Beard in Mind

All is fair in love and auto maintenance. Beau Winston is handsome, charismatic and by common consent the nicest of the Winston brothers — but his charmed life goes sideways when his twin leaves town and the family auto shop takes on a replacement mechanic. Shelly Sullivan is superbly good at the work and, in the publisher's own words, "not nice and never accommodating." Their first meeting goes badly, the hostility is mutual, and Beau's irritation curdles into a curiosity he cannot put down: he wants to know why this woman wears her spikes on the outside.

The answer is obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it sits at the centre of the book rather than at its edges. Shelly has lived with severe OCD for years and has moved away from her family in order to be treated for it; a fear of being touched has walled her off from nearly everyone, and her compulsions extend as far as self-harm. Reviewers singled the portrayal out as unusually careful for the genre — no tidy shorthand about alphabetised bookshelves, but an exhausting condition that shapes every part of her life, with the sessions between Shelly and her therapist given as much weight as the romance.

Beard in Mind is the fourth full-length novel in Penny Reid's Winston Brothers series, a 110,000-word contemporary romantic comedy set among a family of brothers in small-town Tennessee. It runs on slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers friction and a grumpy-meets-sunshine pairing, and it was a Goodreads Choice Award semi-finalist for Best Romance. The publisher notes it can be read as a standalone, though it lands harder alongside the rest of the series.