The Bodyguard

A certain shelf at this desk exists for the people who claim romance is not for them, and The Bodyguard sits near the front, arms crossed, professionally alert. Katherine Center's novel is the gentlest possible execution of a high-concept premise — the personal protection agent is a woman, the client is a movie star, and the fake relationship is invented not for publicity but for a mother, his, ill, back home in Texas, who must not find out her famous son requires armed staff. It is a rom-com built on competence, grief, and casseroles, and the desk finished it feeling as though someone had checked the locks and made tea.

Hannah Brooks is very good at her job and constructed entirely out of it, post-breakup, post-bereavement, first in line for every overseas posting because a hotel room in Seoul cannot remind her of anything. Jack Stapleton is the client no agent wants, a beloved actor with a corgi-related stalker situation, returning to his family's ranch while his mother undergoes treatment, and refusing, absolutely, to explain a bodyguard at the dinner table. The solution, proposed with showbusiness logic, is that Hannah simply attend as the girlfriend. What follows is Center's speciality, which the desk can only call therapeutic screwball — cattle, protective details run from horseback, a family with a buried grief of its own — Jack's brother, and the accident nobody discusses, are handled with real delicacy — and two professionals at pretending discovering the performance keeps coming true.

What sets the book apart is its theory of care. Protection, Center keeps insisting, is a love language with paperwork: Hannah guards bodies, Jack's mother feeds people, and the romance's turning points are all acts of noticing rather than grand gestures. Hannah's arc, from a woman who volunteers for danger because safety has nowhere to put her, to one who lets herself be guarded back, is the book's quiet business, conducted under the comedy the whole way.

Honest notices: the suspense element is deliberately mild, the third act's obligatory rupture is the genre's standard model, and cynics should be advised the book will work on them anyway. Content notes for parental illness and grief. Heat is warm and mostly offstage.

Who is this for? Readers in need of a kind book that is also a funny one, protection-trope fans curious about the holster on the other hip, and anyone who has ever loved someone by standing between them and the door. The desk recommends it like a prescription: take with tea, repeat as needed, refills unlimited.