Issue 001 · Cover Story · Spring 2026 Kestrel Press

Profile — The Author of Chicane

Maeve Cross.

Motorsport romance for women who have watched Drive to Survive eleven times and are not going to apologize for it.

Inside this issue

Profile Portrait series The Trilogy In the Studio An Invitation

A debut motorsport trilogy. Open door · he falls first · Happy Ever After. The author lives in Charleston, South Carolina with too many books and an unreasonable opinion about Eau Rouge.

N° 001 · The lede

Maeve Cross writes contemporary motorsport romance with grown-up heat, brilliant heroines, and heroes who have been quietly in love for years before the heroine ever notices.

— the editor · Spring 2026

N° 002 A profile

The author,
in her own words.

Maeve Cross · Kestrel Press · 2026

She came to romance late, by way of Drive to Survive, an ill-advised dive down a Lauren Asher rabbit hole, and one specific October Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas in 2023.

What she wanted to read was not on the shelf. So she wrote it.

Chicane is the first book in her Kestrel Racing trilogy — a 95,000-word debut about an F1 chief engineer, the team principal who has been quietly in love with her for four years, and the secret he made to her dying father a decade earlier.

She is American. The men she writes are, somehow, almost always Irish. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with too many books, an unreasonable opinion about Eau Rouge, and a vintage Rolex Submariner she does not wear.

Book Two — Apex — is out now. Book Three — Pole Position — closes the trilogy fall 2026. All three in one calendar year.

GenreContemporary romance

Sub-genreMotorsport / Sports

Heat level4 / 5 · open door

Comp authorsAsher · Hazelwood · Huang

Reading atKestrel Press

Latest releaseApex (Book Two)

N° 003 Kestrel Press · 2026

In eight frames.

N° 004 The other things

Off the page.

Maeve Cross · Kestrel Press · 2026

Some things about her that have nothing to do with the books — and a few that do.

Currently reading Tessa Bailey, Hook, Line, and Sinker. For the third time. Reads it the week before every new race.

Currently writing Pole Position. Lane and Mateo. The third book. Fall 2026. The one she has been most afraid to write.

Currently watching Every Drive to Survive episode for the eleventh time. The 2024 Vegas race for the fourth.

The drink Cold brew. Four shots. Black. Room temperature. (She gave the order to Sloane.)

The ritual Five-thirty to seven-thirty every morning. Before the world is awake. The dog watches.

Where A back porch in Mount Pleasant when it’s warm. A leather chair by the window when it’s not.

Listening to A playlist of seven instrumental tracks she has been writing to since 2023. The same seven. In order.

The favorite corner Eau Rouge at Spa-Francorchamps. She has watched it on television one hundred and seventy times. She has never been there in person. She is saving it.

Before this Strategy consulting. Then a long Sunday afternoon in October 2023 in Austin, Texas, when something changed.

Currently re-reading The opening fifteen pages of Twisted Love, every time she gets stuck.

“

I write heroes who have been quietly in love for years before the heroine ever notices.

Maeve Cross · In conversation, Spring 2026

N° 005 The non-negotiables

What I write,
and what I do not.

Brilliant heroines.

A woman who is the best at her job, who measures the room before she walks into it, who never apologizes for being smarter than the men around her.

He falls first.

The hero has been quietly in love for years before the heroine ever shows up. Obsession that earned itself. No insta-anything.

Open-door heat.

Four out of five. Praise + worship register. Plot-integrated. Consent on the page. Aftermath every time.

Happy Ever After, guaranteed.

You will close every book of mine knowing the two people on the last page are still together. That is the contract. I do not break it.

The real world.

F1 paddocks, Charleston kitchens, Monaco balconies, MIT engineering benches. Specific places. Real textures. No fantasy footing.

N° 006 Three books, one season

Kestrel Racing.

Book One · Out Now

Chicane.

Sloane Kincaid & Ronan Callahan

Sloane Kincaid has spent ten years telling herself she is over it. Over her father’s death at Spa. Over the man who was leading the lap. Over Formula 1.

She is also the best engineer of her generation. And when Ronan Callahan, the man she has sworn to destroy, offers her chief-engineer-of-Kestrel money, she takes the job for one reason: to watch him lose.

What she doesn’t know — he has been in love with her for four years.

Read on the book site → Free on Kindle Unlimited

Book TwoOut Now

Apex.

Wren Kincaid & Theo Vance

Fake dating. He has been quietly in love with her for two years. She agreed to eight months of staged photographs to save her career. Neither of them is going to come out of it intact — and there is a brother’s letter waiting in Abu Dhabi that will undo them both.

Book ThreeFall 2026

Pole Position.

Lane Moretti & Mateo Reyes

Second chance. Rival teams. Championship year. They were nineteen and twenty-two at a karting school in Modena. They have not spoken in eleven years. He has carried her photograph in his wallet to every Grand Prix; she has carried his in the inside pocket of her work jacket. The race that ends the trilogy decides who has been carrying whom.

Save the date →

N° 007 · In the studio

The first scene I wrote.

The forty-one-second voicemail Michael Kincaid leaves Elena in Chapter 33 was the first scene of Chicane I wrote. Everything else was built around it.

— Maeve, on the writing of Book One

N° 008 · an invitation

Day Zero.
From Ronan’s side of the desk.

A bonus chapter — the morning Sloane Kincaid walked into Kestrel HQ in May, told from his side of the desk. Three thousand five hundred words. Yours when you join the letter.

Two letters a week · small stories from the paddock · the occasional bonus chapter · unsubscribe in one click

N° 009 Get in touch

How to find Maeve.

Anything,
everything.

Press, podcasts, Q&As, BookTok, foreign rights, audio, film & TV, reader mail. One inbox — I read all of it.

ask@maevecross.com

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