Tantalizing Tales — October 2025 — Part Five

Happy Halloween, dear readers! If you’re looking forward to getting some good reads in as we bid adieu to October and hello to November, check out this awesome list!

First, we have a book that just came out this past Tuesday, Kristen Pipp’s debut novel The Library Of Lost Girls. This horror fantasy — with a slow-burn Sapphic romance — is perfect for spooky season, especially for readers who appreciate the power of friendship, love and truth to beat back the darkness.

Set in the 1890s, TLoLG follows Gwen Donavan as she tries to figure out what happened to her adored older sister, the beautiful, rebellious Izzy. Izzy was shipped off to the Delphi School for Girls and came back a totally different person. Now she’s obedient, demure and, worst of all, off-puttingly eager to marry.

Determined to find answers, Gwen cheats her way into Delphi. The finishing school is nothing like she expected, with sinister shadows lurking in the halls and a curfew that restricts her to her room after dark. Most curious of all is the forbidden library, which is filled with thousands of books, each with a girl’s name on the spine.

After finding a note at the school left to her by Izzy, Gwen is plunged deeper into a search for the truth. Something terrible is lurking at the heart of Delphi. If Gwen doesn’t figure it out, Izzy might not be the only girl whose irrepressible spirit is lost forever.

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If you’d rather lean into cozy than spooky this season, check out another debut novel, Brian Schaefer’s heartwarming and humorous Town & Country. Set in a small rural town, this book spans the six months in which a contentious congressional race exposes the conflict at the heart of a community torn between lifelong residents and the influx of second-homeowners, many of them gay.

The town of Griffin’s status as a desirable place to retreat from the city has attracted plenty of weekenders and carpetbaggers, including wealthy Paul Banks, who now lives in Griffin with his much older husband Stan. Paul has decided to run for the congressional seat in their swing district, against pub owner and town supervisor Chip Riley. Chip’s devoutly religious real estate broker wife Diane has long had her misgivings about selling homes to gay people, while her sons have their own worries regarding adulthood.

With the lines between town and country blurring, as factions form and dissolve and reform anew in different configurations, will this community be able to figure out how to care for all of its people? T&C asks the important questions of what really makes a home, and what we truly owe to our neighbors.

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For humor of a different sort — especially if you find cuffing season a horror all its own — Ana Garriga and Carmen Ubita’s Convent Wisdom is like a Sister Act movie in book form, minus the singing, ofc.

Subtitled How Sixteenth Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life, this wry and not-so-saintly self-help book delves into the unconventional, wise and often wild lives of sixteenth and seventeenth century nuns, extrapolating solid advice for the modern day. These sisters didn’t just shuffle from room to room while praying quietly. Some of them ate spiderwebs, brawled over makeup, or chain-produced manuscripts for extra cash. Rebellious and resourceful, their stories are refreshingly relatable, especially when relayed here by the co-hosts of the popular Spanish podcast Las Hijas de Felipe.

Mss Garriga and Ubita are not only accomplished scholars of the late medieval, they’re also best friends who’ve been through it all and supported each other through thick and thin. This book tackles all sorts of modern day problems — from money woes to FOMO to codependency to lesbian situationships and more — and applies the wisdom of nuns long gone to help readers navigate this increasingly wild 21st century with courage, sanity and grace.

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If you’d rather cope with the season by embracing horror directly, then Christina Henry’s latest chilling novel, The Place Where They Buried Your Heart, could be just right for you!

Jessie Campanelli grew up on what would have been an ordinary street in Chicago, but for the abandoned house where terrible things once happened. Parents warned their kids from approaching, much less going into, a house that was widely rumored to be haunted. But kids being kids, the children of the neighborhood would often dare each other to go inside. Thinking little of it — after all, other kids had gone in and come out relatively unscathed — Jessie dared her little brother Paul, too.

Paul was not, however, one of those kids. His friends Jake and Richie swore that the house ate him. None of the adults believed them, even if the thought of Paul being kidnapped or otherwise harmed by persons unknown was hardly as palatable, especially to the Campanellis.

Jessie’s family never really recovered from Paul’s loss. As the years went by, Jessie would grow up and have a child of her own, while still living on the same street as the house that ate her brother. The house is still hungry, however, and as the darkness spreads from it, Jessie will have to confront her past in order to protect what’s left of her family.

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Finally, we have the book that I’m personally most looking forward to diving into sooner than later, bestselling author Marissa Meyer’s latest fairy tale reinterpretation, The House Saphir, a fresh take on the legend of Bluebeard. From the publisher:

“Mallory Fontaine is a fraud. Though she comes from a long line of witches, the only magic she possesses is the ability to see ghosts, which is rarely as useful as one would think. She and her sister have maintained the family business, eking out a paltry living by selling bogus spells to gullible buyers and conducting tours of the infamous mansion where the first of the Saphir murders took place.

“Mallory is a self-proclaimed expert on Count Bastien Saphir—otherwise known as Monsieur Le Bleu—who brutally killed three of his wives more than a century ago. But she never expected to meet Bastien’s great-great grandson and heir to the Saphir estate. Armand is handsome, wealthy, and convinced that the Fontaine Sisters are as talented as they claim. The perfect mark. When he offers Mallory a large sum of money to rid his ancestral home of Le Bleu’s ghost, she can’t resist. A paid vacation at Armand’s country manor? It’s practically a dream come true, never mind the ghosts of murdered wives and the monsters that are as common as household pests.

“But when murder again comes to the House Saphir, Mallory finds herself at the center of the investigation—and she is almost certain the killer is mortal. If she has any hope of cashing in on the payment she was promised, she’ll have to solve the murder and banish the ghost, all while upholding the illusion of witchcraft.

“But that all sounds relatively easy compared to her biggest challenge: learning to trust her heart. Especially when the person her heart wants the most might be a murderer himself.”

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All these books are available, either now or 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!