Night Crimes · Book 1
At that hour Belfast belonged to wind, black water, and the sort of men who mistook darkness for a deed. The cranes loomed over the docks like iron saints gone feral, long arms braced above the shipping lanes while the river shoved oil-dark against the pilings. Rust, salt, diesel, old bad decisions - the whole harbour reeked of them. She should not have answered the phone.
Cozy Mystery
Orla Ashdown
The first scone to cause a death in Emerald Harbour was not, strictly speaking, poisoned. Molly Fenn would later be very firm on that point, because a woman might survive gossip, debt, heartbreak, and one catastrophic fringe cut, but she could not survive a village deciding her almond-and-blackcurrant scones were murder weapons. The scone was innocent. The man beside it was another matter entirely.
Contemporary Irish Coastal Romance
Bridie Byrne McGuinness
The needle liked to sing when Willow worked—thin notes of metal and breath that soothed brides and steadied her own hands. Today it trembled. She tightened the corset laces the way her mother had taught her—two pulls, one whisper—and the bodice closed like a secret around the young woman’s ribs. Outside the atelier’s front glass, two men in municipal jackets loitered beside a clipboard and a strip of yellow tape that was not quite tape, not yet.
Gothic Romance
Ailsa Crowe
Some legacies should stay buried. Some loves refuse to. The Ghost at Ravensmere opens the gates to a moonlit coastal estate where inheritance, desire and dangerous truths refuse to remain politely in the past. Ailsa Crowe blends gothic atmosphere, haunted family history and romance into a story where the house remembers more than its living occupants are prepared to admit.
Contemporary Romantic Suspense / Infrastructure Thriller
Keir Devlin
Infrastructure engineer Isla MacCrae catches an abnormal tilt at a rain-battered viaduct while management calls it weather and reputational risk. Coastguard rescuer Ewan hears the danger too. As failed cameras, altered logs and overloaded freight point toward deliberate interference, Isla must hold the line long enough to keep a sleeper train—and the town beneath it—safe, while trusting the steady man who refuses to let her stand alone.
Marriage Fiction
Mairéad Quinn
The ring had been left in the sugar bowl, which was either a kindness or a crime, and Nóra Ríordan could not yet decide which. She found it at six nineteen on a Tuesday morning while the house still wore its night sounds: the boiler muttering behind the press, the old stair settling its bones, the sea beyond the harbour wall breathing in the dark like someone trying not to cry.
Scottish Historical Fiction / Historical Romance
Alina MacRae
When Eilidh Ross splits the king’s seal and refuses an order for winter evictions, one act of defiance turns the Scottish town of Inverglass into the beginning of a republic. With soldiers closing the roads and ordinary families forced to choose between obedience and survival, Captain Fraser becomes an uneasy ally in a cause neither of them can control—and a dangerous intimacy neither expected.