Tantalizing Tales — October 2025 — Part Four

Halloween is only a week away, dear readers! Let’s check out some of the books coming out mere days before the holiday, with plenty for readers who love spooky season, as well as for those whose interests veer off in other directions.

Since I love witchy stuff year-round, I’m thrilled to start this column with the latest in Angela M Sanders’ Witch Way Librarian series, Witch And Tell. The seventh book finds small town librarian Josie Way feeling pretty down in the dumps. Her relationship with sexy sheriff Sam has cooled since she revealed to him that she’s a witch. To make matters worse, her magical abilities are on the fritz, with her connection to the library books that she draws her power from seemingly stymied by forces unseen.

When she’s awakened one night by a pounding from the atrium of the library that she lives over, she hurries to investigate… only to discover a dead body. She calls Sam, who lives conveniently next door. But when he arrives, there’s no body, and all the doors and windows are still locked tight. Does the disappearing body have anything to do with the town’s on-going renovation of an old movie palace into a brew pub? Josie will have to figure out why her life is starting to resemble a classic movie while sorting out her paranormal powers and personal affairs.

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Relationships and powers of a different kind form the heart of Robin Merle’s darkly humorous novel, A Dangerous Friendship.

Twenty-nine year-old Tina is emerging from a failed marriage and ready to shake up her life in 1980s New York City. When she meets thirty-five year-old Spike at a writer’s retreat, she’s instantly dazzled by the older woman’s charm and seeming invulnerability. The two women bond as Tina seeks to learn Spike’s ways, both in terms of confidence and in terms of the power Spike seems to wield over men.

Intent on giving more time to their writing — and on having new adventures to fuel their muses — the new friends decide to rent a cabin in the woods for the summer. But their focus on literary pursuits soon falls to the wayside as they hit up local dive bars for drinks, drugs and dalliances with inappropriate men. As the women become increasingly psychologically entangled with one another, cracks begin to appear in their friendship. Will their connection be able to survive the dangers they’re exposing themselves to during this life-changing summer?

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Next up is a book that claims to solve one of the most sensational murders of the 20th century. Author Eli Frankel is an Emmy-nominated producer, veteran true-crime researcher and Hollywood insider. He spent five years researching the Black Dahlia killing that electrified the nation, and is ready to reveal the answers that he’s found in his new book, Sisters In Death: The Black Dahlia, the Prairie Heiress, and Their Hunter.

Every true crime and Hollywood history aficionado knows the story of the Black Dahlia, the nickname given to aspiring actress Elizabeth Short after her corpse was found horribly mutilated in a Los Angeles lot in 1947. The gruesome crime remained unsolved for decades, but Mr Frankel believes that he’s finally figured it out.

Six years earlier and sixteen hundred miles away, another young woman was found butchered in her Kansas City bed. Leila Welsh was a beautiful young woman who’d recently graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and was working towards getting her qualifications as a teacher. She lived with her brother and mother, who found her mutilated corpse on that terrible spring morning. Her murderer was never identified and her case, unlike Elizabeth’s, faded into history.

Mr Frankel, however, has found the connection between the deaths of Elizabeth and Leila, and lays out his case accusing one man of being the perpetrator of both murders. Drawing on documents old and new, interviews with the last surviving participants, and letters from the victims themselves, he presents a compelling solution to two very cold cases.

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Another horrifying mystery is unraveled in CG Drews’ latest YA fantasy-horror novel, Hazelthorn. This tale of botanical body horror revolves around Evander, a seventeen-year-old boy trapped in a living nightmare. Confined to his room on the Hazelthorn estate, he wakes up every day covered in bruises, with no memory of how he acquired them.

Even more agonizing than his physical wounds, however, is his crushing loneliness. Orphaned by a tragic accident, he was placed into the custody of reclusive billionaire Byron Lennox-Hall, who keeps him locked away for his own safety. Byron has given Evander three ironclad rules to follow:

1. He can never leave the estate.

2. He can never go into the gardens.

3. He can never be alone with Byron’s charming, underachieving grandson Laurie, who once tried to bury Evander alive.

Upon Byron’s sudden death, Evander inherits the immense gothic mansion, sprawling grounds and the vast wealth of the Lennox-Hall family. But Evander suspects that his guardian was murdered and believes that Laurie is his only hope in uncovering the killer… before he himself becomes the next victim.

The garden, however, has a mind of its own, as it begins to insinuate itself further into the house with each passing day. Will Evander be able to uncover the terrible legacy of secrets he’s inherited before his very life becomes forfeit to powers outside of his control?

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Our next mystery is also, alas, bestselling author Nelson DeMille’s final novel. Before he passed away in 2024, he’d been writing the Scott Brodie & Maggie Taylor series with his son Alex. This third installment, The Tin Men isn’t just a book for military thriller aficionados, but will appeal to science fiction fans as well.

Army CID Special Agents Brodie and Taylor are sent to Camp Hayden, a remote military installation on the bleeding edge of science and especially robotics. Their assignment is to investigate the unexpected death of Major Roger Ames, the senior scientist overseeing the top secret war games between a platoon of Army Rangers and a fleet of AI-powered “lethal autonomous weapons”.

Everyone is a suspect, from the camp commander who pushes his troops to the limit; to the Rangers slowly slipping into madness due to a toxic combination of isolation, physical exhaustion and performance enhancing drugs, to Major Ames’ own scientific colleagues. Brodie and Taylor will have to untangle a complex web of alliances, animosities and secret agendas in their quest to not only uncover the truth behind Major Ames’ death but to get to the bottom of what’s really going on at Camp Hayden with its terrifying arsenal of next-generation weapons.

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I mistakenly accepted the pitch for our final selection this week because I was under the impression that it was a graphic novel. That was totally my bad, but you can see why I made that mistake when you look at the terrific cover for Hu AnYan’s I Deliver Parcels In Beijing.

This collection of short story essays was translated into English by Jack Hargreaves. From the promotional material: “In 2023, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing became the literary sensation of the year in China. Hu Anyan’s story, about short-term jobs in various anonymous megacities, hit a nerve with a generation of young people who feel at odds with an ever-growing pressure to perform and succeed.

“Hu started posting essays about his experiences online during COVID lockdowns. His recollection of night shifts in a huge logistics center in the south of China went viral: his nights were so hot that he could drink three liters of water without taking a toilet break; his days were spent searching for affordable rooms with proper air-conditioning; and his few moments of leisure were consumed by calculations of the amount of alcohol needed to sleep but not feel drowsy a few hours later.

“Hu Anyan tells us about brutal work, where there is no real future in sight. But Hu is armed with deadpan humor and a strong idea of self. He moves on when he feels stuck—from logistics in the south, to parcel delivery in Beijing, to other impossible jobs. Along the way, he turns to reading and writing for strength and companionship.

“I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is an honest and startling first-person portrait of Hu Anyan’s struggle against the dehumanizing nature of our contemporary global work system—and his discovery of the power of sharing a story.”

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All these books are available now for pre-order, so let me know if you’re able to get to them before I do, dear readers! I’d love to hear your opinions, and see if that will 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!