Tantalizing Tales — October 2025 — Part Two

It has finally gotten cold here in Maryland, which is making me rethink my daily outdoor walks for daily indoor spin sessions instead… which I admittedly also use to catch up with my reading via Kindle. Here are some great selections coming to bookstores soon, if you’re looking for some great books to keep you company while acclimatizing to the weather and hopefully getting a little more reading in!

First up is the latest installment in Kashiwai Hisashi’s deliciously cozy Kamogawa Food Detectives series, Menu Of Happiness. Looking at the cover alone is enough to give me the warm fuzzies, tbphwy.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives are Nagare and her father Koishi, who run the Kamogawa Diner together. Aside from cooking scrumptious daily meals, their forte lies in recreating the food that their clients describe to them but don’t know how to recreate on their own. By figuring out how to reconstitute the dishes that linger in their clients’ minds, the father-daughter duo help said clients reconnect with the past. Whether serving a formerly renowned pianist who longs to taste once more the yakisoba that she shared with the only man she ever loved, or the client who can’t forget the gyoza fed to him by the parents of the woman he jilted, the food detectives perform amazing feats in their quest to bring memories back to life through flavor.

If this book is anything like its predecessors, I highly recommend not going into it hungry, as the author is incredible at writing about food. Just thinking about my experience with the delightful first book in the series is making me crave sushi and ushiojiru so much rn.

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Another kind of craving is the subject of Iman Hariri-Kia’s Female Fantasy, the very first novel in Cosmopolitan magazine’s sexy new imprint with Sourcebooks!

Joonie is obsessed with her favorite romantasy series, writing copious amounts of fanfiction for it and regularly swooning over its hero, Ryke, an impossibly hot merman who has never disappointed her the way real men do. So when she learns that the author based Ryke on an actual person, she’s determined to go find this muse, even if it means borrowing her brother’s car for the road trip. Annoyingly, her brother will only loan her his vehicle if if she agrees to drop off his aggravating but undeniably hot best friend along the way.

As the road trip descends into chaos, it’s hard to deny the sparks flying between Joonie and her unwanted companion, as they both learn a thing or two about real love. Filled with heart, humor and the unhinged antics that are the author’s calling card, this is both a self-aware examination of the romantasy genre and a love letter to romance readers everywhere.

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If you’re looking for a romance that skews more Halloween, check out Trilina Pucci’s One Killer Night, a spicy love story that takes a distinctly dark turn.

From the delightfully wild press materials:

“Love is patient.
“Love is kind.
“Love will stab you from behind.

“It’s Halloween night, and out-of-work writer Goldie Monroe’s trip to the drugstore scares up more than the fake blood she’s looking for. It leads to the man of her naughtiest dreams. And in spite of her costume, sparks fly from the moment they meet.

“Noah Adler, aspiring sneaker designer, is impossibly gorgeous—like a tatted-up version of Goldie’s favorite blue-eyed vampire. He’s there for candy, but it’s Goldie he can’t resist. When she invites him to her sister’s F/X company bash, he’s all in without a second thought.

“The pair’s flirty connection heats up fast, carrying them to electrifying new heights. But after Goldie discovers Noah is hiding a dark secret, it all starts to crumble. Looking for answers about her own past awakens new dangers, and when Goldie and Noah land at a slasher camp for adults, a deadly tragedy threatens to repeat itself. If they can survive this one killer night, they can definitely slay a happily ever after.”

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If you’re more in the mood for horror than romance, CJ Cooke’s historical novel The Last Witch is a must-read. It’s based on the true story of a woman who stood up to the man who would become Europe’s most notorious witchfinder.

Helena Scheuberin is a young wife in 1485 Innsbruck, Austria. Her life is supposed to revolve around supporting her husband, bearing his children and running a household. But Helena is outspoken in a society where she’s supposed to be seen, not heard. Unsurprisingly, she sometimes has trouble fitting in.

Things get worse when a monomaniacal priest comes to town, intent on finding and cleansing it of those he deems witches. He and Helena are swiftly at odds. When her husband’s footman dies, the priest takes the opportunity to accuse her not only of murder but of witchcraft as well. Along with several other women accused of witchcraft — but who have really committed nothing more than the sin of not conforming to expectations — Helena must fight for the truth and for her very life, no matter what dark paths that struggle may lead her down.

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Our next selection is also historical fiction with a fantastic twist. Michael Moorcock and Mark Hodder team up for The Albino’s Secret, an alternate historical mystery starring two British detectives tasked with hunting down an assassin in 1930s Istanbul.

As operatives for Britain’s Temporal Agency, Sir Seaton Begg and Dr Sinclair are in Turkey, searching for the figure known as the Red King. Hard-won intelligence has led them to believe that this leader of a secretive but powerful group of assassins is about to set in motion a plot that could change the entire world. Complicating matters is the presence of Nazi forces, there for their own secretive reasons. It’s unlikely that any of Begg and Sinclair’s adversaries have benevolent aims.

But the Metatemporal Detectives do have one ally… perhaps. Monsieur Zenith — the dread figure who has been, in the modern parlance, Begg’s frenemy for decades — is in town and ready to offer our protagonists his assistance.

Based on characters whose exploits were first collected in Mr Moorcock’s The Metatemporal Detective — and who may be familiar to people in the Dr Who fandom — this is the first full-length novel in which they star. Adding another layer to the metafiction of this story is the fact that both Begg and Zenith are based on characters from the Sexton Blake universe created in the late 1800s by Harry Blyth, writing as Hal Meredeth. TAS is the first novel in a series that promises to further explore Mr Moorcock’s fascinating Multiverse, as alluded to in the series’ name.

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Another first in series also has a tenacious detective seeking to uncover the truth, but in a far more modern setting. Jaime Parker Stickle’s debut thriller Vicious Cycle revolves around a former investigative reporter who’s felt lost ever since giving up her career for motherhood.

Corey Tracey-Lieberman is still suffering from post-partum anxiety when she hears the shocking news. Two teenaged girls have been found dead, hanging in a nearby park of her rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood. More unsettling for Corey is how quick the news is to frame the girls’ death as a result of increasing street crime, as if their lives never mattered now that they’re statistics.

Even if she weren’t appalled by this callousness, her journalist’s instincts can sense that something hideous lies beneath the quickly done-and-dusted surface of the case. With baby in tow, she begins to investigate for herself. How far will she go, tho, when another murder takes place, striking far too close to home?

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Finally, we have a literary memoir that I’m super hoping to find time for soon. Transgender actor and activist Jesse James Rose’s Sorry I Keep Crying During Sex is a powerful and provocative look at victimhood, recovery, grief and resilience.

From the press materials: “In the before, Jesse James Rose is happy. She has a beautiful boyfriend with melty glacier eyes, she’s on a euphoric journey of gender exploration, and New York City is perfect.

“In the after, she’s single, making dinner for her grandfather, and wondering if he’s going to forget her name today. Except, in the before, her first-grade music teacher led her into a dark room to show her something he shouldn’t have. And in the after, she’s finding healing and comfort in coming into her own, even as her grandfather declines.

“In the before, she was fine, more or less. But in the after, she has to reckon with whatever the hell restorative justice really, truly means.

“Following the aftermath of an assault, and the heartache of caring for a grandfather with Alzheimer’s, [this book] tells a captivating story of identity, recovery, grief, survivorship, and transness. Through lists, theatrical scripts, flashbacks, and Grindr DMs, Jesse James Rose’s genre-defying memoir is raw and hysterically funny, and takes readers on the wild ride of overcoming the struggles of a trans twentysomething.”

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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!