3 Fantastically Awesome Books BJ Thinks You Need to Read: February 2026

June by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore  Cassie just inherited a mansion in Ohio from her grandmother. It’s falling apart, but she needed a change and to get out of NYC. So she lives there when one day she gets a knock on a door. It’s a man representing a famous actress named Tate Montgomery. Tate’s father just passed and left his entire estate to Cassie. Which is a massive surprise as she’s never met the man and has no idea why he would leave everything to her. So the story goes back and forth between Cassie and June, the grandmother when she was young back in the 50s. Turns out Tate’s father filmed a movie in that town when June was 18. And Cassie is trying to prove whether or not June and Jack had an affair and whether or not Cassie is actually Jack’s granddaughter. Rather than just take the DNA test, Cassie insists on finding out the truth on her own. Tate and her entourage move into the crumbling mansion while Cassie conducts her investigation. So you have the budding relationship between Cassie and Tate's world as well as hearing from June back when she was 18 as well. Awesome story.

More by Molly Roden Winter  This is a memoir by a woman who was in an open marriage. It seems to me like the marriage wasn’t super equal to begin with, she stayed at home and raised the kids while her husband “worked late” a lot. Then she went out with some friends and met a man and flirted with him. When she told her husband about the man that flirted with her he asked he if she was going to see him again. And then he encouraged her to see him again, and that’s how their marriage opened. I thought the logistics of opening a marriage were super interesting, and it seems to be way more common than I thought. She tells the story of all the different men she dated and had sex with while still married to her husband. And he’s off doing the same. I do question the viability of an open marriage and I think it’s bound to end when one of the participants falls in love with someone else. With every breakup she had with a boyfriend she fell into semi-devastation as you do when you’re dating someone. She still developed attachments to her boyfriends and tried to explain how that works when you’re still married and still love your husband. And it's not like she can really talk to many people in her life about her open marriage when it is such a private topic either. Overall, a fascinating look into a world I do not understand. 

Anatomy of an Alibi by Ashley Elston I read this one for book club. It was a multi perspective story centered around the murder of Ben. He’s not a great guy, controls his wife, he’s a shady lawyer, etc. So Camille thinks he’s up to something, so she gets this woman who looks like her to carry her phone around--because Ben tracks her phone--so Camille can put up cameras in the house and find out what he’s up to. She thinks she’s going to catch him sleeping around but really she finds out he’s involved in covering up an accident years ago where people were killed. On that same day he gets murdered and we have to then figure out who did it.  Overall a good book but I do think that once we got to who actually killed Ben we'd been on so many different paths with whether Camille did it, or Hank who was Ben's business partner that it ended abruptly.