Tantalizing Tales — July 2025 — Part Two

Hey, I’m on Jeopardy! today. I had a really great time (as you can probably tell if you watch what is, in my entirely biased opinion, one of the best regular season episodes you’ll ever see) but it’s super cut into my reading time, unsurprisingly.

So I wanted to make sure in this round-up column to highlight the latest queer historical mystery from an author who wrote one of my favorite books of 2023, Last Night At The Hollywood Canteen. I won’t be able to get to it in the timely manner it deserves, but I’m so excited that Sarah James has returned with Last Stop Union Station.

The 1942 Hollywood Victory Caravan was a real train full of stars like Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Joan Bennett, who volunteered to sell war bonds for the troops overseas. Ms James uncorks a bubbly cast of has-beens and up-and-coming stars aboard her version of this celebrity tour, where a finely timed publicity stunt becomes the scene of an affair, a blackmail scheme, a murder cover-up and a Nazi conspirator playground — just another day in the dog-eat-dog world of Old Hollywood!

The iconic and “difficult to work with” actress Jacqueline Love is shoved onto the Hollywood Victory Caravan in order to perform a facelift on her sagging career. While Jackie is schmoozing the press and glowering at the younger, more successful version of herself, one of her fellow stars dies mysteriously, forcing the crew to lock down in Chicago. Unable to storm off this set, Jackie suspects foul play, so recruits a desk-duty female police officer hungry for her big break to help her solve this murder mystery. In the spirit of old Hollywood drama, their investigation reveals dark secrets and hidden agendas, including a homegrown Nazi scheme that forces Jackie to decide between country and career.

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Our next selection is more contemporary but no less probing in its examination of deeply held attitudes towards class, gender and violence that will resonate with modern readers. Kate Russo returns with Until Alison, an explosive literary thriller that explores the guilt suffered by a woman who realizes that she could have saved her friend… but didn’t.

When Rachel Nardelli finds out that her childhood rival Alison Petrucci has been found dead in Pleasant Pond, the same place where the two women had first said goodbye to each other back in eighth grade, she doesn’t know how to feel. The town of Waterbury, however, is outraged at losing one of their own, who just happens to be the heir to Maine’s largest construction company.

It’s a little more complicated for Rachel, who had seen Alison on that fatal night and callously said something that she probably shouldn’t have. She’d stirred up the past, and the next morning Alison was gone.

Plagued by her complicated memories of Alison, Rachel joins her journalism crew in investigating the murder. But as she revisits her fraught relationship with the dead woman, she falls into a web of cruelties that will threaten to undermine everything she’s ever understood about her past.

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Hugo-award winner author Wendy N. Wagner returns with the pulse-pounding eco-horror novel Girl In The Creek, another book I’m super looking forward to diving into as soon as I can. Set in the mysterious forests of the Pacific Northwest, this folkloric tale blends the suspense of a small town murder mystery with more than just a touch of the supernatural.

Freelance writer Erin Harper’s brother Bryan has been missing for five years. It was as if he simply walked into the forest one day and vanished. Determined to uncover the truth behind his disappearance, Erin heads to the picturesque small town of Faraday, Oregon, nestled in the foothills of Mt. Hood, where Bryan was last seen alive.

He isn’t the first hiker to have gone missing in the area. The Clackamas National Forest has always been a sanctuary for those who prefer to lurk in the shadows, with looming trees and long-abandoned mines sheltering poachers and serial killers alike.

And now someone else has gone missing. After Erin finds the corpse of the missing local woman in a nearby creek, the body vanishes again, this time from the morgue. Days later, the woman’s fingerprints show up at a murder scene.

Maybe it’s the work of a particularly twisted serial killer. Maybe it has something to do with the ruined hotel on the outskirts of Faraday, the one drowning in mushrooms and fungi that not even the local expert can identify. Are these strange spores somehow infecting the forest and those lost inside? Erin must find answers quickly, before anyone else goes missing. Problem is, she might have unknowingly put herself in the crosshairs of very powerful forces — from this world and beyond — that are hell-bent on keeping their secrets buried.

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Our next selection, Kerry Cullen’s upcoming House Of Beth is also a boundary-pushing horror novel. Part queer literary gothic, part body-horror ghost story, this is a book about a struggling publishing professional with intense harm OCD who, after a bad episode, retreats to her bucolic hometown and slides quickly into a life — as a wife, stepmother and homemaker — that might actually still belong to someone else.

After a heart-wrenching breakup and a shocking incident at her job as the overworked assistant at a literary agency, Cassie retreats to her hometown in New Jersey, along the Delaware River. There, she reconnects with her high school best friend Eli, who’s now a widowed father of two. Their bond reignites, and within a few short months, Cassie is trading her bustling New York City life for homeschooling, nature walks and cooking lessons with her reserved neighbor Joan.

But Cassie’s fresh start is anything but peaceful. She still misses her ex-girlfriend and she grapples with harm OCD, as her mind is haunted by graphic, gory images. In their secluded house nestled in the woods, she tries to find solace with her new family instead.

Unfortunately, the shadow of Eli’s late spouse Beth looms large. The influence of the committed homemaker and traditional wife seems to permeate every corner of their home, from the décor to the rhythms of their daily life.

And soon Cassie starts hearing a voice narrating the house’s secrets. As the mysterious presence grows stronger, it guides Cassie down a dangerous path, one that could lead to her uncovering the truth about Beth’s untimely death… or destroy her, body and soul.

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The sole non-fiction selection on this list is a powerful examination of what it means to be Indigenous and particularly Native American today. Award-winning Wampanoag journalist Joseph V Lee’s Nothing More Of This Land is a sweeping, personal exploration of the complexity and ever-changing nature of Indigenous identity and the challenges presently facing Indigenous people around the world.

Martha’s Vineyard is often represented in popular culture as an iconic vacation destination for wealthy elites. Few know that it has also been the ancestral homeland of the Wampanoag people for at least ten thousand years.

As an Aquinnah Wampanoag, Mr Lee grew up spending summers on Martha’s Vineyard. He would watch tourists flock to the island, gradually displacing more and more of his people. Today, nearly three-quarters of tribal members live off-island, complicating Mr Lee’s internal debate about what it really means to be Wampanoag in the 21st century.

Mr Lee’s quest to unpack his own assumptions brought him to icy Alaskan tundras, Northern California forests threatened by fire, and the hallowed halls of the United Nations, as he sought to understand the connections between the Wampanoag and other Indigenous peoples. His book deftly addresses the many threats facing U.S. tribes today, from their complex relationships with local, state, federal and even their own tribal governments, to the fight between white-driven conservation efforts and Indigenous land management. In doing so, he argues that while Indigenous identity is often tied to ancestors, land and the past, it is also ever-changing and reliant on how Indigenous people choose to engage with their own communities today more than anything else.

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Finally, we close with another follow-up novel from a writer I love. Tom Mead’s The House At Devil’s Neck is the latest fair-play Joseph Spector mystery, as the series’ namesake retired stage magician protagonist uses his skills of perception and misdirection to solve a fiendishly clever whodunnit.

An apparent suicide in a London townhouse uncannily mirrors a similar incident from twenty-five years ago. Scotland Yard’s George Flint must delve deep into the past in search of a solution to both the long-forgotten mystery and the new.

Meanwhile, his good friend Joseph Spector is traveling with a coach party through the rainy English countryside, on their way to an allegedly haunted house on a lonely island called Devil’s Neck. The house, first built by a notorious alchemist and occultist, was later used as a field hospital in the First World War before falling into disrepair.

Upon arriving, the visitors intend to hold a seance to conjure up the spirit of a long-dead soldier. But when a storm floods the narrow causeway connecting Devil’s Neck to the mainland, they find themselves stranded in the haunted house. When their seance is followed by a series of seemingly impossible murders targeting the assembled guests, only Joseph Spector ― with his keen ability to see through illusions ― can prove that these acts were committed by mortal hands and not, as it seems, by the phantom soldier.

Adding another level of complexity to the tale is the fact that Flint’s and Spector’s investigations are in fact closely linked. It is only when the duo are reunited at the storm-lashed Devil’s Neck that the entire truth can finally be revealed.

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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!