Tantalizing Tales — February 2026 — Part One

I can’t believe it’s the first week of February already, dear readers, especially since I’ve been a shut-in with one illness or another for these past three weeks. I’ve managed to leave the house exactly once — for much-needed specialty groceries — but haven’t ventured any farther than my yard otherwise, as I’ve only felt healthy for exactly two out of these last twenty-one days.

Hopefully, your year has been going much better than mine so far! I console myself with the thought that at least I have so many wonderful books to lose myself in, including our first selection this week, Andrea Tang’s upcoming sapphic enemies-to-lovers romantasy, To The Death.

Eighteen year-old Samantha Chan lives in a world where magic is a thing of the past, used mostly for show nowadays in highly regulated duels. But after her older brother got caught up in illegal dueling and died at the hands of the legendary Mateus Blackwood, Sam has thrown herself into learning and mastering the ancient art herself. Under the tutelage of (legitimate) dueling champion Lysander Rook, she quietly plots her revenge against the man who killed her brother.

Up-and-coming duelist Tamsin Blackwood is desperate to get out from under the shadow of her father and coach Mateus. Receiving a challenge from the undefeated Lysander and his assistant Sam seems like the perfect way for her to finally make a name for herself. Neither she nor Sam is prepared for the friendship, and more, that spring up between them, however. Sam has no intention of letting Tamsin in on her plans for vengeance, but will her feelings get in the way as her machinations bear down to their deadly conclusion?

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If escapism of a different sort is your go-to right now, check out the latest Jesse Stone novel, Robert B Parker’s Big Shot by Christopher Farnsworth. This topical procedural sees our favorite police chief being investigated after a very wealthy nuisance disappears from their town of Paradise.

Ramsey Devlin doesn’t think that rules, much less laws, apply to him. After gaining an acquittal in a multibillion dollar fraud case, he decides to party hard, leading Jesse to discover him intoxicated in a McLaren that costs more than most people’s houses. Devlin then takes a swing at Jesse, who dumps him in the drunk tank to sleep it off.

Unfortunately, this only earns our hardworking chief of police Devlin’s enmity. The filthy rich hedge fund manager begins to do everything in his power to make life difficult for Jesse, even pouring money into the campaign coffers of Jesse’s nemesis, Paradise’s Mayor Gary Armistead. When Devlin starts encouraging Deputy Chief Molly Crane’s violent side, tho, Jesse knows he has to do something to protect his town and the people in it.

So he’s much more relieved than disappointed at first when Devlin abruptly disappears. Trouble is, it doesn’t look like Devlin left town voluntarily, if the bloodstains in his home are anything to go by. Jesse is soon accused of foul play and suspended from his job. Will he be able to figure out who really got rid of Devlin before he’s the one who ends up behind bars?

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The next upcoming novel I’m really looking forward to is from one of my favorite fantasy authors. A. G. Slatter’s A Forest, Darkly is the latest standalone novel set in her unprepossessingly named but wonderfully gothic Sourdough fantasy universe.

From the publicity materials:

“Deep in the forest lives Mehrab the witch, coping with loneliness in her own strange ways and quietly battling her demons. One evening, a young woman appears on her doorstep seeking shelter, pursued by godhounds who wish to destroy all those practising magic, and Mehrab’s solitary existence is disrupted as she teaches the girl how to control her powers. Together they forge a cure for their isolation with heartbreaking consequences…

“Meanwhile, in the local village, children begin to disappear, sometimes returning forever changed – or not returning at all. Sinister offerings appear on Mehrab’s doorstep, and a dark power pursues her through the trees. As the villagers turn hostile and the godhounds close in, Mehrab finds herself at the centre of a struggle to save the soul of the forest, the life of an old love – and her own new-formed family.”

I have so many books on my To Be Read pile, that I wanted to make sure to highlight this one for you in a timely manner. Rest assured that I will be actually reading and reviewing it in the hopefully not too distant future!

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Let’s take a look back at some of the books that I didn’t get a chance to read as they published in 2025. First up is Gillian French’s adult debut Shaw Connolly Lives To Tell, the first in the Shaw Connolly series.

Our title heroine is a fingerprint analyst who’s seen more than her fair share of trauma over the course of her career. Now married with two kids, she serves a rural Maine community as she helps investigate not only murders but a baffling string of arsons.

Shaw is, however, haunted less by the crimes she deals with in her daily work than by the disappearance of her little sister Thea sixteen years earlier. She knows that her relentless obsession with her sister’s case is slowly isolating her from her family, even before she starts taking calls from a man named Anders Jenssen, who knows way too many details from all that time ago. As their relationship deepens, he begins to tell her disturbing facts about her own life, things he’d only know if he was watching her and her family much too closely. Shaw just can’t cut him loose tho, so desperate is she to finally find out what happened to Thea.

As Anders begins to escalate in his threats and designs, Shaw will have to reckon with how much she really has to gain from their relationship… and how much she’s willing to lose.

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For an even more overtly creepy read, check out Chelsea Conradt’s latest spooky thriller, The Farmhouse.

When Emily Hauk’s mother dies, it’s the final push that she and her husband Josh need to leave San Francisco behind and make a fresh start in rural Nebraska. Buying a farm, with its clear skies and low costs, seems like the perfect way for her to deal with her grief.

But the farm turns out to be anything but the refuge that Emily was expecting. The barn seems to keep moving, and her mother’s favorite music inexplicably drifts across the corn fields. Blood appears in unexpected places, and she keeps waking to screams that she knows aren’t from foxes, no matter what Josh claims.

Emily begins to dig into the farm’s past, and learns that a teenage girl went missing from there just three years ago, with the girl’s mother dying mysteriously soon after. The more Emily investigates, the more troubling the stories that she unearths of women connected to the farm, all of whom came to dark ends. Will Emily be able to get to the bottom of the mysterious deaths before she becomes the next victim of the malevolent force lurking in the corn?

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We close this week’s column with another book about a daughter coming to terms with a building’s looming legacy in Mary Anna Evans’ The Dark Library.

The United States has just entered World War II, and Bentham-on-Hudson is no longer the estate that Dr. Estella Ecker grew up on. Years ago, she ran away from there with no intention of ever coming back. Now, however, she’s been forced into the footsteps of an overbearing father who dominated the college where he worked and the manor where he entertained scholars and artists for decades.

With her father recently dead and her mercurial mother missing, E has stepped into a liminal world where all eyes are on what she’ll do next with the family holdings. Everyone seems to want to talk about her father, but no one even seems to care about her vanished mom. As she discovers more about her parents’ secrets, she’s drawn further and further into the heart of Rockfall House: the library of rare books that her father had once forbidden her to touch.

Could these books have something to do with the crimes and unsolved deaths plaguing her area? In order to find her mother in a society strained by wartime and the lack of women’s rights, E must learn to reckon with her father’s legacy of ice and darkness.

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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!