Tantalizing Tales — August 2025 — Part Four

Hello, dear readers! We’re well on our way to a five-parter of Tantalizing Titles this August (with a bonus reissue recap earlier this week!) but let’s not get too, too far ahead of ourselves. Today we’re featuring seven brilliant books that have either just published or will be coming to bookshelves this coming Tuesday!

We start off with the newest historical novel from the author of the phenomenal The Torqued Man. Peter Mann’s World Pacific is set in San Francisco and the Asian Pacific during the lead up to the Second World War, and is told from the points of view of three indelible and very different characters.

Richard “Dicky” Halifax is attempting to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco, as part of the World’s Fair festivities on Treasure Island, when he vanishes in the Pacific. This writer of boys’ adventures is a man of bravado and breezy prose styles. Both his machinations and his letters to his young readers keep his voice alive, even as his disappearance upends the lives of those left behind in his wake.

Hildegard Rauch is an émigré painter and the daughter of Germany’s greatest living writer in exile. After she finds her twin brother in a coma after an attempted suicide — and the mysterious note he left behind — she embarks on a search for the truth about his relationship with Richard Halifax and the dangerous secret her twin entrusted to the writer before his voyage.

British Intelligence officer Simon Faulk has been assigned to ferret out Nazi spies in California. He learns of the arrival of a mysterious American agent from across the Pacific, part of a joint German- Japanese operation. As all three paths converge, the novel explores the many forms in which shipwreck, exile and betrayal beset us, and the stories that we tell ourselves in order to stay afloat.

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Our next selection is part true crime, part self-help, as Johnathan Walton helps readers figure out how to identify con artists before falling for their schemes. Anatomy Of A Con Artist explains the 14 red flags that will help the average person spot and avoid scammers, grifters and thieves.

Who, I’m sure you’re wondering, is qualified enough to write a book like this? Mr Walton himself was once an investigative reporter who lost USD100,000 to a con artist. Infuriatingly, the cops were no help. Instead of giving up, he launched his own investigation and built a compelling criminal case that the authorities just could not ignore. Walton got his con artist charged, prosecuted and convicted, then devoted his life to helping other victims do the same.

As part of that, he created and hosts the hit podcast Queen Of The Con. Now he’s created an even handier guide to help readers protect themselves from getting robbed of their life savings or worse, based on what he’s learned over years of investigating hundreds of cases and helping victims find justice.

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Protecting yourself from a threat of a different kind is the premise of acclaimed horror author D W Gillespie’s latest middle grade novel Grin, a riveting modern narrative with more than a dash of retro 80s nostalgia.

When Danny learns that he’s about to spend a week at his Uncle Bill’s massive arcade Pixelworks, he’s thrilled. The ability to play unlimited video games is a dream come true for a kid like Danny, even before he starts making new friends and a crush named Jodi.

He’s even more excited when the intriguing, incredibly addictive new video game Grin shows up in the arcade. But when Uncle Bill starts spending all his time playing Grin, Danny can’t help but worry. Uncle Bill is behaving really differently now that he’s addicted to the game. He’s erratic, impatient and angry, acting almost as if he’s been possessed by something evil. With help from Jodi and a knowledgeable videogame streamer, Danny must find a way to save his uncle from the grasp of Grin before it’s too late.

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Another spooky, if slightly less scary, middle grade novel publishing next week is Christine Virnig’s Phantom Academy. I loved her previous book, A Bite Above The Rest, and am super looking forward to enjoying more of her blend of supernatural suspense.

Twelve year-old Flynn isn’t super happy about finding himself dead after a freak accident. Adding insult to injury is the fact that he’s expected to attend school in the afterlife, too. Phantom Academy is a boarding school for underage ghosts figuring out how to navigate death, and Flynn is their newest student.

Tests and homework are bad enough: his ongoing difficulties making new friends are even more mortifying. But as he and his classmates eventually begin to grow closer, they slowly discover that something weird is going behind the scenes of their academy. They’re going to have to band together and figure it out before they’re faced with a fate that could be even worse than death.

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Pivoting over to spooky adult fiction, we have Leigh Stein’s wonderfully titled If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You. Both a gothic mystery and an audacious social comedy, it brilliantly takes on parasocial relationships, how the creator economy is reshaping the world we live in, and why it’s so hard to escape social media even when we’re desperate to leave it.

Dayna is 39 years old, recently dumped and jobless. Nearly at the end of her rope, she accepts an opportunity from a man she stopped speaking to almost two decades earlier. Helping Craig turn a crumbling Hollywood mansion into a hype house inhabited by a motley crew of Gen Z content creators forces her to get up close and personal with the generation coming to replace her. It’s not the most comfortable situation, but it’s a living.

Everything changes when Becca, an enigmatic tarot card reader who’s built a rabid fandom with her cryptic, soul-touching videos, abruptly goes missing. After her sudden disappearance from within the mansion’s walls, Dayna and 19-year-old Olivia, the newest member of the hype house (and one of Becca’s biggest fans) create a social media campaign revolving around Becca’s disappearance, ostensibly to help them get her back. The campaign goes unexpectedly viral, to Craig’s dismay. He doesn’t want the women to keep searching, but Dayna and Olivia are determined to penetrate the heart of the mansion’s labyrinthine corridors in order to unravel its secrets. Will their pursuit of the truth allow them to rescue Becca, or will a shocking discovery upend everything they thought they knew?

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An even older heroine grappling with questions of youth and the past is the star of Beth Morrey’s hilarious and thought-provoking mystery Isabella’s Not Dead.

Those three title words, with the emphasis on the NOT, are what Gwen says to anyone who asks about the best friend who abruptly disappeared fifteen years ago, right when Gwen needed her the most. But if Isabella’s not dead, then where is she and why did she leave?

Freshly fifty-three, unemployed and with children who no longer need her, Gwen decides to finally find out. Setting out to solve the mystery will see her embark on an adventure that takes her first across the country then across Europe. Her friendships and even her marriage will be tested, as she plunges headlong on a collision course with reluctant acquaintances and a mother-in-law best described as eccentric, and down a rabbit hole full of clues.

But Isabella’s not the only one who’s lost. A tale of deep, frayed friendship; fractured memories, and skewed perspectives, this is the story of one woman’s quest to reclaim not only her best friend, but also herself.

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Finally, we have bestselling Japanese author Tsujimura Mizuki’s wonderful novel Lost Souls Meet Under A Full Moon, translated into English by Yuki Tejima. One of the few authors to win both the Japan Booksellers’ award and the more literary Naoki Prize, she returns with a suspenseful tale of magical realism, about a mysterious teenage go-between who arranges meetings between the living and the dead.

If you had the ability to bring back one person from the dead for one night and ask them anything that they’d be willing to answer, would you do it? When a young woman from Tokyo contacts the Go-Between to request a meeting with a deceased TV star who’d once helped her, she doesn’t expect an enigmatic teenage boy to answer her call. Dressed in a designer duffel coat with tattered notebook in hand, Ayumi Shibuya greets his clients at a luxury hotel. There he lays down the ground rules: the dead can be called back only once by the living, and have the right to refuse; both parties can request just one meeting with the person of their choice; the service is entirely free, and the reunion must take place during a full moon.

As Ayumi arranges these meetings, we encounter a resentful eldest son who wants to ask his mother to unearth the deeds to a plot of land; a teenage girl who blames herself for her best friend’s death, and a weary businessman seeking answers about his fiancée’s disappearance days after he proposed. With each reunion, readers begin to unravel the mystery of the boy in the duffel coat and why he’s been called to this greater purpose. Artfully balancing heart with mystery, this is an unforgettable page-turner in which the living and the dead are given one last chance for closure.

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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!