Tantalizing Tales — May 2025 — Part One

Happy May, dear readers! I’m in the hard middle of Performance Season, but at least I have a whole bunch of terrific upcoming reads to keep me company as I gallivant around the country.

First on my list is the latest book from local-to-me author Nick Brooks, which I’m super looking forward to bingeing with another of his novels, Promise Boys. His latest YA mystery Up In Smoke has two protagonists: one desperate to clear her brother’s name, and the other just as intent on keeping his own out of the spotlight.

After Cooper King is pressured by his big brother figure Jason to go on a looting spree during a local march, the unthinkable happens. Gunshots ring out and someone ends up dead. Cooper flees, but the news shows four teens in ski masks — Cooper and his friends — near the scene of the crime. Cooper fears that the cops will soon come knocking at his door. The pressure only mounts when Jason is taken into custody as a murder suspect.

Monique, Jason’s sister and Cooper’s longtime crush, will do whatever it takes to clear her brother’s name. If it means going into the belly of the beast and confronting the real killer herself, then so be it. When she teams up with Cooper, they begin to fall down an investigative rabbit hole… and to fall for each other.

But little does Monique know that Cooper is hiding the truth about his own whereabouts when the gun went off. If the pair fail to unmask the real murderer, Jason will get locked up for a crime he didn’t commit — and Cooper will most likely go down with him.

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For a marginally less complicated romance — or at least one with slightly less deadly but still important stakes — check out Jackie Lau’s Time Loops & Meet Cutes. When Noelle Tom eats an order of dumplings at the night market, she does so against her better judgment. But the old woman at the stall said that they would give her what she needed most, and what Noelle desperately needed after another long work week was quick and filling food.

Only now she’s somehow reliving the same Friday over and over. Every morning her alarm goes off at 6:45. That wouldn’t be so weird, except the Wordle answer is always “happy.” Worst of all, any work she does at her job as an engineer is completely erased by the time she wakes up again.

Monday might never come in this workaholic’s nightmare. Noelle has no idea how being trapped in a time loop is the “thing she needed most”. A return trip to the food stall doesn’t help either, because there’s no longer any sign of it.

Then she meets good-looking Cam, who appears in multiple places on different iterations of her Friday. While the brewery owner seems to have no memory of their encounters, there are signs that he might be her key to getting un-stuck. Thing is, Noelle can’t quite figure out how, even when she steps outside of her comfort zone and finally starts to live a little. As she grows more and more attached to Cam, she begins to worry that she’ll never escape this time loop and he’ll never recall her name. And if she ever does get out, will they be able to be together in the “real” world?

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Another genre-bending upcoming release is Lincoln Michel’s inventive Metallic Realms, an ode to golden-age science fiction, friendship, creativity, and the power and perils of storytelling.

Perennially single, socially awkward and drowning in debt, (the cheekily named) Michael Lincoln’s life has turned out nothing like the stories of the intergalactic pulp heroes he worshipped in his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns. He has a greater calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written word: The Star Rot Chronicles. Written collectively by the Orb 4, the misfit sci-fi writing group which includes Michael’s best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle, the stories follow the mind-bending adventures of Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew as they travel the Metallic Realms, encountering solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime while navigating interstellar love triangles. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished… until now.

For all that, the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest multiverse ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the funhouse reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, as the true reasons for the group’s fallout begin to emerge. Laboring away in hiding, Michael has just one mission: to bring the truth of the Metallic Realms to the world, no matter the cost.

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Our newest writer already mentioned Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent in her recent round-up of Speculative Mysteries to Get Excited About, so I’m piping up here to say that I’m excited about it, too!

Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School, and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings; teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers; more meetings, and securing the school’s boundaries from demonic incursions.

Walden is good at her job — no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It’s her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. It’s entirely possible, however, that the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from is herself…

Written by a real-life teacher who has lived to tell the tale (although with admittedly fewer demons,) The Incandescent is a beautiful story of self, belonging, and power. Ms Tesh invokes the familiar setting of a magical boarding school while exploring its boundaries through fresh authorial eyes.

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Our next writer also has an unusual background perfectly suited to her subject matter. Eliza Reid is the former first lady of Iceland, whose debut mystery novel Death On The Island draws from her own experiences in politics and international diplomacy.

A group of international players has gathered in a tiny village on the Westman Islands, off the coast of Iceland, for a diplomatic dinner. Graeme is an ambassador with an agenda to push. Jane, his wife, is just along for the ride. Several others, from Iceland and abroad, each have their own reasons for being there, with their own loyalties and grievances to cling to.

As glasses are raised in a toast, a storm begins to rage outside. The power goes out and the deputy ambassador falls dead. Trapped on the island, Jane and the remaining members of their uneasy group can’t help but wonder if the woman’s death was truly as accidental as claimed.

Jane soon comes to realize that small communities can be far more dangerous than she’d ever expected. No one in her group is safe, as she races to figure out how and why the deputy ambassador was murdered. With secrets around every corner and violent weather trapping the finite list of suspects together on the island, this locked-room mystery brings Agatha Christie and Nordic noir together in a brand-new twist.

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Another exotic locale for most of us is the setting of our final book for this round-up. Combining the sweltering heat of South Africa, an opulent week-long wedding celebration and murder is Jaclyn Goldis’ latest mystery, The Safari.

Odelia Babel, CEO of a sustainable fashion empire, is about to marry for the second time, to an employee twenty-five years her junior. She invites her loved ones — many of whom are understandably less that thrilled by this turn of events — to the Babel family’s luxury South African compound for the wedding festivities. In its soil, the family has deep roots and even deeper secrets.

Tragedy strikes just hours before the wedding. After a quarrel with her son Sam, Odelia is found dead. He insists that his twin sister Bailey is his alibi, but she’s gone missing, too. The heat roils, as desperate poachers and ferocious animals lurk on the fringes. Dark motives fester, and it soon becomes clear that whoever killed Odelia isn’t finished with the Babels yet. The rest of the family is about to become the murderer’s prey…

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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!