Tantalizing Tales — February 2026 — Part Two

Happy Friday the 13th, friends! I finally drove myself into the city for the first time since getting sick almost a month ago and it was Not Pleasant. But at least I have a bunch of more than pleasant books to look forward to reading soon, beginning with Fergus Craig’s delightfully titled I’m Not The Only Murderer In My Retirement Home.

Carol is anticipating a cozy, relaxing retirement in the luxury of the posh Sheldon Oaks community. Decades in a cramped prison cell were not, after all, the most conducive to pursuing her non-murderous hobbies. If she can keep her past criminal record as a serial killer quiet, maybe she’ll even be able to make a few friends with whom to see out the rest of her golden years in happy anonymity.

That dream unfortunately dies after a fellow resident, who just happens to have once been a police commissioner, is found dead from unnatural causes. Turns out that he wasn’t the only retired member of law enforcement or the judicial system to live at Sheldon Oaks either, as Carol soon learns to her consternation. Worse, the truth of her own past comes out, making for some very awkward Bingo sessions with her new-found friends. Suspicion for the murder quickly falls on Carol, who’ll have to resort to everything short of killing again to prove her innocence, and to find and catch who really dunnit.

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Our next selection is the debut thriller from an author known as Black America’s Attorney General. Ben Crump’s Worse Than A Lie is a great pick for Black History Month (which I’ve been woefully under-discussing here at TFC this year.)

The publicity material for this first in a series is so good that I’m going to just quote it directly:

“It’s the night of November 4, 2008. America’s first Black president has just been elected. And fifty-three-year-old Hollis Montrose—a Black ex-police officer from the suburbs of Chicago—has become the latest victim of a brutal attack. He was shot ten times in cold blood by four white men who otherwise would have been colleagues back in his police days.

“Beau Lee Cooper was born serious, as if on an urgent mission with little time to waste. Raised in the tumultuous world of Texas, it had always been his dream to become a lawyer and fight for what’s right, ever since he was a little boy reading To Kill A Mockingbird. And now, ten years into running his own law firm with his best friend and partner in crime Nelson “Nellie” Rivers and his suave right-hand-man Brent “Cape” Capers, he feels he’s finally making a difference. When Beau Lee learns about Hollis’s situation, he’s determined to help.

“Miraculously, Hollis survives the encounter, but the Chicago Police Department has already spun the narrative in their favor, and Hollis is given a wrongful prison sentence with an unreasonable bail. What really happened that night the car was pulled over? Was it random or was Hollis targeted? Beau Lee knows he’s treading dangerous waters, and finding evidence of the truth will be his biggest challenge yet, but with troubling powers at play, one innocent man’s life hangs in the balance.”

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Our next thriller takes us to the skies in Susan Walter’s Murder At 30,000 Feet, which absolutely gives me Agatha Christie’s Death In The Clouds vibes but with a 21st century twist!

Direct flight 868 to San Juan, Puerto Rico is filled with, among others, tipsy guests on their way to a destination wedding; a high school baseball team and their chaperones; a grieving mother, and lovestruck flight crew. Everyone’s ready, it seems, for their trip to paradise and the changes that it will hopefully bring.

The atmosphere literally darkens when a lightning strike from the storm raging outside suddenly plunges the plane into both turbulence and darkness. After a passenger is found brutally murdered in one of the plane’s lavatories, the air marshal on board will have to race to unravel the secrets and lies of his fellow travelers in order to catch a killer before anyone else gets hurt.

Told from multiple points of view, this cinematic novel of suspense has come to me highly rated from more than one industry source, who claim that it’s, perhaps ironically, a great travel read despite the catastrophe-adjacent subject matter.

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Turning our gaze back to books I really wish I’d been able to get to last year — and still have on my very long list of books to read — we have Pria Anand’s The Mind Electric, a non-fiction title on how deeply storytelling is coded into our bodies.

Dr Anand is a neurologist who’s gathered a series of case studies and woven them together with history, fable and chapters from her personal life to write a book reminiscent of Oliver Sacks’ medical bestsellers. She explores not only the ways in which neurological illnesses are inextricably linked with narrative, but also the ways in which people’s stories survive, and whether these same stories are heard or dismissed depending on who’s doing the telling and who’s doing the listening.

Whether treating a girl who believes she’s been struck blind for stealing a kiss or a mother who believes that each of her children has been replaced with a changeling, Dr Anand examines the gray areas of both history and medicine, showing how thin the line can be between what’s accepted as fact versus fiction. Through her travels and work around the world, she also demonstrates the universality of peculiarity, and how that only serves to underscore our shared humanity.

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Another sort of globe-trotting is the subject of Travis Kennedy’s feel-good, spy caper The Whyte Python World Tour.

It’s 1986 and things are pretty good for Rikki Thunder, an aspiring drummer whose life in Los Angeles is maybe not as glamorous as it might be (tho is certainly recognizable to anyone who’s ever actually been on the rock scene.) When he gets a chance to join LA’s hottest new hair band, Whyte Python, it’s like a dream come true. Soon, the band’s first single is blazing up the charts, and the new love of his life is part of the adoring crowds coming out to see them play. Everything is coming up Milhouse for our man Rikki.

A multi-continent tour seems like the next natural step in Whyte Python’s quest for world domination. To Rikki’s surprise, the CIA, of all people, is eager to help. A rock-and-roll-propelled youth revolution is fomenting behind the Iron Curtain, and Whyte Python might be just the ticket to securing the USA’s victory in the Cold War. So what if Rikki and his bandmates wind up in a little (or a lot) of danger while on their own mission to spread peace, love and some epic headbangers?

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Finally, we have the latest thriller from one of my favorite writers on the complex interior lives of women. In Megan Abbott’s El Dorado Drive, the acclaimed author turns her incisive gaze on the fraught connection many women have with money, to devastating effect.

The three Bishop sisters grew up privileged in the moneyed Detroit suburbs. But as the auto industry declined, so did their fortunes. Youngest sister Harper is barely making ends meet nowadays, so turns to beloved middle sister Pam for a place to stay. She’s surprised to find Pam living large, given how Pam’s deadbeat ex drained the family coffers.

Pam and their eldest sister Debra tell Harper that the secret is a club they’ve both joined, called The Wheel. It’s a female empowerment program (and if you also made a face when you read that, then you and I consume the same kinds of entertainment and news) that collects money from all its members to bequeath to one lucky participant, as in your standard money pool. The difference here is that you have to recruit new members in order to keep making money. Does Harper want in?

The answer is yes. But things quickly spiral out of control as the sisters are driven to take ever greater risks for the money that they need, even as a darkness lurking at the heart of the group threatens to destroy everything that the sisters have ever built and ever hoped for.

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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!