Lady Wolf's Library

By Julie Murphy

Pub Date: 7/21/26

Genre: Rom Com

LRating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗

Heat Level: 🔥🔥🔥 Hunger Howl
Tropes: Second Chance Romance

REVIEW

JULIE. MURPHY. Please keep approving me for your romances, because they are spicy and have me deeply emotionally invested every time. I cannot tell you how much I wish Starlight Palms was a real place in Palm Springs that I could retire to. Everyone felt so real and the descriptions of the place were immaculate and felt so old Hollywood. Also–ELI! OMG–Eli. Vera–Brody?!?!?! ELI, VERA!! ELI!!!! (IYKYK).

I LOVE my lush lady romances, but this one was featured a middle age protagonist having a hard right turn in her life that pretty much flips her off a cliffs edge. Not literally, but it sure as hell feels like it. It was really refreshing to read a middle aged protagonist who is experiencing actual life. Finding yourself and finding epic love (and hot hot spicyness) doesn’t have an age limit. To top it off, this story takes place against the background of a retirement neighborhood, making it a multi-layered story of heartbreak, love, and self discovery.

Thanks to NetGalley and Avon Harper Voyager for the advanced ebook copy in exchange for a fair and honest review!

PUBLISHER’S SYNOPSIS

Welcome to Starlight Palms, a favorite retirement facility among Hollywood actors and industry professionals tucked away just outside of sunny Palm Springs. Filled with forgotten scream queens, eccentric screenwriters, and heartthrobs of the past, it has a brand-new resident: Vera Stein, age forty.

Vera knows she’s missed her chance at a life worthy of the silver screen, just like she missed her chance at ever finding true love. But Vera isn’t one to take chances. She’s spent most of her adult years caretaking for her dying mother and her movie star boss’s ego. Now abruptly houseless and jobless, Vera has nowhere to land, so to grandmother’s house we go!

The Starlight Palms Senior Living Center is midcentury Hollywood down to its pastel-painted bones. This desert gem isn’t lacking in saucy plot twists (swinging seniors, anyone?) or a leading man: Elias Buckley, the on-site doctor and Vera’s former ill-fated college fling and—for reasons that will stay in Vegas—legally her ex-husband according to the state of Nevada.

It’s not long before Vera falls into a job as the activities coordinator and under the spell of a certain smart-mouthed doctor… Suddenly all those empty years in LA look less like mistakes and a lot more like backstory. With a fresh start at her fingertips, Vera begins to see that even with all the detours she’s taken, there’s still a Hollywood ending (and maybe even a happily ever after) in sight…