Tantalizing Tales — January 2026 — Part Two

Hello, dear reader! This week, we’re featuring one upcoming book and five backlist titles, beginning with a collaboration involving one of my favorite authors of contemporary speculative fiction. Rob Hart teams up with Jeff Rake for Detour, a high stakes sci-fi thriller with a Planet Of The Apes-like twist.

It’s all in a day’s work when police officer and devoted family man Ryan Crane thwarts an assassination attempt on a billionaire with presidential aspirations. A grateful John Ward offers Ryan the chance of a lifetime: a seat as one of a handful of civilians joining three astronauts on the first manned mission to Titan, Saturn’s moon. Ryan is understandably hesitant. He doesn’t have the training and doesn’t want to leave his family for such a long period of time, even if the experimental spacecraft can condense the journey to a “mere” two-year expedition. Ward, however, dangles the extra incentive of a paycheck that will take care of Ryan’s family for life. With his wife urging him on, Ryan takes off for Titan, and returns two years later a hero.

But something is different now. As Ryan and the other civilian astronauts discover that the Earth they’ve returned to isn’t the home they left behind, they begin to question everything and everyone they know. The crew must uncover what happened during their journey, and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives.

Mr Hart earned my admiration with the wonderfully prescient The Warehouse, and has gone on to write other entertaining, if more mainstream thrillers in his Assassins Anonymous series (I am once again blurbed without a byline for that latter on Bookshop, lol.) I really wish I had the time to read this novel in a timely manner too, so let me know if you do!

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Our next selection is the latest psychological thriller from Allison Buccola. The Ascent is the mesmerizing tale of a twelve year-old girl named Ophelia, who was found alone by the side of the road. She was searching for her family, who turned out to be the members of a reclusive commune near where she was discovered outside Philadelphia. The Fifteen, as they were labelled, had mysteriously vanished, leaving no trace except Ophelia behind.

Twenty years later and Lee Burton has built a new life for herself. She has a loving husband and a seven month-old daughter named Lucy, and has done everything in her power to keep her troubled past a secret from everyone she knows.

But the challenges of new motherhood are beginning to overwhelm her. She can’t sleep, and doesn’t want to let Lucy out of her sight for even a moment. When a stranger arrives with the promise of answers about her past — answers that could very well help her learn how to manage her present — Lee is torn between skepticism and the desire for closure. Can Lee trust that this woman is who she claims to be? And even if she is, will the revelations of the past shatter everything that Lee has worked so hard to build?

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Another pair of troubled women lie at the heart of Vikki Wakefield’s crime thriller The Backwater, originally published in Australia under the title To The River.

When Sabine Kelly was seventeen years-old, a fire broke out in her remote trailer park community, killing her mother, her sister and seven others. Sabine confessed to the murders, but escaped custody and disappeared into the thick forest and winding backwaters of the river that was her childhood refuge.

Twelve years after what became known as the Trailer Park Murders, journalist Rachel Weidermann has lost her family and her job. On the plus side, she now has plenty of free time to investigate a case that she hasn’t been able to get out of her head. Rachel is certain that Sabine is hiding out somewhere near the river. If she can track the fugitive down, she’ll land the story of the year, and maybe get her own life back on track too.

But the closer Rachel gets to Sabine, the more she’ll have to question everything she assumed about this story, as she unwittingly sets off a brutal chain of events that will rock their small town and change both their lives in ways neither woman expected.

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Next up is a darkly satirical supernatural thriller from an emerging star in the horror field. Matt Serafini’s Feeders asks what’s really behind the worst of the degrading social media trends, and comes up with an answer that’s perhaps more palatable than the horrors we see unfolding in front of us daily.

Kylie Bennington is trying her best at making it big as an influencer. Success, however, remains frustratingly out of reach. When a video depicting the brutal murder of a former classmate leaks online, Kylie can’t help but be curious about where it came from and how it went viral, leading her to an “off-the-grid” social media app named MonoLife. The user agreement is a little weird — it’s all very First Rule of Fight Club — but Kylie figures she can manage the stipulation of interacting with other users twice daily or risk losing access to everything.

As her star begins to climb in the MonoLife ecosystem, Kylie is gratified… but soon also to fear for her sanity. MonoLife rewards the worst in human behavior, forcing Kylie to keep pushing at her own boundaries in order to please her growing number of fans. How far will she be willing to go to satisfy the ruthless forces behind the platform, who see all from the shadows?

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Another tale of unexpected consequences is Laura Leffler’s Tell Them You Lied, a psychological thriller about bad friends. I’m ngl, I was totally in when I was told that this book grapples with some of the issues from the infamous Bad Art Friend controversy.

From the publicity materials:

“Anna had never met anyone like Willow. Entering art school with lofty ideas about Art and her role in it, Anna was wholly unprepared for someone as mysterious, moody—and cool—as Willow. Here was Anna’s muse and collaborator all in one, ready to bring her in on Art’s great secrets.

“Now, five years later, Anna is weary. Where art school was boundless creativity and collaboration, the New York art scene is all about survival. Worse: Willow’s true nature as a muse only to herself has become nakedly apparent, as has her cruelty.

“So the mugging Anna has staged for Willow this morning? It’s supposed to send Willow running back to her true friend. The knife is supposed to be a mirror in which this ‘artist’ can finally see the monster she’s become. It’s supposed to give Anna her power back.

“But this morning isn’t just any Tuesday. It’s September 11, 2001. And as the city reels from the seismic events of that day, Willow never returns home. Anna keeps quiet about the prank and her growing panic that she’s to blame for Willow’s disappearance. But as the hours and days tick by, Anna begins to question whether she’s the mastermind she thought she was, or the pawn.”

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Finally, we have my most highly anticipated title on this list. Jaime Lynn Hendricks’ Their Double Lives is the latest from an author I adore for her empathy and commitment to feminism and solidarity in the face of oppression.

Kim Valva has been given an offer she can’t refuse. A mysterious Stranger has promised her a life-changing amount of money in exchange for the seemingly simple task of dropping a pill into someone’s drink at the country club where she works as a waitress. Kim isn’t the biggest fan of the carefree socialites she serves, but this isn’t the kind of request she’d ordinarily countenance… if it weren’t for the fact that her beloved dog needs expensive surgery to survive. On the heels of a bad break-up and with a social life in shambles, Kim doesn’t have it in her to wrestle with the ethical qualms.

She does, however, hesitate when it turns out that her target is the high school ex she hasn’t seen in fifteen years. Tony Fiore is now Anthony Fuller, and he’s done a complete one-eighty from bad boy to multimillionaire. Now he’s at the club with a pretty young fiancee on his arm. Kim is no longer sure she can slip him the poison, so is as shocked as everyone else is when someone else at the table drops dead. Did The Stranger commission a second assassin? Who would want Tony and/or the other guest dead? As Kim digs deeper into the lives of the two targets and the identity of her mysterious employer, she begins to discover that no one is really who they seem….

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All these books are either available or available for pre-order now, 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!