Tantalizing Tales — April 2025 — Part Three

In which we check out some of the most interesting books to be released here at the tail end of the month before turning our attention to May!

First up, we have a newly published memoir, Ana Hebra Flaster’s Property Of The Revolution. A family of Cuban revolutionaries found themselves growing increasingly disillusioned by Fidel Castro’s regime, and were forced to flee their homeland for an entirely different space: a snowy mill town in New Hampshire. A political refugee at the age of six, young Ana clung to her matriarchal extended family’s courage and quirky wit to help her make sense of all the turmoil and change that was going on around her.

Several decades on, as a successful adult with a five year-old daughter of her own, Ms Hebra Flaster was forced to confront once more the memories of that time in her past, leading her to not only talk about her experiences publicly but to also eventually write this powerful book. Celebrating the resilience of refugees while acknowledging the pain that shaped them, this is a fascinating look not only at immigration in general but also into Cuban and Cuban American politics and sociology.

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Our next book is the second in the spin-off series to one of my favorite culinary cozies, which I’ve long enjoyed not only for its delicious recipes but also for its gentle but probing psychological insight. Karen Rose Smith’s Booked For Revenge continues the adventures of Daisy Swanson’s grown-up daughter Jazzi, as the latter finds herself following not only in her mother’s restaurateur but also sleuthing footsteps.

After moving to the lakeside resort town of Belltower Landing, New York, Jazzi Swanson has made a success of her bookshop and tea bar, Tea & Tomes. She’s further thrilled to be able to participate in the town’s upcoming Gentleman’s Bake-off competition, a tourist attraction whose celebrity panel of judges will be signing their cookbooks at Jazzi’s store.

Unfortunately, big names too often come with big egos, leading Jazzi to wonder if there are perhaps too many cooks in this virtual kitchen. Fortunately, the competition itself features far fewer notable names. It’s still a shock, however, when local photographer Finn Yarrow is found dead by Jazzi’s own partner shortly after being declared the winner. The champion has been bludgeoned to death next to his prizewinning Black Forest Cake, and there’s no shortage of suspects in the assembled crowd.

Had someone truly been so incensed at not winning that they’d decided to kill the victor? Or did Finn’s death have something to do with his occasionally intrusive profession? Jazzi is determined to uncover the truth and unmask the killer before anyone else gets hurt.

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Robert Bailey’s eleventh novel The Boomerang is a departure from his usual courtroom dramas. This conspiracy thriller features a desperate father whose determination to save his daughter has him making a breakneck road trip from the White House to the dusty plains of rural New Mexico.

The President of the United States has terminal cancer. Chief of Staff Eli James, the president’s faithful consigliere and best friend, is one of the few who know. But just as the president is mysteriously cured, Eli gets heartbreaking news: his own teenage daughter has cancer.

Determined to make use of his Washington connections, Eli turns to Big Pharma’s top lobbyist for advice. Her response is confounding. While trying to make sense of it, he stumbles upon a jaw-dropping governmental cover-up worth billions of dollars ― and millions of lives. Armed with this deadly secret, Eli flees DC with his family out west. To keep them safe, he forms an uneasy alliance with land baron Nester “the Beast” Sanchez, known for his ruthless power tactics. As an epic showdown brews, it’s the state versus one desperate citizen willing to put his life on the line in order to save his daughter.

This is Mr Bailey’s most deeply personal book to date, as the story was inspired by his experience having a ringside seat in 2017 to two battles against cancer—fought by his father, who passed away, and his wife, who thankfully survived.

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Another book about desperate measures against terminal diagnoses is Aaron John Curtis’ debut novel Old School Indian, a coming-of-middle-age tale that follows an Ahkwesáhsne man’s reluctant return to the home he thought he’d left behind forever.

Abe Jacobs is Kanien’kehá ka from Ahkwesáhsne — or, as white people say, a Mohawk Indian from the Saint Regis Tribe. At eighteen, Abe left the reservation where he was raised and never looked back.

Now forty-three, Abe is suffering from a rare disease that his doctors in Miami believe will kill him, and quickly. Running from both his diagnosis and a failing marriage, Abe returns to the Rez, where he begins to contemplate the one path he thought he’d never undergo: a healing at the hands of his great-uncle Budge Billings.

Budge, a wry, unceremonious, recovered alcoholic with a penchant for punk t-shirts, is not the least bit sentimental about his healing gift. Which is good, because Abe’s last-ditch attempt to be healed is just that: a fragile hope of which he is thoroughly skeptical himself. But no healing is possible without hope or self-knowledge. To find both faith and himself again, Abe must confront how leaving the reservation at eighteen has continued to affect him, as well as the loves and fears that have kept him far from home ever since.

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Another dazzling literary debut is Omar Hussain’s A Thousand Natural Shocks, a mesmerizing meditation on trauma, memory and identity, wrapped in a high-octane thriller.

Memories define us. But who do we become if they disappear?

Dash is a reporter in Monterey, California who is desperate to outrun his own past. During the day, he investigates the reemergence of a long-dormant serial killer. At night, he has become entangled with a criminal cult that promises Lobotomy Pills to erase his traumatic memories of his father.

But as Dash begins to lose his memories — as well as his sense of self — he discovers a dark secret about the cult, one that would horrify even its own members. Soon he finds himself in a race against time to evade the cult, unveil the killer and reconcile himself with his past before his memories all fade away.

Taking its title from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this powerful thriller examines the central questions of existentialism, and how experience and memory shape the self.

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We come full circle to close the round up this week with a memoir that also examines the complicated relationships between parent, child and memory. Jill Bialosky’s The End Is The Beginning is subtitled A Personal History Of My Mother, and tells the life story of Iris Yvonne Bialosky in reverse, from death back to her birth.

When Iris Yvonne Bialosky died in an assisted care facility on March 29, 2020, it unleashed a torrent of emotions in her daughter Jill. Grief, of course, but also guilt, confusion and doubt, all of which were compounded by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic which made it impossible for Jill to be with her mother as she was dying or to attend her mother’s funeral.

With a poet’s eye for detail and a novelist’s flair for storytelling, Jill presents a profoundly moving elegy unlike any other, introducing readers to Iris at the physical and cognitive decline that led to her end in a care home. Jill then rewinds the story through Iris’s battle with depression, the tragedy of a daughter’s suicide, a failed second marriage, the death of her beloved first husband, her joyful teenage years, and the trauma of losing her own mother at just eight years old.

The result is a compassionate and powerful celebration of a multi-dimensional life, showing how we are all the sum of our experiences. Ultimately, this isn’t just a family memoir: it’s a brave and compassionate celebration of a woman’s life and death, and a window into a daughter’s inextricable bond with her mother.

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Let me know if you’re able to get to any of these books before I do, dear readers! I’d love to hear your opinions, and see if that will help spur me to push any of them higher up the mountain range that is my To Be Read pile.

And, as always, you can check out the list of my favorite books in my Bookshop storefront linked below!