Find your future faves with this delightfully convenient shopping list of romance novels coming out in March. This time around, we’ve divided them up by subgenre to make it easier for those who’ve got a very specific obsession. Don’t forget to take this printable version with you when it’s time to shop!

Heroes and Heartbreakers March 2013 Shopping List!

Paranormal/Urban Fantasy/SfR

[Check out the complete list!...]

Released in theaters on Valentine’s Day (because the kids need date movies, too) was Beautiful Creatures, the latest—though assuredly not the last—paranormal YA adaptation to hit our screens this year. Based up the book of the same name by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, it is the first installment in their Caster Chronicles series, the filmic version of which stars a host of pseudo-high-schooler hotness, plus the likes of Emma Thompson and Jeremy Irons. Should you go and see this movie? That, I cannot yet say, since it hasn’t yet made its way to my Australian shores. But should you read these books? Yes, yes, and yes again. At least, assuming you have any interest in this particular subgenre.

For a start, there is much that is unique about the Caster Chronicles—and when was the last time one could genuinely say that about a paranormal YA release? Oh, sure, the tropes are all present and accounted for, but let’s face it, we’d be disappointed if they weren’t: our heroine is a woman of great specialness; she and our hero have an instant, unexplained connection; there are eccentric families to contend with; there are dark secrets to be revealed; and there is an approaching Major Crisis, which only love can conquer. But where Beautiful Creatures and its three sequels (and one novella) differ from most everything else of its like on the shelves today is that our first-person voice is male.

[That is more rare these days...]

Donna Grant
Midnight's Warrior
St. Martin's Press / November 27, 2012 / $7.99 print & digital

For ten long years, Tara has been a woman on the run, hiding from the magic-wielding Warriors and Druids of modern-day Scotland. Now, as a tour guide at a remote Highland castle, she hopes to finally escape her past—until one impossibly gorgeous man enters her life…and exposes her wildest secrets.

For centuries, Ramsey MacDonald has concealed his strength and skill as part Warrior, part Druid, for fear of unleashing the full force of his power. But when he takes Tara into his arms—and seals their fate with a kiss—Ramsey will have to fight for her love…though it may mean losing control of the magic inside him.

A lovely woman is manning the phones in a gorgeous Scottish castle-hotel—but she's not just in Scotland for the scenery. Tara is running from a secret past, and is afraid for her life. I hadn’t read the previous books in Donna Grant's Dark Warrior series, so I wasn’t sure whether Declan, the man Tara is thinking about, was good or bad—just that he was influential in Tara’s past. He’s certainly chasing her, but why? It seems Declan wants to bend her to his will. Tara had escaped from Declan ten years earlier, but she doesn’t want to leave her refuge in a Scottish castle and start running again.

In the past, Tara was quite intrigued by the handsome handyman Ramsey, even though the timing wasn’t right; “The problem was there was never a good time for her to get involved with anyone.” Ramsey is a brawny dark-haired Celt with eyes the color of gray ash, so rugged that he doesn’t even wear a coat outside, even though it’s bitter cold in the Highlands.

[A hunky, hardy Highlander? I dig it...]

Today Heroes and Heartbreakers is pleased to exclusively reveal the cover of the third book in Jenn Bennett's Arcadia Bell series, Binding the Shadows. Here's what it's all about:

Demons sure know how to kill a girl’s buzz. Renegade mage and bartender Arcadia Bell has had a rough year, but now the door to her already unstable world is becoming completely unhinged. When a citywide crime wave erupts, Cady’s demon-friendly tiki bar is robbed by Earthbounds wielding surreal demonic abilities that just flat-out shouldn’t exist. With the help of her devilishly delicious boyfriend, Lon Butler, Cady sets out to find the people who wronged her—but her targets aren’t the only ones experiencing unnatural metamorphoses. Can Cady track down the monsters responsible before the monster inside her destroys everything—and everyone—she loves? If she survives this adventure, one thing is certain: it’s last call for life as she knows it.

Binding the Shadows will be available May 28, 2013.

Reading an online discussion of Rainshadow Road by Lisa Kleypas recently, I was struck by how many readers insisted that the book would have been better had Kleypas omitted the magical realism. My own reaction was just the opposite. I loved the way the fireflies, hummingbird, orchids, grapevine, and stained glass window served to erase the barriers between the real and the fantastic. It was the magical realism that made the book more than just another romance from an author whose books are nearly always winners for me. I thought Kleypas’s use of the magical was remarkably close to the use of the term “magical realism” by the art critic who coined it to describe the “magic insight into reality” that he saw in Post Expressionism and even closer to magical realism as I first encountered it in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

(For info about a special pre-order offer for the next book in Lisa Kleypas’s magical Friday Harbor series, Dream Lake, check out the H&H Lisa Kleypas Collection.)

[Magic actually is all around...]

Kalayna Price
Grave Memory
Roc / July 3, 2012 / $7.99 print & digital

As a Grave Witch, Alex solves murders by raising the dead—an ability that comes at a cost, and after her last few cases, that cost is compounding. But her magic isn’t the only thing causing havoc in her life. While she’s always been on friendly terms with Death himself, things have recently become a whole lot more close and personal. Then there’s her sometime partner, agent Falin Andrews, who is under the glamour of the Winter Queen. To top everything off, her best friend has been forever changed by her time spent captive in Faerie.

But the personal takes a backseat to the professional when a string of suicides occur in Nekros City and Alex is hired to investigate. The shades have no memory of the days leading up to their brutal endings, so despite the very public apparent suicides, this is murder. But what kind of magic can overcome the human will to survive? And why do the shades lack the memory of their deaths? Searching for the answer might mean Alex won’t have a life to remember at all…

Coming into Kalayna Price’s Grave Memory, Alex Craft has already got more on her plate than she can handle. From previous books, she’s experiencing rapidly deteriorating vision, barely containable magic, a Faerie Queen out to make her life miserable, and a not-so-hot love life. With all this going on, surely the only way for Alex will be up, right?

[Why do I sense the answer is in fact something like “Hell no”?!...]

Donna Grant’s Midnight’s Lover is released tomorrow, and combines time-traveling, sexy Highlanders, and druids! We’ve asked Donna to join us here at H&H to explain just what her fascination with druids is all about. Thanks, Donna!

I get asked a lot why I chose Druids for my Dark Sword and Dark Warrior series. I find the legend of the Druids utterly fascinating, not least of which because there are so many conflicting accounts. Some records show the Druids to be spiritual and intellectual leaders who helped heal the sick and gave counsel to kings and other leaders.

The Romans would have us believe they were the basest of humans who routinely sacrificed humans and animals in order to appease their pagan gods.

[Say it ain’t so...]

Lucy March
A Little Night Magic
St. Martin’s Press, $14.99 trade paperback/$9.99 digital, Jan. 31, 2012

Olivia Kiskey needs a change. She’s been working at the same Nodaway Falls, New York, waffle house since she was a teenager; not a lot of upward mobility there. She’s been in love with Tobias, the cook, for the last four years; he’s never made a move. Every Saturday night, she gathers with her three best friends—Peach, Millie, and Stacy—and drinks the same margaritas while listening to the same old stories. Intent on shaking things up, she puts her house on the market, buys a one-way ticket to Europe, and announces her plans to her friends . . . but then she meets Davina Granville, a strange and mystical Southern woman who shows Olivia that there is more to her life than she ever dreamed....

When reading Lucy March’s A Little Night Magic, what struck me was how magic was used in the world created.

As a reader of fantasy, I’m used to big, grand, spectacle – powers straining limits and occasionally beyond imagining. But in A Little Night Magic, magic is intimate and precise. Its power is in the personal and in the relationship it fosters.

[Seems like Nodaway Falls is the perfect place for a little romance...]

A few minutes ago, urban fantasy author Kevin Hearne posted the cover for his upcoming release, Tricked, due out April 2012.

Here’s a bit more about the book, fourth in the Iron Druid Chronicles:

Druid Atticus O’Sullivan hasn’t stayed alive for more than two millennia without a fair bit of Celtic cunning. So when vengeful thunder gods come Norse by Southwest looking for payback, Atticus, with a little help from the Navajo trickster god Coyote, lets them think that they’ve chopped up his body in the Arizona desert.

But the mischievous Coyote is not above a little sleight of paw, and Atticus soon finds that he’s been duped into battling bloodthirsty desert shapeshifters called skinwalkers. Just when the Druid thinks he’s got a handle on all the duplicity, betrayal comes from an unlikely source. If Atticus survives this time, he vows he won’t be fooled again. Famous last words.

Several H&H bloggers are big fans of the series. Have you checked it out? What do you think of the Tricked cover?

I’ve just finished reading a spate of urban fantasy books where magic was a crucial element to the plot. Not just a causal casting of a love spell, but a more esoteric kind of magic where summonings and bindings run wild.

Is this a new untapped market for the genre? Or nothing new? Let’s take a look.

In the past, magic was handled in a “Harry Potterish” way (don’t get me wrong, I love Harry): The protagonist had a problem, they would wave their wand or hands say a few words—problem solved. Dark Magic was only done by evil beings setting themselves up as overlords.

More recently, however, magic has taken a darker forms, done by main characters as way to exist. Banishments and Summonings are regular business, both in Urban Fantasy and PNR. It never goes completely right, either, which again is a new take in the genre. No quick fixes for these mages.

[Make ’em work for it...]

I've hated vampires ever since a friend gave me Stephen King's Salem's Lot for my birthday in 1976 and I spent the next month waking up every night from a vampire-related nightmare. Or perhaps longer (My therapist has a theory about this).

I'm not crazy about werewolves, shape shifters, demons—you know, the whole pantheon of not-human inhabitants of romance novels. In fact, I don't get the allure of this sub-genre. 

But—and you knew there was a “but” coming, didn't you?—I don't have a real problem reading about humans with paranormal powers. Maybe I'm just a species-ist. I especially enjoy Historical Romance with said humans. But these powers have to successfully integrated into the characters and plot to work for me. 

Mary Jo Putney's Guardian series works; this series takes place in Georgian England and Scotland (although we do see them at work during Elizabeth I's reign in the novella Alchemical Marriage in Irresistible Forces).

[A touch of magic...]