Tantalizing Tales — June 2025 — Part Four

Wow, this has been my first month with four Tantalizing Tales columns, which should give you a good idea of all the very cool books that get pitched to me, dear readers!

Leading the pack is Mike Bockoven’s Come Knocking, a book that I desperately want to find time to fit into my bursting-at-the-seams schedule. The title play is more than just a play: it’s an entire theatrical production that’s taken over six floors of a once-abandoned building in Los Angeles. The reception for it has been overwhelmingly positive, with both critical acclaim and lines out the door for tickets.

But then the unthinkable happens, as a night of bloody chaos kills dozens and injures hundreds attending the show. A shocked nation demands answers. Investigative reporter Adam Jakes is assigned to uncover the truth behind the massacre. Through a series of gripping interviews with survivors, cast members and witnesses, Jakes pieces together the chilling reality behind what was supposed to be the ultimate theatrical experience.

As a former theater professional and perpetual fan of experimental media myself, this is absolutely something I’m panting to read, especially since the book promises to take a good hard look at the “grotesque underbelly of immersive experiences”. I’m also weirdly obsessed with that eerie cover, which gives me a delicious chill in this otherwise near-unbearable summer heat.

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Our next selection is a more conventional murder mystery in comparison. Martin Walker’s An Enemy In The Village is the eighteenth and latest book in the Bruno, Chief Of Police series, chronicling the investigations of a French policeman in the idyllic town of St Denis.

When Bruno finds a motionless figure in a car parked at a scenic overpass on the ridge of the Vézère valley, he’s ready to investigate. Inside, he finds a suicide note and the dead body of Monique, a successful businesswoman who rented out châteaus to wealthy expats. It seems like an open-and-shut case.

But Bruno can’t shake the suspicion that something sinister lurks underneath this tidy narrative. After he delivers Monique’s final messages to those most important to her, malicious gossip about Bruno begins to spread through the village. One thing leads to another, and soon Bruno faces pressure to resign from his job.

Despite this disturbing turn of events, Bruno remains Bruno, never one to turn down a fine meal with good company in the French countryside. In the course of his inquiries, he meets Laura — and her dog, which happens to be the same breed as his beloved basset hound. As sparks fly and Bruno realizes just how much he has at stake, he races to find out what really happened to Monique, before he loses his badge, his new love or something even more important.

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I super enjoyed Brittney Morris’ Slay and am so thrilled that she’s back with This Book Might Be About Zinnia, a dual timeline Young Adult novel.

In the year 2024, Zinnia Davis is on a mission to ace her personal essay for her college applications. But when an admissions rep hints that her adoption story is “lacking heart,” she has to figure out a new spin on her story. Trouble is, Zinnia doesn’t know much about her birth parents. But then her favorite author releases a new novel called Little Heart, about a princess with a heart-shaped birthmark on her forehead who was separated from her mother at birth, just like Zinnia was. It seems unlikely, but could her favorite author actually be her birth mother?

Flashback to 2006, when teenager Tuesday Walker is barely making it through high school after experiencing a loss that had her out of commission for months. In order to cope, Tuesday writes a series of entries in her journal. When that journal is lost, however, it feels like reliving her trauma all over again. Tuesday’s search for her journal uncovers dangerous secrets about her past, her crush and her own mother’s life story.

The biggest mystery in this book, however, is how Tuesday and Zinnia are connected. The only thing that readers know for sure at the outset is that if Tuesday isn’t careful in her search for the journal, Zinnia will face the consequences almost twenty years later.

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Our next book is also about the tangled bonds between mothers and daughters. In addition, Lo Patrick’s Fast Boys And Pretty Girls is a gritty, slow-burn mystery about the consuming power of first love and the inescapable pull of the past.

Following a semi-successful career as a teen model in New York City, Danielle Greer has moved back to the mountains of North Georgia, where she now lives in her childhood home with her husband and four daughters. One stifling, lazy afternoon, the girls are exploring the ravine behind the house when they come across a dead body.

Danielle immediately knows that the body doesn’t belong to Benji Law, the local misfit with whom Danielle had an illicit relationship when she was a teenager. His body was found right away, after he was killed in a motorcycle accident on the road in front of her family’s house. Danielle does, however, have a good idea whose the body might be. She just doesn’t know how it got into the ravine.

When local police officer Cady Benson is called in to investigate, Danielle’s world is turned upside down. The investigation thrusts her back into those dark, confusing days leading up to Benji’s death. As she tries to balance out the things she remembers with the things she can’t forget, will she finally be able to embrace the truth?

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Another sweltering setting is an essential part of the framework of Clemence Michallon’s sophomore novel Our Last Resort.

Siblings Frida and Gabriel arrive at the stunning Ara Hotel in the secluded desert of Escalante, Utah, seeking a fresh start to their relationship. Once so close that they were able to finish each other’s sentences, they’ve grown apart in recent years after a sudden, unspeakable tragedy.

Now, at the luxe resort, they’re ready to reconnect between dips in the pool and hikes on spectacular desert trails. It all feels like paradise… until the dead body of a beautiful young woman who was vacationing at the Ara with her powerful, much older husband is discovered. When the local police arrive and put the resort into lockdown, Gabriel and Frida are forced to revisit memories of their upbringing in a cloistered cult in upstate New York, led by a charismatic and fanatical leader. It was their dramatic, fiery escape from his control fifteen years ago that bonded them for life — or so Frida believed.

As the police hone in on Gabriel, Frida has to ask herself how well she really knows her brother. Despite the accusations and innuendos hurled at them throughout the ordeal of their scandalous escape from the cult, her belief in Gabriel’s innocence never wavered. But now even she can’t ignore the evidence mounting against him.

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Finally, we have the electric debut of Jay S Bell. Welcome To Cottonmouth is a hilarious, fast-paced dive into the world of faded spies and secretive operatives, living under the radar in a sleepy town in East Texas.

When the US government is done with its spies and special operators, it doesn’t exactly give them a golden handshake. Instead, it sends them to Cottonmouth, Texas — a tiny, nondescript town in the Piney Woods — where they’re expected to blend in and retire quietly.

Devlin Mahoney is the town’s reluctant “mayor,” a man who’s as good at keeping secrets as he is at dodging his own past. But peace and quiet can be surprisingly hard to come by in Cottonmouth, especially when Mahoney’s carefully constructed life is disrupted by two women on the run from a dangerous criminal. Suddenly, the stakes are higher than a small-town mayor could ever have imagined, forcing Mahoney to finally decide between doing what he’s told and doing what he knows is right.

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Wow, that’s a lot of orange going on in the covers of this week’s selections, fitting given the pervasive summer heat outside, at least here on the Eastern US seaboard. Let me know if you’re able to escape into 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!