Beard Science

Secret weapons close lists, and the desk closes the grumpy-sunshine file with Beard Science, the book in which the grump is a scheming genius and the sunshine blackmails him. Penny Reid's third Winston Brothers novel is the desk's pick for the series' summit and one of the great sleeper romances of the modern shelf: a small-town Tennessee comedy with the emotional engineering of a much heavier book, conducted between the family's most dangerous brother and the town's most underestimated woman.

Jennifer Sylvester is the Banana Cake Queen of Green Valley — a title, a costume, and a cage. Famous locally for a bakery persona her parents constructed and administer, Jenn at twenty-two has never chosen her own clothes, schedule, or future, and the book opens with her deciding, quietly and completely, to want out. Her instrument is leverage. Cletus Winston, sixth of seven siblings, presents to the town as an eccentric sausage-making dawdler and operates, beneath it, as Green Valley's unacknowledged chess master — a fixer of outcomes, collector of favours, and keeper of everyone's secrets. Jennifer, whom nobody watches because nobody ever has, happens to possess video evidence of one of his less legal manoeuvres, and she spends it on the desk's favourite demand in the catalogue. Teach me to be like you. Not romance. Lessons. How to be unignorable, how to want things out loud, how to leave.

What follows is the trope inverted with surgical care, because the makeover runs backwards: Cletus, undertaking the tutorials with a hostage's grace, discovers within weeks that his student requires no renovation — that the beige wallpaper persona conceals a person of terrifying patience and clarity who has been studying the town her whole invisible life — and the book becomes the story of the schemer out-schemed, a man who catalogues everyone realising he has been catalogued. Reid writes Cletus's unravelling with comic precision and real tenderness, and Jenn's emancipation from her parents, which is the book's serious cargo, lands with force the banter never undercuts.

Honest notices: content guidance for controlling and emotionally abusive parents, handled seriously; the series rewards order but this volume stands alone, and many readers enter here. Heat arrives deliberate and late. The sausage subplot is real.

Who is this for? Readers who want their grumps brilliant and their sunshine armed, anyone underestimated by design, and every quiet person keeping receipts. Bring cake, and negotiate everything, including the cake. The Winston siblings each hold a volume and the desk vouches for the family, but this remains the series' masterpiece and the town's best-kept file. Cletus would approve of the assessment, which worries us appropriately.