Tantalizing Tales — March 2026 — Part Four

Lol, I’m so tired of the rollercoaster my health has been on lately. Let’s hope that the end of March and the beginning of April bring better things, including these three upcoming novels I’m super excited to talk about! Bonus: I also discuss three books from 2025 that I’m still very much trying to squeeze into my unfortunately overstuffed schedule.

First up is Emily Carpenter’s A Spell For Saints And Sinners. Ingrid White inherited a shabby Savannah townhouse when her grandmother, local celebrity psychic Miss Edie, passed away. She’s also inherited, and fully believes in, the family business of witchcraft that Miss Edie used to run from the premises.

Unfortunately, business hasn’t been great lately, and mounting bills have Ingrid worried for the future. Heiress Sailor Loeffler’s bachelorette party changes everything. Sailor is so enamored of Ingrid’s eerily accurate reading that she soon allows Ingrid into her inner circle as a trusted confidante. In order to ensure her continuing access to Sailor’s charmed life — with all the privileges that it brings — Ingrid starts using more and powerful spells, venturing into the dark practices that Miss Edie used to warn her against.

But is it really witchcraft that keeps clearing Ingrid and Sailor’s paths, or something far more mundane and malevolent? Soon, Ingrid will have to confront how just far both she and the people around her are willing to go in order to get what they want.

As a single-issue Etsy Witch myself, I’m totally intrigued by this premise, and am super looking forward to discovering the resolution. Like Miss Edie, I’m a big proponent of putting out good energy only, and am already nervous for and invested in the characters in this Southern Gothic mystery.

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Another variation on a similar theme lies at the heart of our next selection, Kirsten King’s A Good Person. I’m low-key obsessed with this cover btw, and find the expression depicted extremely relatable.

Our antiheroine Lillian is in a classic situationship. Lillian believes, however, that if she can just be the nicest, most accommodating lover ever (*cough*doormat*cough*,) then she can lock Henry down into a real relationship. She’s thus totally blindsided when he breaks up with her. Drunk and enraged, she performs a hex on him, expecting him to come crawling back to her, begging for forgiveness, as a result.

Unfortunately, he dies. Worse, the police consider her not only a suspect but The Suspect. Adding insult to injury is the discovery that Henry had an actual girlfriend the entire time!

Lillian is determined to not only clear her name but, perhaps just as importantly to her, stake her claim to being Henry’s rightfully mourning partner. It doesn’t matter what increasingly unhinged lengths she has to go to in order to prove all this. She’s a good person!

Having a strong streak of delulu myself, I love complicated heroines like this one, and can’t wait to see how her story goes.

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Can’t get enough of people in awful relationships making terrible, murderous choices? Then you have to check out Corinne Sullivan’s Yours Always, where a software engineer makes the mistake of getting back with her cheating ex.

It’s a little ironic that Talia Danvers works for a dating app, given that her own love life is such a mess. When Townsend Fuller comes back on the scene, it’s like she has a second chance at the perfect happily ever after. Never mind that he dumped her for Amanda Reade, who has only recently disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The police suspect foul play, and that Townsend had a significant role in the disappearance. Talia, tho, wants to believe that he’s as changed a man as he swears he now is.

Unsurprisingly, Talia’s friends and family think that she’s making poor choices. Things definitely go sideways when Talia starts receiving threatening texts from, of all people, Amanda. Is Amanda still alive? Then why is she in hiding? Or is someone playing a vicious game?

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Let’s set aside toxic relationships for a minute and check out the follow-up to one of my favorite debuts of 2023, Lina Chern’s Tricks Of Fortune.

Katie True has mostly gotten her life together, jolted as she was by the events described in Playing The Fool. Now she has her own Tarot-reading room, even if it’s just space in her sister’s real estate office that she gets to use in exchange for some light clerical work.

Her business is a moderate success even tho, or perhaps because of the fact that, Katie isn’t actually psychic: she just learned how to cold read people under the tutelage of her Aunt Rosie, and so dispenses sensible advice based on their conversations. But answering mundane questions for her clients is a lot less exciting than solving a murder, as she did so well just a year ago when she investigated the disappearance of her best friend.

Now a local police officer has died, one who played a key role in her own childhood. Her friend/romantic interest Detective Jamie Roth is on the case, and Katie is eager to help. After all, the deceased Lieutenant Matthew Peterson was basically a family friend. How much of her own past will she have to dig into, tho, in order to figure out who had it in for the veteran cop?

I loved how Ms Chern wove the Tarot into the first novel of this series, as well as how truly lovely, well-meaning and determined both Katie and Jamie are. I can’t wait to read more of their adventures both here and in forthcoming books!

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Another book I super want to find time to dive into is Antony Johnston’s Can You Solve The Murder?, an interactive crime novel where readers are invited to step into the role of lead detective, taking notes and making choices to solve the mystery inside.

From the publicity materials:

“One murder. Six suspects. One truth for YOU to uncover.

“YOU are the lead detective and it’s your job to investigate the most mysterious crime of your career.

“There’s been a murder at Elysium, a wellness retreat set in an English country manor. You arrive to find the body of a local businessman on the lawn – with a rose placed in his mouth. It appears he was stabbed with a gardening fork and fell to his death from the balcony above. You quickly realize that balcony can only be accessed through a locked door, the key is missing, and everyone in Elysium is now a suspect… Who did it and why? It’s up to you to figure it out.

“YOU gather the evidence and examine the clues.

“YOU choose who to interview next, and who to accuse as your prime suspect.

“But remember that every decision YOU make has consequences – and some of them will prove fatal…

“Do you have what it takes? Can YOU solve the murder? Put your sleuthing skills to the test!”

As a seasoned crime fiction reviewer and all-around smart person, this is exactly the kind of challenge I love! Honestly, I might switch this over from the “book” category in my mind to the “puzzle game” category, so I can find the time to finally tackle it.

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And last but not least of the books of 2025 that I’m still super eager to find time for is singNsong’s Omniscient Readers’ Viewpoint Vol 1, the first professionally bound and published installment of their long-running webnovel, translated here from the original Korean by Hye Young Im and J Torres.

Dokja Kim is an ordinary office worker on the commuter train home when the unthinkable happens. The apocalypse has finally arrived, and a goblin appears to tell the commuters that the only way out is by killing another living being in the time allotted. While everyone around him erupts in panic, Dokja is surprisingly calm… because he’s seen this entire scenario play out already in his own favorite, if obscure — he’s literally been the only reader for months, if not longer — webnovel, Three Ways To Survive The Apocalypse.

Collecting the first 25 chapters of the wildly successful digital story, this is a bold read that is sure to appeal to fans of speculative fiction and LitRPGs!

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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!