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.
Mystery
Aileen Muir
The hours before the ceremony had given no warning except the kind people ignore because ordinary life is noisy. Finn had woken to Nell singing to her cereal. His mother had coughed in the hallway and told everyone she was fine in a voice that meant she was absolutely not. His father had burned toast, scraped it, burned the scraped toast, and finally served everyone Weetabix with the solemnity of a man making legal reparations.
Romantasy / Maritime Fantasy
Aisling Vire
The Tidebound Courts
Salt, starlight and a crown with a cost shape this maritime romantasy. A Crown of Salt and Starlight brings desire and duty into the same tide, where neither power nor love arrives without consequence.
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.
Marriage Fiction
Laura Carpenter
The first tribunal notice arrived in a brown envelope with the tide still low enough to show the black ribs of the harbour wall. Nessa Harte found it wedged under the schoolbag her daughter had abandoned beside the kitchen table, half hidden by a county jersey that should have been washed two nights ago and a lunch note that read: Remember the yogurt this time, Mam, because I am not emotionally built for a dry sandwich.
Small-Town Romance
Sorcha Lennox
THE THINGS THE SEA DOES NOT KEEP The sea returned the wedding photographs on a Thursday. It did not return the wedding. That distinction would matter later.
Emotional Romance
Skye Wilder
The first envelope came back slit open, rain-softened at the corners, and stamped RETURN TO SENDER in a red so violent it looked less like ink than a wound. Maeve Larkin stood in the staff doorway of the Harbour Light Hotel with one hand still on the brass threshold plate, her waitress shoes soaked through, and understood before she read her own name that some doors did not close politely.
Epic Fantasy
Aisling Vire
Book One of The Fifth Ring Saga · Book 1
The Tide Went Wrong The tide went wrong three nights before the dead fisherman came home. Not with storm. Storms belonged to ordinary fear, and ordinary fear had rules. Storms broke masts. Storms drowned cattle in low fields. Storms tore slates from roofs and left women standing in doorways counting names into the dark with shaking hands and practical voices.
Celebrity Romance
Caoimhe Kildare
THE LAST SCENE The last thing Maeve Callaghan ever said as Eilidh Kerr was not written in the script. It was not supposed to be said at all. The script had given her silence. After fourteen years, eight seasons, three wars, two fictional children buried and four fictional grandchildren born, a shipwreck, a hanging narrowly avoided, one revolution, a fever that had taken six weeks to film and roughly ten minutes to survive on screen, and more mud than any actress should reasonably be expected to swallow for art, Eilidh Kerr’s final instruction was simple.
Sports Romance
Nessa Calder
Physiotherapist and single mother Aoife Byrne has built a careful life around work, community and her fierce nine-year-old daughter. When football star Eoin Daly returns home for a testimonial season, the boy she once loved walks back into the leisure centre carrying an injured knee, a changed life and the history neither of them has quite buried. As school visits, family loyalties and the pressure of public attention pull them closer, Aoife and Eoin must decide whether a second chance can be built from something quieter than grand gestures: trust, ordinary reliability, and the courage to stay after the match is over.
Erotic Romance
Sive Hart
At midnight, the harbour door locked from the inside. That was the rule on the bronze plaque beside the bell: no spectators after twelve, no phones beyond the velvet line, no touch without a yes that could survive morning. Mara Vale had written the words herself in a fit of stubborn optimism and made the sign-maker engrave them twice because the first version had put consent in smaller letters than discretion.
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.
Irish Historical Fiction
Branna O'Dwyer
Before the Scarlet Season lives in the uneasy space before change, when ordinary routines begin to carry a different weight. An Irish historical novel about family loyalties, private choices and what people sense before they are ready to name it.
Small-Town Romance
Sorcha Lennox
Ronan O’Doherty had never liked the way the cottage fell quiet at night. It wasn’t real quiet, not with the wind coming in off the Atlantic and rattling the old storm windows, and the sea pushing itself up against the harbour wall like it might finally work out how to climb. The pipes clanked, the turf in the grate sighed and settled, and somewhere down the hall his father snored like a tractor that ought to be retired.
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.
Holiday Romance
Aoife Winters
The lighthouse lamp failed twelve days before Christmas, and the first person to notice was the woman everyone in Emerald Harbour had learned not to pity. Mara Keane stood at the end of the pier with a box of donated paper angels under one arm, a municipal clipboard under the other, and the taste of old panic at the back of her throat. Across the black water, Lighthouse Point should have been breathing its steady white pulse over the bay—three seconds of light, three seconds of dark, the town’s oldest reassurance.
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.
Contemporary Women's Fiction
Laura Carpenter
The ferry bell rang once for the living and twice for the dead, and on Inish Rua everyone knew which count the sea preferred. By nine that November night, Captain Niall O’Rourke had already carried three nurses, a crate of antibiotics, two sacks of lamb meal, and one furious priest across a black channel that had no interest in mercy. The fourth crossing should have been cancelled.
Contemporary Family Drama / Protective Romance
Laura Carpenter
All the Law The mornings settled themselves into a choreography no one had rehearsed but all of them somehow knew. Maeve kept one palm curved under Sorcha’s small skull and the other balancing Seamus’s bottle while the kettle ticked itself toward the boil. RJ clattered bowls like cymbals, delighted to be assigned “dry hand” for the breakfast-table clean-line; Ellie prowled barefoot in her bunny pyjamas until she made her choice—up, always up—and scaled Rowan as if he were the only mountain on the island, koala-clinging to his shoulder with the solemn focus of a mountaineer and then dissolving into giggles when he swayed.
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.
Protector Romance
Skye MacLeod
The letter arrived in a dead man’s waterproof coat. Not in the post, not with a neat stamp and a civilised knock, but folded into the oilskin pocket of a fisherman who had been dragged from the Minch with his hands still clenched as if he had tried to hold the sea shut. Isla Kerr saw the coat before she saw the body, and that was what stayed with her: the yellow sleeve lifting in the wind like a warning flag, the black buttons shining wet, the torn cuff caught on the rusted hook beside the pier office door.
Holiday Romance
Aoife Winters
Killarney Wakes Killarney wakes in a hush that tastes of pine and the sea, a breath held between weather fronts, and Niamh Kelleher sets her shoulder to the morning like it’s an old friend. The fairy lights along the front parlour window blink in a slow heartbeat while she ices trays of cinnamon buns, a flurry of sugar settling on the oak like first snow. Radio Kerry chimes the forecast—“a cold snap, mind yourselves”—and in the pause before the kettle clicks, she hears a taxi’s tyres hiss past the guesthouse and splash the kerb.
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.
Sports Drama Romance
Bronagh Fairburn
High Tide Trilogy · Book 1
After a near-catastrophic rig failure threatens his offshore racing campaign, skipper Ronan Kearney needs one strategist brilliant enough to keep the team competitive: Maeve Sullivan, the navigator tied to the part of his past he has never managed to put right. Bringing her back to County Down means old loyalties, old hurt and championship pressure collide on the same deck. Off Course is a high-stakes sports romance about trust under pressure, second chances and two people learning that winning means very little if they repeat the same old mistakes.
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.
Romantic Fantasy
Aisling Vire
Dúnmara Chronicles · Book 1
Epic Fantasy
Aisling Vire
Dúnmara Chronicles · Book 4
The drowned boat came home without its men at the hour when the tide should have been going out. By then, Cara O’Dálaigh had learned to distrust every mercy that arrived clean. A boat returning was supposed to be a blessing. A small one, perhaps, compared with childbirth, harvest, fever breaking before dawn, or a husband’s hand finding yours beneath a table while men argued law around you as if women were furniture with opinions.
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.
Cozy Romantasy
Iseabail Moonan
House Six Romantasy • Book One
Hearth magic meets saltwater royalty in The Hearth Witch and the Sea Prince. A cosy romantasy about belonging, bargains and two very different worlds finding common ground.
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.
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.