Tantalizing Tales — October 2025 — Part One

Happy October, readers! This month is all about the cozy, the creepy or the criminal, and maybe a little bit of all three!

Our first selection for you is definitely on the cozier side, tho with a distinct frisson of crime. Juno Black’s Mockingbird Court is the last (at least for the foreseeable future) installment of the beloved Shady Hollow mystery series, which features anthropomorphic animals solving mysteries in their woodland town.

In this sixth book, however, the murder in question will take us outside the boundaries of Shady Hollow and into the big city! Shady Hollow itself is busy preparing for the Harvest Festival when an unexpected figure shows up. Bradley Marvel is a bestselling author whose last visit to the area probably didn’t go as well as anyone anticipated. This time things are worse, as he’s on the run. A body has been found in his penthouse apartment, and he skipped town before he could be arrested.

He swears he didn’t do it tho. Intrepid reporter Vera Vulpine and her friends will have to figure out what really happened at a remove… until Vera realizes that the victim is someone she knows. Worse, her connection to the victim implicates her in the crime too. Will she and her friends be able to unravel the mystery before an innocent person is convicted of murder?

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We keep those cozy crime-solving vibes going with Kiri Callaghan’s The Hearth Witch’s Guide To Magic And Murder, available in both deluxe and standard editions! This urban fantasy novel blends magic with mystery as an unlikely pair must solve a string of murders that threaten to sunder the veil between the Fey and human worlds.

Avery Hemlock is a changeling who’s been released from her five hundred-year sentence of Nightmares, expressly for the purpose of putting an end to these crimes. Trouble is, she’s not only thoroughly lacking in social graces, but also missing about two centuries’ worth of information regarding the world at large.

Saga Trygg is trying to find meaning in witchcraft after being dumped at the altar and dropping out of medical school. When she discovers that her new neighbor Avery isn’t your average girl next door, she swiftly becomes enmeshed in Avery’s investigation. But when the truth starts hitting a little too close to home for Saga, will Avery be able to protect the one friend she’s been able to make in centuries?

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For a darker take on magic and mystery, check out Kristen Loesch’s The Hong Kong Widow, where a woman returns to the scene of the crime decades later… a crime the police insist never actually happened.

Mei is a young refugee in 1950s Hong Kong, having fled Communist-held Shanghai. She’s a little surprised to receive an invitation to an unusual competition. A former Shanghainese silent film star has invited six spirit mediums to stay for six nights in a house notorious for being haunted. They will hold six seances before determining a single winner, who will receive a rich reward.

While Mei just wants to put her old life behind her, she can’t just ignore the invitation. Once upon a time, her hostess’ husband destroyed her life. With this invitation, vengeance could be hers for the taking.

Decades later, Mei is finally ready to confront what happened on that last, terrible night of the competition. The police were called to the house due to a brutal massacre. When they arrived, however, there wasn’t a shred of evidence to indicate that anything untoward had happened. They dismissed the claim of a massacre as a collective hallucination, but Mei knows what she saw. Worse, someone else seems convinced that they know what she did. Will she be able to return and uncover the truth, despite the ghosts that still lie in wait for her?

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Ghosts also permeate our next selection, but with a far more romantic bent. Nicholas Sparks and M Night Shyamalan have been friends for decades, and have teamed up for their first project together, Remain. The novel publishes October 14, with the accompanying film (starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor) expected next October!

From the press materials: “When New York architect Tate Donovan arrives in Cape Cod to design his best friend’s summer home, he is hoping to make a fresh start. Recently discharged from an upscale psychiatric facility where he was treated for acute depression, he is still wrestling with the pain of losing his beloved sister. Sylvia’s deathbed revelation—that she can see spirits who are still tethered to the living world, a gift that runs in their family—sits uneasily with Tate, who struggles to believe in more than what reason can explain. But when he takes up residence at a historic bed-and-breakfast on the Cape, he encounters a beautiful young woman named Wren who will challenge every assumption he has about his logical and controlled world.

“Tate and Wren find themselves forging an immediate connection, one that neither has ever experienced before. But Tate gradually discovers that below the surface of Wren’s idyllic small-town life, hatred, jealousy, and greed are festering, threatening their fragile relationship just as it begins to blossom. Tate realizes that in order to free Wren from an increasingly desperate fate, he will need to unearth the truth about her past before time runs out . . . a quest that will make him doubt whether we can ever believe the stories we tell about ourselves, and the laws that govern our existence. Love—while transformative—can sometimes be frightening.

“A story about the power of transcendent emotion, Remain asks us all: Can love set us free not only from our greatest sorrows, but even from the boundaries of life and death?”

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Trauma of a different kind haunts the titular sleuth of Kate Belli’s latest twisty mystery, The Gallery Assistant.

Ever since the events of September 11, Chloe Harlow has been throwing herself into living, if not necessarily in the healthiest ways possible. So when she wakes up late one morning with only hazy recollections of the party the night before — and zero memory of how she got home to her Brooklyn apartment — it’s a regrettable but not unusual occurrence in her life as it is now, a mere two months since the terrorist attack.

When she finally makes her way into work at a gallery on the Upper East Side, she’s not exactly surprised to be called into her boss’ office either. What does surprise her is the presence of NYPD detectives, who want to know everything she can tell them about the night before. Apparently, her host — an up-and-coming painter who’d only recently signed with her gallery — is now dead.

As Chloe tries to unravel what really happened the night before, she’ll have to navigate both her messy personal life and the sophisticated, cutthroat world of fine art. But the more she digs, the less things add up. Is there a conspiracy to hide the truth from her? The closer Chloe gets to the truth, the more dangerous the consequences.

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Another hazy evening is the inciting incident of Corey Liu’s Young Adult debut He’s So Possessed With Me.

Colin and Ren are best friends who went dancing in a place they probably shouldn’t have been allowed into. They were harassed on their way home, and a sinister figure emerged from the trees, as a pale hand reached for Ren through a thick fog.

Colin doesn’t remember a whole lot of what happened after, but he does know that Ren is different now. Ren claims that it’s just love, the love he’s finally able to express for Colin, but Colin knows better. Something has happened to Ren, and Colin has to figure out what it is and fix it.

With the help of several unlikely allies, including a cranky old medium, Colin will have to conquer his own self-doubt and get to the bottom of what happened to Ren that fateful night. If he doesn’t, this new love could very well cost one or both boys their lives.

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Finally, we have Nic Stone’s debut adult novel, Boomtown. Set in and around Atlanta’s most notorious gentleman’s club, this thriller details the search for two missing erotic dancers and the woman dedicated to finding them.

Michah “Lyriq” Johanssen used to be a Boom Town headliner. When new girl Damaris “Charm” Wilburn doesn’t show up for her daytime shift, everyone else thinks she’s just a no-call, no-show. But Lyriq’s former headline partner and lover, Felice “Lucky” Carothers, also disappeared under similar circumstances, leading Lyriq to think that something nefarious is going on.

As Lyriq investigates, she finds herself caught in a tangled web of power and privilege. Gaslighting is just par for the course. With the line between friend and foe blurring, and danger only mounting, Lyriq will have to ask herself whether finding these women is worth the risk of losing her own life.

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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!