Tantalizing Tales — May 2026 — Part Four

Woof, living with autoimmune disease is tough. At least I’m starting to recognize when I’m having a bad day early on, so I don’t collapse halfway through my scheduled activities and take even longer to recover. It’s been particularly brutal to me in that it’s also affecting my reading and writing — I sleep A LOT more these days — but at least there are a bunch of awesome books to keep me interested and entertained when I am awake and energized.

Such as F T Lukens’ upcoming speculative YA novel, The Last Best Quest Ever. This charming romantasy revolves around seventeen year-old Ellinore, who is the best quester her kingdom has ever seen, better even than her brooding royal rival Aven. So when she announces her retirement at a royal feast, the entire kingdom is shooketh.

Her twin brother Zig, however, is so confident in her abilities (and willingness to get back in the game) that he bets his very life on her ability to retrieve the horn of the mythical Elder Beast, a creature no one knows for sure is even real. In order to save him, Ellinore has to return to the spotlight, embarking on one last quest with Zig, Aven and a ragtag crew of other questers looking for fortune and glory.

Trouble is, Ellinore’s a fraud. All her kills were staged and her quest rewards planted. She quit because she couldn’t take the pressure of lying any more… and now her idiot brother’s life is on the line. Will Ellinore be able to save him, and maybe save her own soul in the process?

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Another reluctant relationship (with the baggage of a troublesome sibling too) takes center stage in Liz Lawson’s It Happened One Murder. I love her Agathas YA novels with Kathleen Glasgow, and can’t wait to see what she does here with her debut adult mystery!

Harriet Baker thought she’d left her sleepy New Jersey hometown behind for good when she left for the big city. But losing her dream magazine job means moving back to Logan Island and living with her eccentric mother once more. At least she has an extravagant birthday party to look forward to… until it ends with the discovery of a dead body.

But when life gives you lemons, Harriet is ready to make lemonade, especially when her old job says that it’ll hire her back if she writes an investigative article revealing what really happened the night of her party. The only drawback is that doing this requires the cooperation of the person closest to Sara Albright, the prime suspect in the murder.

Harriet had a short-lived fling with Sara’s brother Nic several years ago, one they’re both very ready to forget. But Nic doesn’t believe that his sister is guilty and is willing to do anything to prove it, even if it means teaming up with the one person he’d rather not spend any more time with. If both he and Harriet want the truth about what happened that night, they’re going to have to learn how to work together to uncover the surprisingly dark secrets of their seemingly perfect hometown.

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Siblings themselves take the spotlight in Anna-Marie McLemore’s YA thriller We Could Be Anyone. Lola and Lisandro grew up hearing that they could become anything, but from their Latine parents, that was less encouragement than warning.

Now they’re teenagers who survive in Golden Age Hollywood by outperforming the stars of the silver screen while scamming the elite. Lola takes on the role of tragic spectre, while Lisandro is the spiritualist ready to exorcise her from the homes of the wealthy, for a fee of course. Their next target is The Coterie, the opulent estate of newspaper tycoon Bixby Fairfax and his famous mistress Blythe Bell. A score this big will allow the siblings to leave Hollywood and set themselves up respectably anywhere else.

But this job is different from the very outset. Lola and Lisandro will have to switch roles, even as more and more inexplicable things keep befalling them at The Coterie. As tensions rise between brother and sister, will they be able to figure out what’s happening and escape with their relationship intact, if not with their very lives?

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Another historical mystery takes us even further back in time, in Jonelle Patrick’s extensively researched The Samurai’s Octopus. From the promotional materials:

“It’s the year 1784 and the shogun rules with an iron fist . . . except within the walled pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara. Inside the Great Gate, samurai law does not apply, and it’s women who pull the strings. Magistrates bow to courtesans, prostitutes snub potentates, and those with the most power beg favor from those with the least. There is no greater spectacle in all the land.

“But beneath the surface runs a deadly current of greed, deception . . . and murder.

“Takahisa Takeda will never forgive the first shogun for rewarding his ancestor’s loyalty with more honor than land. He’s the head of a venerable samurai family who can barely make ends meet, until the night he witnesses a terrible crime and seizes the opportunity to turn tragedy into gold.

“Birdie is just a child when she’s chosen to serve Yoshiwara’s number one courtesan and given a new name at the House of Treasures. Like every girl growing up in the pleasure quarter, she longs to become one of the beauties strutting down the promenade under a crimson parasol, entertaining lords of the land in robes that cost more than a laborer makes in a year. But the higher she climbs, the more she realizes those she trusts with her life might also betray her in a heartbeat, and she’ll need all her wit and wiles just to survive.

“Caught between two powerful men whose futures both hinge on the night that made Takeda rich, Birdie’s only way out is to discover why the victim had to die, and hunt down a witness whose life depends on not being found. Only then can she decide whose crime to punish and whose to keep hidden. If she chooses right, she will win her freedom. If she chooses wrong, she’ll be forever trapped by the fate she’s trying so desperately to escape.”

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We stay in East Asia but come back to the present for Kelsea Yu’s chilling novella Demon Song, which is next on my personal reading list after the Hugo nominees.

Megan and her mom are stuck in Beijing after yet another of her mom’s toxic relationships brings them here from Portland. A friend of her mom’s offers the stranded duo a lifeline: in exchange for cleaning services, they can have room and board in the Huihuang Opera Theater while they hide from Mom’s vengeful ex.

Between her limited Mandarin and the constant reminder that she’s an outsider, Megan can’t help but feel incredibly lonely… until she meets Kristy, the glamorous young lead of the operatic adaptation of the Chinese classic tale The Monkey King And The White Bone Demon. Soon, she has friends and a battered copy of Journey To The West — the book from which the opera is taken — to learn from. Perhaps more importantly, Kristy’s talent reawakens Megan’s own long-buried ambitions, leading her to begin to explore the theater’s walls.

But the opera house has its secrets… and its hungers. As Megan discovers passageways that shouldn’t be there, reality and folklore begin to bleed into one another, with scenes from her book merging impossibly into her present. Will she be able to solve a mystery that’s haunted the opera house for decades, before it claims her entirely for itself?

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Finally we have Hervé Le Tellier’s The Name On The Wall, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. This remarkable work of autofiction tells the tale of M Le Tellier himself as he investigates a name carved into a hidden space of the wall of his new countryside home.

Through his research, M Le Tellier discovers the story of André Chaix, a World War II resistance fighter who was killed at the age of just 20 in 1944. With painstaking historical thoroughness, he considers the kind of life the young man had had, and the courage it took to join the Maquis in their fight against the occupying Nazis. He also evokes André’s romance with the magnificent Simone, avoiding simple tropes in order to breathe life into their once-obscured story.

With fascism on the rise worldwide, this is the kind of necessary meditation on belonging and bravery — and the humanity that breeds both — that the world needs to read if we’re to have any hope of avoiding the repetition of past tragedies.

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All of 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!