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Fabulous Fall Books
September 28, 2025 at 5pm ET
Lyn Liao Butler
Lisa Gardner
Eliza Reid
Francesca Serritella
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Lyn Liao Butler
Lyn Liao Butler is a Taiwanese American author of thrillers, upmarket fiction, and rom-coms. Two of her books were instant Amazon bestsellers and her second book Red Thread of Fate was a finalist in the WFWA Star Awards for 2023. Before becoming an author, she was a professional ballet and modern dancer and is still a fitness and yoga instructor. She and her family, including two rescue dogs and a myriad of foster animals, divide their time between New York and Kauai.
The Fourth Daughter
Chef Liv Kuo’s star is on the rise…until a traumatic incident leaves her emotionally unable to venture outside her Manhattan apartment. But an unexpected reason to break free comes from Ah-Ma, Liv’s beloved grandmother in Taiwan. Ah-Ma needs Liv’s help in finding her fourth daughter, taken from her when the girl was an infant. After all these years, it seems impossible. It’s also a mystery: Ah-Ma’s fourth daughter is an aunt Liv never even knew existed.
After landing in Taiwan, Liv hears the heartbreaking story of her grandmother’s plight in a country once under martial law, of choices made for her, and of the hopeful search for a lost girl that has endured for more than sixty years. Like the enriching food and traditions that bind Liv and Ah-Ma, their journey for answers brings them together.
And it’s a quest that turns up both a precious old cookbook and a tale of fatal betrayal that shakes everything Liv believed about her family–revelations that could also give her the courage to face the trauma she left behind.
Lisa Gardner
Lisa Gardner is the #1 NYT bestselling author of over two dozen thrillers. When not plotting how to get away with murder, she can be found hiking, gardening or watching penguin videos.
Kiss Her Goodbye
Recent Afghan refugee and young mother Sabera Ahmadi was last seen exiting her place of work three weeks ago. The local police have yet to open a case, while her older, domineering husband seems unconcerned. At the insistence of Sabera’s closest friend, missing persons expert Frankie Elkin agrees to take up the search just in time for a video of Sabera to surface–showing her walking away from the scene of a brutal double murder.
Frankie quickly notes there’s much more to the Ahmadi family than meets the eye. The father Isaad is a brilliant mathematician, Sabera a gifted linguist, and their little girl Zahra has an uncanny ability to remember anything she sees. Which given everything that has happened during the girl’s short life, may be a terrible curse.
When Isaad also disappears under mysterious circumstances and an attempt is made on Zahra’s life, Frankie realizes she must crack the code of this family’s horrific past. Someone is coming for the Ahmadis. And violence is clearly an option.
When everything is on the line, how far would you go to protect the ones you love? Frankie is about to find out.
Eliza Reid
Eliza Reid is a bestselling writer, public speaker, gender equality advocate, cofounder of the acclaimed Iceland Writers Retreat and former first lady of Iceland. She was born and raised in Canada but has lived in Iceland for over twenty years. Eliza’s first book, Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World, was an instant bestseller in Canada and Iceland, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Pick, and translated into numerous languages. Her first novel, an Iceland-set mystery called Death on the Island (Death of a Diplomat in the UK) was an instant USA Today bestseller, an instant bestseller in Canada and Iceland, and has been optioned for television in a pre-empt deal. From 2016 to 2024, Eliza served in the unofficial role of First Lady while her husband was President of Iceland, during which time she served as patron of numerous organizations and was named a United Nations Special Ambassador for Tourism and the Sustainable Development Goals. She continues to speak at conferences and events around the world. A memoir of her time in the role is set for publication in spring 2026. She lives in Iceland with her husband and four children.
Death on the Island
A group of international players has gathered in a tiny village off the coast of Iceland for a diplomatic dinner. There’s Kristján, the mayor reeling from a personal tragedy. Graeme, the ambassador with an agenda to push. Jane, his wife, along for the ride on another one of her husband’s many business trips. And several others, from Iceland and from abroad, each with their own reason for being there, their own loyalties and grievances. By the end of the night, one of them will be dead. And it will be up to the ambassador’s wife, Jane, to figure out how–and why.
What Jane soon comes to realize is that small communities can be the most dangerous of them all… and no one in their group is safe. With secrets around every corner and violent weather trapping the finite list of suspects together on the island, this locked-room mystery by internationally bestselling author Eliza Reid brings Agatha Christie and Nordic noir together in a brand-new twist.
Francesca Serritella
Francesca Serritella is the New York Times bestselling author of Ghosts of Harvard, nominated for Best First Novel by International Thriller Writers, and a nine-book series of essay collections co-written with her mother, author Lisa Scottoline, based on their Sunday column in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Serritella graduated cum laude from Harvard University, where she won multiple awards for her fiction, including the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize. She lives in New York City with her eighteen-year-old cat and her new puppy.
Full Bloom
Reeling from a breakup and overlooked at her job as a lighting designer, Iris Sunnegren finds herself stuck, disconnected, and lonely in crowded New York City. Her wealthy friends are married and having babies, while she’s trying to pay for freezing her eggs. And the future she longs for feels out of reach.
Then, a mysterious neighbor, an older Frenchwoman, makes her a gift: a bespoke perfume.
One spritz, a dab behind the ears, and Iris feels like a different woman. Suddenly, she is the object of every man’s desire, and she can satisfy her own hungers for sex, love, and ambition. She can cast off her inhibitions and use her newfound allure to dazzle the high-profile client, attract a man who excites her like no other, and access all the rarified spaces that once excluded her. Invigorated by the perfume, Iris embodies her maximum power—a flower fully bloomed.
But there is danger in connecting to our primal emotions. Scent awakens buried memories, and nightmares of the childhood house fire she barely survived return to haunt her. As Iris ventures deeper into the glamorous and male-dominated worlds of New York real estate, dimly-lit steakhouses, and beachfront mansions in the Hamptons, she finds herself getting closer to unspeakable truths—about the people she trusted, about the people she loved, and about the new circle of power-players that invited her in.
A sensual and seductive novel set among the upper echelons of New York City, Full Bloom is at once a poignant story of becoming and a riveting mystery that asks: Who are you without your inhibitions? Does being wanted get you what you want, or will you be devoured by desire?
Meet Your Hosts
The Back Room is the brainchild of bestselling authors Hank Phillippi Ryan and Karen Dionne.
Learn more about how they conceived of The Back Room, how it works, and about their books too!