Tantalizing Tales — June 2025 — Part Two

Hello, dear readers! Has your June been as busy as mine has? It’s probably because my kids are finishing the last years of their respective schools before they launch into their new ones, but I’ve been run ragged keeping up with all their activities (and let’s not even get started on MY activities.) Fortunately, there are some delightful books to help fill the few quiet times I have available, beginning with Eliza Knight’s recently published historical novel Confessions Of A Grammar Queen.

There are no female publishing CEOs in 1960s New York. Savvy, ambitious Bernadette Swift is going to change that, with the help of a pair of pink pantyhose.

As a junior copyeditor, Bernadette is in the habit of pushing her personal life aside for the intentionally unmanageable workload her boss piles on her desk. Part of this is because she’s determined to become the first female CEO in the publishing industry. First, however, she’ll need to take the next step up the corporate ladder, with a promotion that her boorish and sexist boss very much wants to thwart.

Seeking a base of support, Bernadette accepts the unusual offer of a bold pair of pantyhose and joins a feminist women’s book club at the New York Public Library. Soon, she’s inspiring her fellow members to ask for more, to challenge the male gatekeepers and decades of ingrained sexism in their workplaces, and to pursue their personal and professional dreams. Their movement starts small but grows: demanding and receiving more scandalous books for the club; more time for their personal lives (and, in Bernadette’s case, for a certain charming male colleague); more women’s equity marches, and more women’s voices in publishing. Will a bad boss and a jealous colleague be able to stop her rise? Not if Bernadette and her friends have anything to say about it!

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Our next selection is a romantic suspense novel by Kendra Elliot. Her First Mistake is the first in a series starring police detective Noelle Marshall, a crime fighter with a dark past.

Thirteen years ago, Noelle was “just” a housewife to a charming, ambitious politician. Then a home intruder murdered Assemblyman Derrick Bell and left Noelle for dead. The crime was never solved, but was also never forgotten.

Fast-forward over a decade and Noelle is now a detective for the Deschutes County sheriff’s office. When the FBI comes knocking, she isn’t sure how to react. They’re reopening the case and looking for new clues, and now want her perspective on everything that she thought she’d left safely behind. It isn’t just that she doesn’t want to revisit the marriage that wasn’t the perfect love story she’d been promised, or the husband whose charm and privilege hid a dark side. Noelle has also been hiding a terrible secret about the night that Derrick died.

As past and present and leads and misleads collide, one thing becomes frighteningly clear. Derrick’s murder wasn’t just unsolved: it’s unfinished. And only the truth — no matter the cost — can save the life of the next potential victim.

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Looking forward to next week’s upcoming releases, we have one of my most hotly anticipated novels of the summer, Dennard Dayle’s sharply satirical How To Dodge A Cannonball.

Historically, flag twirlers were vital to an army’s morale. A battle would be won or lost not on the field, but in the abilities of a troop’s flag twirler to achieve the ultimate and most motivating routine… or so the army propaganda goes.

Anders is a white teenager living during the American Civil War. Desperate to escape his abusive mother, he volunteers for the Union Army as a flag twirler. After multiple defections from the North to the South and back again, Anders finds himself hiding out in an all-Black regiment, claiming to be one-eighth Black, or an octoroon, to fit in.

Anders takes two things seriously: staying alive and twirling his chosen army (whichever side he may be representing at the moment) onward to victory. Yet as the war goes on and the regiment is called in to put down various “uprisings”, Anders begins to see the war through the eyes of his newfound brothers in arms. Will these revelations expose a version of America that is perhaps not worth fighting for?

This book’s rich commentary on race relations in America rings too true today, making this masterful novel a relevant and insightful take on America’s past, present and future. Mr Dayle expertly plays with format here too, including a literal one-act theatrical play performed by the soldiers, as well as lessons in spycraft and letters interspersed between chapters.

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I will freely admit that I’m obsessed with the pop-art inspired cover of Natalie C Anderson’s upcoming Young Adult thriller That Kind Of Girl. The contents are just as absorbing, as two girls from opposite worlds play a dangerous game of cat and mouse, after a rich classmate is murdered and they both become prime suspects.

Sixteen-year-old amateur sleuth Roxie is shrewd, nimble, cunning and only a little bit damaged. She also has a real knack for finding things, making her the perfect go-to detective for her rich classmates at St. Margaret when they’re looking to retrieve the things they’ve “lost”— no questions asked. So when queen bee Kirsten Montgomery-Wiggins pays Roxie a hefty sum to track down a mysterious blonde who “stole” her phone, Roxie accepts. Although Kirsten is a bully and she and Roxie have bad blood between them, Roxie could really use the cash. But that same night, Roxie finds Kirsten murdered in her mansion, and police zero in on her as a prime suspect.

On the outskirts of town in a trailer park, Inez, a part-time maid and part-time sex-worker, keeps finding blood everywhere. Crusted in her earring, threaded into her shoelace. She should really toss her shoes so there’s nothing to tie her to the body, but these shoes cost her a few “favors” and several hours of cleaning houses. How could the night have gone so wrong? She really thought she was working her way to a better life, but now she could be headed to jail if the wrong someone puts two and two together.

Roxie doesn’t know who she’s looking for and Inez doesn’t know who she’s hiding from. But all roads seem to lead to Montgomery House, as Roxie works to clear her own name and Inez attempts to stay one step ahead of the law and the men who hurt her.

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An even younger protagonist features in Jennifer Trevelyan’s propulsive debut novel A Beautiful Family. An unnamed ten-year-old is on summer holiday with her family, and gets pulled into a web of mysteries surrounding a local child who went missing two years prior.

In this tense coming-of-age tale, our narrator arrives with her parents and fifteen year-old sister at their rental house in a New Zealand beach town in December 1985. She soon falls in with Kahu, another visiting kid. The two forge a friendship bonded by a shared goal: to solve the mystery of what really happened to Charlotte, a local girl who presumably drowned there two years ago. As they focus on gathering evidence, our protagonist begins to understand more about what’s really going on around her this formative summer, not only recognizing the dangers lurking in the seemingly idyllic beach community but also identifying fissures in her own family. As the summer winds to a close, a body is found, and our narrator’s family finds itself mixed up in an investigation that may very well push each member past their breaking points.

Ms Trevelyan deliciously plays with the tension between a ten-year-old’s understanding of events and the reader’s sense of real-world dangers, ratcheting up the suspense over the course of her narrative’s hot, languid summer. Despite the darkness swirling around the protagonist and her family tho, there is no shortage of either humor or 80s nostalgia, with a treasured Walkman and a matching soundtrack having pride of place. The narrator, especially, is the kind of fierce, opinionated and smart child protagonist that populates the best of popular literature.

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Finally, we have another electrifying debut to look forward to with Danie Shokoohi’s Glass Girls. This supernatural thriller explores the weight of family secrets, the burdens of trauma, and the cost of starting over.

Former child medium Alice Haserot thought she’d escaped her family’s centuries-long curse. For sixteen years, she’s lived far away from her family of witches and the ghosts that she used to channel. She’s buried the memories of her overbearing and abusive mother, her aloof and rebellious older sister Bronwyn, and the curse that plagued every moment of her childhood. Despite Alice’s best efforts to escape and reinvent herself, however, her past isn’t so easily left behind.

Alice discovering that she’s unexpectedly pregnant would be unsettling enough, but when Bronwyn turns up on her doorstep too, her carefully built new life begins to unravel. Bronwyn gives Alice a dangerous ultimatum: one of Bronwyn’s daughters is trying to possess the other, and only Alice has the power to save them all. If Alice refuses, Bronwyn will go to their mother and expose her location, threatening the safety of the life she has worked so hard to craft and maintain in her adulthood. Forced to confront the terrors of her childhood, Alice must return home to face down her family curse and all of the agonizing questions and choices that it still provokes in her adult life.

Equal parts ghost story and a narrative of survival, Glass Girls examines how our living monsters can be more frightening than the paranormal, and grapples with the question of what we owe the ones who raised us.

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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!