Who Is The Author Of The Home Reader?

Maya Bennet came to college with one goal: survive. Keep her scholarship. Work enough hours to pay her bills. Graduate. Don’t make mistakes. Especially not the kind that come with a charming smile and a football jersey. The last thing Maya needs is Cole Ryder. The star quarterback has a reputation for breaking hearts, avoiding commitment, and never taking anything too seriously. He’s exactly the kind of guy Maya has spent years avoiding. But somewhere between late-night study sessions, stolen moments, and Cole showing up whenever her world starts falling apart, he becomes impossible to ignore. For Cole, it starts as curiosity. Then concern. Then something much more dangerous. Before he realizes what’s happening, the girl who never believed she’d be chosen becomes the center of his entire world. But falling in love doesn’t magically fix real life. Maya is still carrying the weight of family problems, financial stress, and years of believing she’s only worth what she can accomplish. As old wounds reopen and painful family secrets come to light, she’s forced to decide whether she can finally stop carrying everything alone. Because Cole isn’t the only one falling. The real question is whether Maya can believe she deserves the kind of love that’s willing to stay. Filled with laugh-out-loud banter, found family, emotional healing, college chaos, and a swoon-worthy quarterback who falls first and falls hard, The Rogue Next Door is a heartwarming slow-burn romance about learning that sometimes the strongest thing you can do is let someone love you.

I was adopted. They were so good to me that every night before I fell asleep, I prayed to grow up healthy and happy in this home. Then Mom got pregnant. I hid under my covers and cried all night, quietly packing the little suitcase I had arrived with. But they didn't send me away. They loved me even more. The day my brother was born, Mom took my hand and gently stroked my head. "Having an older sister," she said, "is why we have a younger brother." Dad lifted me above his head and spun me around laughing. "Lily is our family's lucky star — our most beloved baby!" I finally stopped dreading every single day. I thought I had truly become part of this family. Then my brother snapped my favorite Barbie in half. I pushed him. He stumbled, sat on the floor, stared for two seconds, and burst into tears. Mom panicked, shoved me aside, and pulled him into her arms, asking over and over if he was hurt. Dad came running. He grabbed my shoulders and slammed me against the wall, eyes blazing. "Is this what I raised you all these years for — to bully your brother? Believe me when I say I will send you straight back to—"

After years of running from her past, Lissa returns to the one place she never wanted to see again—her childhood home. The town hasn’t changed, but Lissa has. Now a mother, a wife, and a survivor, she’s trying to rebuild a life while standing on the crumbling foundation of her trauma. Just a few months. Just until she finds her footing. But the house doesn’t let go so easily. It smells of mildew and memory. Dust covers more than furniture—it coats every secret Lissa tried to bury. As she navigates motherhood, old friendships, and a strained relationship with her sister, Lissa discovers more than ghosts in the attic. A photograph violently scribbled out. A letter from someone she hoped was lost to time. And a journal that brings her back to the girl she used to be. Her husband, Colt, tries to be her anchor. Her son, Lucas, is her reason to fight. But a single name—just one letter, T—is all it takes to fracture her resolve. The past isn’t dead. It’s waiting in the basement. In a letter tucked behind old receipts. In the quiet corners of her memory where no one else can go. As the days pass, the house begins to feel like a trap.Lissa must decide if she’s strong enough to dig through the wreckage of her past… or if some secrets are better left buried. Told with raw emotion and atmospheric suspense, House of Quiet Screams is a story of trauma, resilience, and the silent strength it takes to confront what once felt un faceable. For Lissa, surviving was never the end of the story—facing what comes after might be the beginning.

For three years, I was the only one allowed inside my husband, Matthew Carter's, secret room on the top floor. Until that day—when I walked in and found his young assistant there. "Matthew asked me to get things ready for his dinner party," she said, all confidence and no shame. I smiled. It turned out this was what it felt like to have my privileges as his wife trampled on. Fine. If the rules of the game had changed, then I would show everyone who the real player was. One by one, I dismantled the Carter family's most prized projects. That was when Matthew finally panicked. He demanded, "Why? We're husband and wife!" "Exactly," I said, tossing the divorce papers onto his desk. "And that's why betrayal comes with a steeper price, doesn't it?"

The tale of a widow's harrowing journey through grief and peril into the cold remnants of a dead world. Damon Sharpe had in part found victory, he believed, in his battle to unearth a truth obscured by time. By autumn, he was dead, leaving to his wife Anne a house of unfulfilled wishes, remnants, and the key to the enigma of his obsession, the Mourner’s Cradle. A journey through grief and peril delivers Anne Sharpe from her home in St. Charles to the faraway skeletons of a long-dead civilization where she will find the desperate answers she seeks…or die trying. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

For five years, Mira poured her obsession into The Reckoning of Caelen Mors—a dark fantasy about a ruthless duke and the woman he becomes dangerously fixated on. At 2:47 AM, exhausted and alone, she died at her laptop. Her final words still glowed on the screen: "Duke Caelen finally showed her his true face. It was nothing like she imagined." She woke as Isadora Vess—the secondary character from her manuscript—in a silk bed, in a monster's house, with servants calling her by a name she'd invented. The problem: Mira remembers writing this world. She knows every dark secret. She knows how the story should end. Except her memories are fractured. The manuscript was never finished. And the characters have evolved without her input, making choices she never wrote, saying things she never scripted. Worse—Duke Caelen knows she's different. He's been waiting for her. Across seventeen timelines, he's seen her arrive at this exact moment. And in three of them, everything burned. Now Isadora must navigate a world she created but no longer controls, surrounded by men who each want to use her—a charming prince offering escape, a dark count offering power, and a villain offering the only thing that might be true: the answer to why she's here, and what happens when an author gets trapped in her own story. Because in every version where Isadora arrives, the empire falls. And Caelen has been waiting a very long time to see which ending she'll choose this time.