Which New Good Mystery Books Feature Amateur Sleuth Protagonists?

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 quit and dipped. City threw a parade. Only Jenna Blake—my oh-so-gifted junior who claimed she could "see through killers' eyes"—lost it. At her celebration banquet, she went full drama queen: "I owe everything to Kate Mercer. Please, bring her back!" I laughed. Cold. Not happening. Last time around, I was the hotshot detective. But every clue I found? She dropped it first like she read my mind. People started saying I was washed. So I went all in—three months, no sleep, cracked a massive trafficking ring. Led the raid myself. She beat me there. Again. Place was cleaned out. Boom. She's the city's golden girl. I'm the clown with no game. Pressure got ugly. My head snapped. I died chasing the last scumbag. Then—bam. I woke up. Same day. Raid morning. Round two.

Meet Esmerelda Sleuth. Sleuth is her name and investigating is her game. (Paranormal Investigating, that is.) Esmerelda makes a good living as an investigator in a rather progressive firm. She lives a stable and sensible life until she meets Lance; an old money "hottie" who works for a real estate firm next to her building. After accepting an invitation for a weekend getaway party, she quickly discovers that Lance has a secret. He is wealthy. That part is true. And, yes, he's procured a job as a realtor in the building next door. His secret is that he belongs to an underground society of humans who didn't abandon their connection to magic centuries ago when religion declared it evil and he has traveled through time specifically to find her and bring her back to his time to marry him. If that isn't enough of a far fetched tale to absorb, he informs her that she was born in his time to a family belonging to that same secret society and was promised in marriage to him as an infant. When enemies who didn't want to see the union of families take place made attempts on her life, her parents sent her into the future and erased her memories of them as a precaution. Possessing virtually no belief in magic, ghosts, psychics, time travel, etc., it takes some doing on Lance's part to convince her to believe his story and go back with him. When she does, the lies, deceit and attempts on her life start all over again. Will she escape emotionally and physically unscathed? "The Other Side Of the Mirror" is a steamy-paranormal-romance- mystery-thriller and book one of the Esmerelda Sleuth series.

With her enemies in pre-civil war Virginia still seeking her death, Esmerelda is forced to return to the future only days after wedding Lance. Because it was necessary to fake her death in order to stop her enemies from following her to the future, her new husband, Lance, was forced to stay behind. He’d placed a magic box for them to communicate until he found a way to safely be with her beneath the floorboards of the house. Now, she must find it. A task that is easier said than done! “The Magic Box” is book two of the exciting paranormal-romance-mystery-thriller Esmerelda Sleuth Series

Forced to return to the past and then venture back into the realms of the dark lord to save her friend, Esmerelda faces loss, love, and a new awakening in this final installment of the Esmerelda Sleuth Series. Filled with excitement, love, loss, time travel, family dynamics, dimension hopping, and a few vampires, this is the completion of a story that you won't want to miss.

A series of past murders catch the attention of the police and the media. All the people who were killed were women, all of which had some sort of relationship with a well known and successful businessman named Asriel Parker. For some reason, the murders all point to him as the number one suspect and connection between them. The reasonable thing to do is to put him behind bars but there is one problem. "Everyone is innocent in the eyes of the law until proven guilty." There isn't a shred of evidence that actually pinpoints Asriel Parker as the culprit. With that statement in mind, Selena March, a good police officer and detective is sent undercover as his live-in Personal Assistant to dig up whatever information she can use to put the murderer behind bars. Selena has no idea what she signs up for but she knows for a fact that falling in love is not part of the whole 'undercover' mission