Summer’s here! Come on in, the books and the cocktails are fine. Claim your chaise poolside or relax into that backyard hammock with any of these entertaining novels and a matching icy adult beverage—perfect together!

The novels you can pick up at your favorite bookseller. For more cocktail recipes and trivia, browse at imbibemagazine.com.

Paula Hawkins returns after the runaway bestseller Girl on a Train. You got to give her credit, that is a hard act to follow. But she can be proud of Into the Water, a chilling look at a contemporary English village’s deep secrets. Who else will be pulled from the pool that was used centuries ago to test a woman for witch’s powers? With this one, I’d recommend a Dark and Stormy with its spicy bite of ginger.   Get the book.

Dottie Frank, as she’s known to the scores of fans she meets every summer when she tours for another of her Lowcountry novels, always delivers a perfect combination of humor and heart.  In Same Beach, Next Year, two ex-sweethearts run into one another on vacation: Adam and Eve make their spouses a little jealous. Over twenty years of shared vacations, the web of emotions these two couples create will capture you completely. A Charleston Bog, sweetened with Honey Syrup and Maker’s Mark, really hits the spot. Get the book.

In The Sunshine Sisters, a Hollywood legend who was a rotten mother is forced to ask her three resentful, estranged adult daughters for help. It’s much more fun than that sounds! Jane Green doesn’t gloss over her characters’ faults which just makes her books all that more relatable. If you don’t see yourself in one of these women, you may need to pass by that magnifying mirror a little more often. Toast the girls who triumph over it all with a bright, sassy Sidecar.   Get the book.

Beth Goehring believes, with apologies to Lorelei Lee, that rather than diamonds books are a girl’s best friend…and a boy’s, a man’s and a woman’s. For more than twenty-five years, through Book-of-the-Month Club and its related clubs, she’s sold popular fiction, mysteries, romances, cookbooks, children’s books, play scripts, behind-the-scenes tales of the movies and theatre, and lifestyle books. She lives with her husband and corgi in Manhattan.