Tantalizing Tales — November 2025 — Part Two

(assuming you count last week’s Gift Guide as its own separate beast, which I’m choosing to do here!)

Is anyone else taking advantage of the pre-Black Friday sales? Or are you being stubborn like me and choosing to wait till the day itself in case there are really good deals, literally or figuratively, lying in store for us? Regardless, keep this next selection top of your shopping list! I adored the first book in Vanessa Kelly’s Emma Knightley mystery series and am only sorry that the sequel didn’t come in time for me to secure a place for it on my review list.

That said, if Murder At Donwell Abbey is even half as good as Murder At Highbury, then readers are in for a treat indeed. Ms Kelly reimagines Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse as an amateur sleuth who must solve the murders she keeps coming across now that she’s happily settled down with her husband George. Unfortunately for her ongoing peace of mind, someone else in her immediate family is looking to get settled as well, in this second book of the series. To Emma’s less-than-delight, her hypochondriac father announces his engagement to, of all people, Miss Hetty Bates.

But something even worse than domestic mismatch happens when Emma’s hardworking lady’s maid Prudence is found dead, presumably from an accidental fall. Emma, however, suspects that something far more sinister is afoot. In her pursuit of justice for Prudence, will she put her own life at risk?

Emma is, perhaps weirdly, my favorite of Jane Austen’s heroines, as I’ve slowly come to accept and appreciate the similarities between us. I love what Ms Kelly has done with her and with the entire world in which she lives, extrapolating fairly from the original book for entertainment that is at once riveting and convincing. And honestly, of all the Austen heroines we know, who but clever and meddlesome Emma would be best suited to succeed at amateur sleuthing?

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Next up is an extrapolation from a much more recent source, as Mike Lupica continues the exciting adventures of Spenser PI in Robert B Parker’s Showdown. This is Mr Lupica’s third novel in this series; I haven’t read any of the others yet, but I did really enjoy what he did with the Jesse Stone property in Robert B Parker’s Fool’s Paradise.

In Showdown, Spenser takes on the kind of case he usually loves: bringing down the rich, powerful and obnoxious. In this case, his target (after a fashion) is Vic Hale, a shock jock podcaster who loves spewing the kind of overheated rhetoric that some people love despite (or maybe even because of) how often he’s called out for his bullshit. He’s about to sign the biggest contract in online broadcasting history and is riding high… until Spenser shows up to bring him back down to earth.

Turns out that Spenser’s newest client Daniel Lopez believes that he’s Hale’s illegitimate son. This information could deliver a massive blow to Hale’s reputation, and might even be enough to scupper the broadcasting deal outright. Spenser loves it… at least until the bodies start turning up, all connected with the mystery of Daniel’s birth. Is someone trying to silence Daniel, or Hale, or even both? It’s up to Spenser to get to the bottom of the mystery and ensure that justice is truly served.

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Thriller writers Simon Gervais and Ryan Steck join forces for our next selection, The Second Son, kicking off a brand new series that mixes international espionage with police procedural.

Chase Burke is a former soldier who’s happy to make a living now by giving wine recommendations to guests at the restaurant where he works as sommelier. His old life begins to intrude, however, when his intelligence analyst brother is killed in a covert op gone wrong and is subsequently branded a traitor. Then a brutal ambush at his restaurant leaves the woman he loves — a congresswoman, no less — clinging to life.

Chase will have to team up with NYPD Detective Alice Doyle, a single mom with problems of her own, to figure out who’s coming after him and stop them before anyone else gets hurt. If he clears his family name and protects the woman he’s romantically involved with in the process, then so much the better. But a ruthless criminal syndicate with influence the world over and elite mercenaries on their payroll is closing in on him. Who can he and Alice trust in the face of such overwhelming odds?

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Our next selection is also a police procedural, tho from a longer running series. The eighth installment of Val McDermid’s Karen Pirie books, Silent Bones, finds our chief of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit investigating the unearthed bones of a very complicated, and now very dead, man.

Investigative journalist Sam Nimmo vanished over a decade ago, while poking into the murky politics of the Scottish independence referendum. Of greater interest to the police at the time was the actual extent of his involvement in the brutal murder of his girlfriend. His disappearance effectively shelved that case.

Torrential midwinter rains in 2025, however, cause a motorway landslide that reveals his true fate. Sam had apparently been killed and buried in all the construction back when the road was being built eleven years ago. DCI Pirie and her team take over from there. Was Sam murdered in retaliation for what he’d allegedly done to his girlfriend? Or had he come too close to a political secret that someone would kill to protect?

When the accidental death of a hotel manager quickly turns into a homicide investigation, a chain of interlinked puzzles like nothing DCI Pirie has ever encountered before will come to the surface, testing her and her team to their limits as they investigate the secrets of a Scottish highland town.

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Finally, we have Christina Kovac’s new thriller Watch Us Fall, that I’m really hoping to find time to get to soon, due to its setting in my beloved Washington DC!

Lucy Ambrose is living her best life in the nation’s capital, far away from where she grew up in stifling small town Georgia. Having recently graduated from college, she now shares a Georgetown rowhouse with her three best friends Estella, Penelope and Addie. They call themselves The Sweeties (for reasons that are hopefully explained in the book in a manner that doesn’t make me whole body cringe, lol.)

The young women’s lives are dominated by early-career striving and the drama of young love… until Queen Bee Addie’s ex-boyfriend Josh suddenly goes missing.

From the publicity materials:

“Josh Egan isn’t just any DC up-and-comer. He’s a star investigative broadcast journalist from a prominent political family with skeletons in the closet.

“As the Sweeties’ lives are upended by the search for Josh and the media’s speculation, Lucy becomes determined to get to the bottom of what happened. But the more questions she asks, the more the detectives suspect the roommates know more than they are letting on. And Lucy has a few long-buried secrets of her own she is desperate to protect…”

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All these books are available 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!