Tantalizing Tales — February 2026 — Part Four

February is drawing to a close, the weather is getting nicer, and hopefully I will soon stop feeling ill so much of the time! In other cheery news, I have a slew of great books for you this week, beginning with Amara Lakhous’ critically acclaimed The Fertility Of Evil, translated from the original Arabic by Alexander E Elinson.

July 5th is Algerian Independence Day, a national holiday for a country still coming to terms with the insidious legacy of colonialism. Colonel Soltani of the anti-terrorist unit, however, will have to give up his day off in 2018 after his superior officer manages to track him down to his mistress’ home in the city of Oran.

A former National Liberation Front fighter and Algerian power broker has been found dead under remarkably gory circumstances. Soltani is put in charge of the case, with the clear message to close it quickly and cleanly. Despite this directive, the colonel and his team delve deep into the victim’s past, going all the way back to the 1950s in their pursuit of leads. Their investigations eventually bring them to a revolutionary cell founded long ago, whose three remaining members are all still very much viable suspects in this recent killing. Can Soltani sort through six decades of secrets and lies to uncover the truth and bring a murderer to justice?

Inspired by the author’s return to Oran after years spent living in Italy as a political refugee, this gripping novel balances psychological thriller with historical fiction. It presents a compelling portrait of post-colonial Algeria, its shadowy history and the long tail of corruption as religion and politics intertwine.

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Interestingly, our next mystery shares many of these themes, tho with a much lighter approach. Lyla Lane’s The Best Little Motel In Texas may not be historical fiction but does still soundly evoke a sense of place, as our heroine returns to small-town Texas upon receiving an unexpected inheritance.

It’s been a long time since Cordelia West had to comb the dive bars of Sarsaparilla Falls in search of the fun-loving woman who had to be reminded to be her mother. Nowadays, she lives a quiet, upright life in Dallas, with her tumultuous small town days firmly behind her.

Or so she believes, until she gets a strange phone call. A great-aunt whom she’s never heard of has left her a motel, with one stipulation: it cannot be sold until all of its residents leave or pass away. To her dismay, Cordelia finds that the Chickadee Motel is indeed inhabited, and by a trio of sixty-something women named Daisy, Arline and Belinda Sue, who are collectively known as the Chicks. Even more alarmingly for Cordelia, they’ve been operating the Chickadee as a brothel for decades, with the tacit approval of the rest of the town’s women.

Cordelia has no interest in running a motel, much less a brothel, but she’s not about to turn the Chicks out of their only home either. Things get even more complicated when the town pastor is found dead of poison in Daisy’s bed. Cordelia is no stranger to cleaning up the messes of her elders, but rarely have the stakes been this high. As she races to find the killer before any of her newest charges are incarcerated for a crime they didn’t commit, she’ll also have to risk losing her own heart to, of all people, the pastor’s obnoxiously attractive son, who just so happens to be her sworn nemesis from childhood.

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If you’d rather solve a murder mystery with an eye towards the future and its attendant technologies, then you must check out Justin C Key’s debut novel The Hospital At The End Of The World.

In a near future where society is pretty much run by AI, Pok is a young medical student whose physician father mysteriously dies under conditions tied to The Shepherd Organization, a corporation that oversees nearly every medical school in the USA. Pok’s quest for answers leads him to Hippocrates, the renegade school in New Orleans that insists on teaching human-led medicine, in defiance of the shepherds. Enrolling there is a step down for an ambitious wannabe doctor, but Pok is ready to fling himself at any hurdle in order to find justice for his father.

At Hippocrates, however, he soon uncovers a larger mystery. Newcomers to New Orleans who grew up under shepherd care are falling ill and subsequently dying from a strange plague. Pok might not have been able to save his father, but will he be able to save countless other lives in his quest for the truth?

Mr Key is a practicing psychiatrist who first began creating this story while studying to be a physician himself. The novel grew from his own experiences witnessing the negative impact on patients of bias and structural inequality. It also raises pertinent questions for the future, as the medical establishment finds itself under increasing pressure to accept more AI in place of human interaction and diagnostics.

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Science(-fiction) and the bond between parent and child also take center stage in our next selection, Kirsten Kaschock’s An Impossibility Of Crows.

From the press materials:

“Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone’s throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations bound by twisted folk wisdom and a kinship with the crows that loom over their land.

“Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential, manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past.

“A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, An Impossibility Of Crows is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm, self-preservation, memory, and myth, in a visceral narrative as uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.”

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Interested in another variation on the haunting bond between parent and child? Kim Fu’s The Valley Of Vengeful Ghosts delivers in buckets, in addition to being one of the most hotly anticipated titles of 2026, according to Time, Book Riot and the Chicago Review Of Books.

For years, Eleanor Fan’s mother took care of every detail of her life so that Eleanor could concentrate on her career as a therapist. Lele took care of, if not outright controlled, Eleanor’s meals, housekeeping and finances. When she died, Eleanor was left adrift.

In order to fulfil her mother’s last request that she use her inheritance to buy a home, Eleanor impulsively makes a risky bid on a model home in a picturesque valley development. Closing on the house feels like the beginning of a new era for her, until the rains begin to fall in an endless, torrential downpour. Water seeps into the cracks of her home, necessitating a parade of untrustworthy workmen and bureaucrats. Work becomes harder, as her clients’ stories seem to take on a life of their own. And then there are the actual ghosts that she’s beginning to see.

Desperate to cling to whatever shreds of reality remain in her unraveling world, Eleanor must confront her own dark secrets and the choices that have brought her here, even as the merciless nature of her circumstances threaten to overwhelm her completely.

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For something a little lighter, check out one of my personal most anticipated novels of next week, Grace K Shim’s The Oks Are Not Ok. If you too watched Schitt’s Creek and thought Alexis never got enough credit, then this is definitely the book for you.

The Ok (pronounced Oak) family seems to have it all. Dad is the retail mogul behind the wildly popular fast-fashion label It’s Ok! (pronounced okay) while Mom is their stylish matriarch. Oldest child Gavin is the apple of his parents’ eyes, to the bewilderment of his only sibling, seventeen year-old Elena. She uses her image as a Los Angeles party girl to feed into her life as a financially savvy influencer, tho gets little credit for it from her family.

When It’s Ok is suddenly anything but, the Oks are forced to retreat to the small farming town of Blaire while an investigation is held into their now bankrupt company. Stuck in close proximity in the middle of nowhere, the parents begin to realize how little they really know of their kids, and how distant they all regrettably are from one another. But getting back in touch with their Korean farming heritage provides a lifeline for the family. Elena, especially, begins to use her skills to help her new community, and learns that maybe there are more kinds of success than what she’s always been raised to believe.

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Finally, I want to draw your attention to an upcoming graphic novel that’s currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter through March 8 (ending time may vary based on timezone, so jump in while you can!) Dick Turpin And The Restless Dead is the latest installment of Steve Tanner’s 18th century horror series featuring the titular legendary highwayman.

With art by John Erasmus (check out the cool example at left!), letters by John Robbins and editing by Paul H Birch, this third volume of Dick Turpin’s gothic exploits finds our antihero up against a village of ravenous zombies. Luckily or otherwise, he’s got fellow highwayman Tom King the Gentleman Thief at his side. Fresh off of the success of a joint stick-up, the two robbers did not expect to come across a village so benighted while fleeing the scene of their latest heist. It will take every ounce of their courage, physical prowess and wit to make it out of this accursed place alive.

The rewards for this campaign include digital and physical copies of this graphic novel, as well as the opportunity to grab both the earlier books in the series as well as the other titles in Mr Tanner’s Flintlock Universe. Check it out to help support indie comics creators and publishers!

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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!