Tantalizing Tales — January 2026 — Part Four

The last roundup column of January features some terrific upcoming thrillers, as well as a few books I wish I’d been able to get to back in 2025.

First up, we have a non-fiction examination of two of my favorite pastimes and one of the places where they intersect. John Curran’s The Murder Game examines the birth of the mystery genre and its explosion in popularity, coinciding with the mainstreaming of light intellectual pastimes like crossword puzzles and deductive board games. He posits that these trends were helped along by the sudden abundance of both leisure time and literacy, with curious minds hungry for stimulation.

Dr Curran believes that the novels of the Golden Age of Detecting (essentially the 1920s and 30s) continue to be as popular as they were a century ago due to the fact that they’re essentially games set up between author and reader. There are unspoken rules best exemplified by the Fair Play movement, where all the clues to a mystery’s solution are laid out in the story such that astute readers should be able to figure out whodunnit alongside the fictional detective. He also examines the many different kind of games at play in the experience of reading, whether between detective and murderer, publisher and book buyer, or between authors themselves. It’s a fascinating study of the genre that provides real insight into the enduring popularity of Golden Age detective fiction and its many successors today.

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Also publishing this Tuesday is a coming-of-age novel that really hits me in the nostalgic feels. Liz Allan’s In Bloom is set in mid-1990s small town Australia, as a group of young girls must decide what they’re willing to do in order to, well, bloom.

The Bastards is the name four Nirvana-obsessed fourteen year-old girls choose for the band that they’re convinced is their only route out of the coastal dead-end town of Vincent. The foursome are relative nobodies even in their small community, all daughters of single moms struggling to make ends meet. They’re definitely not rich and they’re certainly not popular. None of them are good at school, and the only things they’re sure of are the lifelong friendships between them and the desperate need to escape the same fate as their moms.

But then lead singer Lily Lucid quits the band, claiming that their beloved music teacher Mister P sexually assaulted her. None of the other girls believe her. With the impending Battle of the Bands that could be their only ticket out of there looming over them, the girls will have to figure out what they’ll do and how far they’re willing to go in order to keep their dream alive.

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Four other best friends since childhood are at the center of Camilla Sten’s latest thriller, The Bachelorette Party. Every year, Tilly, Anna, Linnea and Evelina met at a remote island nestled off the coast of Sweden, as a much needed escape from their everyday lives. No one else knew the exact location of the island where the women partied and bonded for one carefree night of each year. So when they disappeared, no one really knew where to start looking for them either.

Ten years later, true crime podcaster Tessa Nilsson might finally have a lead. She’s been obsessed with the story of the four missing women since she was a teenager, and has channeled that fascination into a successful podcast that covers Sweden’s most gruesome cases. But now her career has crashed and burned, and the questions that have haunted her throughout the years only seem to loom larger, instead of receding into the background of what she should be focusing on in the rest of her life.

Her best friend Anneliese, for example, is about to get married. When Anneliese books a bachelorette party at Baltic Vinyasa, a sophisticated island retreat, Tessa is struck by the similarities between the venue and the few descriptions known of the four women’s mysterious island. While she’s ostensibly there to drink cava, do sunrise yoga and bond with the bride-to-be, Tessa can’t pass up the opportunity to do a little investigating. Little does she know, however, that someone there is also ready to finally enact a revenge years in the making.

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One of the most gorgeous releases of the big 25 was Julie Clark’s The Ghostwriter. The first edition comes as a deluxe hardcover with truly glorious sprayed edges. The deluxe paperback version (also with sprayed edges!) publishes this April.

The novel itself revolves around the title character, Olivia Dumont. She’s spent her entire professional career hiding the fact that notorious horror author Vincent Taylor is her father.

Decades earlier, Vincent’s two teenage siblings were found dead in their Ojai, California home. As the only survivor, Vincent was never quite able to shake the rumors that he’d somehow been involved, if he hadn’t murdered his siblings outright. These rumors would grow into dark legend as Vincent grew up to become a bestselling author, with his titillating reputation partially fueled by his refusal to ever discuss what happened on that terrible night.

Now Vincent is dying and wants his estranged daughter to write his final book for him. Olivia is on the precipice of financial ruin, and accepts only because the book is supposed to be the capstone of his canon of horror fiction. Too late, she realizes that he actually wants her to write the memoir where he will finally reveal what happened to his siblings… if he can be believed.

Even as Olivia has to contend with her manipulative father and their troubled relationship, she’ll find herself piecing together the truth behind what really happened that summer of 1975. Soon, she’ll discover that the tangled web of family secrets and lies that she’s long been an unwitting part of obscures a story more complicated and horrific than even she could ever have imagined.

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Our next book also deals with fraught family relationships and suspicions, as three sisters have to figure out who among them is a serial killer in K D Aldyn’s dark debut Sister Butcher Sister.

The Rowling sisters have always seemed perfectly normal, with partners and children and homes and dreams. And who doesn’t have secrets tied to near-forgotten traumas — it would be abnormal if you didn’t. But when Kate, the eldest, decides to buy their late grandfather’s home, all three sisters must return to a place where they thought their secrets were left safely in the past.

Coming back unravels each sister’s hard-earned peace in different ways. Are Kate’s inexplicable visions tied to events she can barely recall? Is middle child and married mother of two Aurora acting out because of her sisters’ indiscretions? Will youngest sister and recovering addict Peggy be able to move on from the memories that she wishes she could forget?

And then there’s the personality known only as SHE, a serial killer hidden in their midst. SHE is ready to strike again and again now that they’re all back together. As a wave of murders rocks their coastal community, the evidence begins to point to the Rowling sisters. The women will have to finally confront the past and its impact on their present, in this chilling multiple POV thriller.

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Finally, we have Plays Well With Others, the adult debut of bestselling YA author Lauren Myracle. Check out this phenomenal description from its publicists:

“Jacquelyn “Jake” Nolan’s entire life has just been shattered. After a devastating miscarriage, her husband and “best friend” Shelby reveal they’ve been having an affair—and now Jake is on the outs. In her lowest moment, Jake writes a soul-bearing, desperate email to Shelby…only to have the most damning lines plastered across social media, quickly going viral and making Jake an internet pariah.

“Mabel wants to be the perfect stepmother to her husband’s ten-year-old daughter, Bethany—but each olive branch is met with an ice cold shoulder. Not to mention, Mabel’s got an online nemesis in the neighborhood, “WarriorMom” on GoodNeighbors, who is tormenting her anonymously on even the most innocuous of comments.

“Now neighbors, Jake and Mabel find in each other a safe place to share their frustration and rage…and permission to express their dark desire for revenge. As the two new friends grasp for power in their own lives, what start as trifling pranks turn bitingly vicious, unintentionally dragging the neighborhood’s children into the mix. As the stakes climb and long-buried secrets come to light, the residents of Sweetwater Lane will soon find out that it only takes one small spark to light an uncontrollable fire.”

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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!