Tantalizing Tales — July 2025 — Part One

The midpoint of the year has come and gone, and here we are, looking forward and back on a specially scheduled day to showcase what’s just come out and what we’re looking forward to next!

Top of the pile is Martha Grimes’ latest Richard Jury novel, The Red Queen. This twenty-sixth novel in a series I first read when my dad brought a (much earlier) book home from his travels finds Superintendent Richard Jury investigating yet another murder linked to an English village pub.

One quiet night in Twickenham, a businessman named Tom Treadnor is shot off his barstool at The Queen pub. Jury is called in to investigate and quickly realizes that everyone in Treadnor’s life — from his widow Alice to the staff at his manor to his business partner — had wildly differing opinions of the dead man. To complicate things further, Jury has just happened upon a photo in the newspaper, of a man in the United States who is a dead ringer for the deceased.

Meanwhile Wiggins, Jury’s partner at New Scotland Yard, becomes sidetracked by an investigation of his own. His sister, missing for years and presumed dead, has just sent a postcard to their mother. When Wiggins takes off in search of his sister, the two investigations begin to converge in unexpected ways.

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Our next selection is the Middle Grade debut of an author well-known for her tense, thrilling YA novels. Tiffany D Jackson’s Blood In The Water is a murder mystery set on the picturesque beaches of Martha’s Vineyard, where danger lurks both in and out of the water.

Kalayni is a spunky twelve year-old girl from Brooklyn. After her father’s incarceration — which she believes is wrongful — she’s sent to Martha’s Vineyard to stay with an affluent Black couple and their granddaughters.

Soon after arriving, the shocking death of a local teen rocks the island. Did he drown? Was it the result of a vicious shark attack? Or, worse, was he murdered? As Kalayni dives further into the investigation, she begins to learn more about the Black history of the island while slowly unpacking the deep-rooted secrets that threaten to change both the island’s dynamics and her life forever.

Inspired by her connection with and love for Martha’s Vineyard, Tiffany D. Jackson has crafted a loveable and authentic character in Kalayni. Readers, and especially tweens, will relate to her emotional relationship with her imprisoned father, her struggles to fit in, as well as her dedication to helping those around her.

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The Edgar Award-winning author of the Ruth Galloway novels is back with a brand new series this summer, incorporating an intriguing speculative element into her usual clever mysteries! Elly Griffiths’ The Frozen People melds the police procedural with, of all things, time travel in this inventive series debut.

British detective Ali Dawson is middle-aged but young at heart, thrice-divorced and delightfully feisty. With her eclectic team of police officers and scientists at the Department of Logistics, she solves cold cases using time travel — a mission known only to a select few.

One of these privileged few is Britian’s justice minister, Isaac Templeton. As of January 2023, there is still a sordid stain on his family history: his great-grandfather Cain Templeton was suspected of murdering three women. Isaac wants Ali and her team to prove his great-grandfather’s innocence. Petticoats in hand, Ali is sent back to 1850s London to clear Cain’s name — only to find more dead bodies, unanswered questions and, worse, no way home.

But while Ali is trapped in the past, entangled with the enigmatic and handsome Cain, another murder thickens the plot in the present, with her own son Finn becoming a suspect. Could the two cases somehow be connected? In a race through and against time, Ali must find out before it’s too late.

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I’m really excited about Martin Cruz Smith’s latest novel Hotel Ukraine. The eleventh Arkady Renko mystery is as timely as ever, as the embattled Moscow detective doggedly pursues the investigation begun in the prior gripping installment, Independence Square.

Legendary Moscow investigator Arkady Renko seeks to solve the murder of a diplomat as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wears on and the effects of Renko’s Parkinson’s disease — an illness shared with his author — worsen. Helped by his lover, journalist Tatiana Petrovna, Renko traces the killing to a Russian paramilitary group aided by a government official… who also used to be a romantic partner of Renko’s. Before long, those responsible for the assassination look to get rid of Arkady and Tatiana in similar fashion, leading to a thrilling and action-packed climax.

This is billed as being the final Arkady Renko novel, and while I definitely feel like Mr Smith has earned a well-deserved rest, I’m rather wistful at this being the last book!

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Next up is another novel that challenges the status quo and government systems of justice, tho much closer to home for us Americans. Gabriel Urza’s latest legal thriller, The Silver State, is an electrifying, emotionally charged tale of systemic failure and moral ambiguity that asks us: What if justice is a myth?

Santi Elcano is a recent law school graduate whose idealism is soon worn away by the cases and clients he’s been assigned. When the body of young mother Anna Weston is found near Reno’s infamous silver mines, Santi and CJ, his mentor in the public defender’s office, are tasked with defending Michael Atwood, the man accused of Anna’s brutal murder. Despite Santi and CJ’s best efforts and the scant physical evidence against their client, Atwood is convicted and sentenced to death.

Eight years later, a shocking letter from Atwood — now on death row — forces Santi to reexamine his own role in the case. At the time, the public obsession with Anna’s disappearance, combined with intense pressure on the police to make an arrest, led to a rushed trial. As they investigated the case, however, Santi and C.J. became increasingly convinced that they were defending an innocent man. But now a horrific discovery leads Santi to reconsider everything he once believed and all that it has cost him: love, family and friendship.

The Silver State brings to vivid life the deals that get cut in the name of justice, the murkiness between victim and perpetrator, and the cost of a life in the law.

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To cap off our roundup of timely reads, we have Jacqueline Friedland’s Counting Backwards. Told in two alternating narratives bound together by a shocking parallel of issues — including reproductive rights and society’s expectations of women and mothers — this novel is a compelling reminder that progress is rarely a straight line and always hard-won.

New York, 2022. Jessa Gidney is trying to have it all: a high-powered legal career, a meaningful marriage and hopefully, one day, a child. But when her professional ambitions come up short and Jessa finds herself at a turning point, she leans into her family’s history of activism by taking on pro bono work at a nearby detention center. There she meets Isobel Perez, a young mother fighting to stay with her daughter. As she gets to know Isobel, an unsettling revelation about Isobel’s health leads Jessa to uncover a horrifying pattern of medical malpractice within the detention facility… one that shockingly has ties to her own family.

Virginia, 1927. Carrie Buck is an ordinary young woman in the center of an extraordinary legal battle at the forefront of the American eugenics conversation. From a poor family, she was only six years old when she first became a ward of the state. Uneducated and without any support, she spends her youth dreaming about a future separate from her exploitative foster family, unaware of the ripples that her small country life will soon have on an entire nation.

As Jessa works to assemble a case against the prison and the crimes that she believes are being committed there, she discovers the landmark Supreme Court case involving Carrie Buck as well as its shocking implications for the one before her now. Her connection to the case, however, is deeper and much more personal than she ever knew, sending her down new paths that will leave her forever changed and determined to fight for these women, no matter the cost.

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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!