Tantalizing Tales — July 2026 — Part Three

Hello, dear readers! For this week’s column, we get to look both into the recent and slightly more distant pasts to come up with some terrific summer reads for you.

If you, too, are in the throes of Summerween (I mean, anything to distract from the real-life horrors on our doorsteps, especially if you’re living in an area affected by wildfire smoke as I am, even down here in Maryland) then you have to check out Kelly McWilliams’ new Young Adult thriller No One Leaves The Manor. It’s 1921 and four debutantes have been invited to Graystone Manor, the home of oil heiress Caroline Reginald Kane. She’s the last of her line and has given the girls a tempting offer: to compete for the prize of becoming her sole heir.

The four girls are vastly different. Vaughn was born for this life, and won’t let anyone or anything stop her, much less call her crazy when she’s just doing whatever needs to be done in order to fulfil her destiny. Birdie thinks she has a destiny of a different kind, and while she doesn’t even know exactly why she’s been invited, she does believe in divine providence. Dorothea is an accomplished thief and liar who’s come in search of any signs of the mother who disappeared at Graystone years earlier. And finally there’s pretty, underestimated Elspeth who can see things that others can’t, including hints of the malevolent force that doesn’t want them to leave the manor alive.

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For more supernatural adventures, check out the first two books in Victoria Laurie’s Magical Trinket Mystery Series! A Trinket For The Taking introduces us to Dovey Van Dalen, who was once the belle of 1840s Copenhagen. After she became immortal, she was given the task of recovering magical items from unworthy mortals who’d somehow come into their possession.

Nearly two centuries on, she’s living in Washington DC, looking forward to a day of pampering for her 200th birthday. But members of the rich and powerful Ariti family have begun dying in the exact ways that they fear the most. Her boss suspects that a stolen artifact has something to do with it. Given that she’s the immortal agent best suited to blending in with regular human beings, Dovey’s going to have to postpone her birthday celebrations and instead head over to the art gallery where the Ariti patriarch has recently died.

Her investigations soon have her crossing paths with handsome FBI agent Grant “Gib” Barlow. Their chemistry — professional or otherwise — is undeniable, but Dovey hasn’t survived for as long as she has without learning the importance of hiding the truth from mere mortals. The more they work together tho, the closer they get to something dangerous enough to strip even the immortal of their very lives.

In the sequel, A Murder In The Making, Dovey can’t stop thinking about the handsome FBI agent she formed such a connection with on her last case. Obviously, an actual relationship is out of the question. Even if she weren’t immortal, she’s already romantically involved with the man who’s essentially her boss: Elric Ostergaard, the powerful mystic who initiated her into the world of immortality to begin with.

So when Dovey’s incurable romantic best friend engineers a lunch date between her and Gib, Dovey isn’t sure how to react. Things get even more awkward when their reunion is interrupted by news of another FBI agent’s brutal and incomprehensible murder — incomprehensible, that is, to anyone who isn’t a mystic like Dovey. She immediately recognizes the cause of death as being the Crushing Curse, a spell that could only be cast by a mystic as powerful as, say, Elric.

As the body count rises, Dovey will have to race to track down her elusive lover and get some answers. What she uncovers about both him and Gib will rock her to her core, as she tries to stop a rogue mystic while still protecting her own tender heart.

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Protecting your heart is also one of the themes of Gabriella Zalapi’s Ilaria, Or The Conquest Of Disobedience, translated from the original Italian by Adriana Hunter.

In May of 1980, during the period described by Italians as the Years Of Lead, eight year-old Ilaria gets into her father’s car after a day at school. He’s not supposed to be taking her on a cross-country road trip, but as the days pass and they stop at a series of highway hotels spanning northern Italy, Ilaria thinks of the mother from whom she’s been parted and vows not to cry any more.

As the months pass, Ilaria has to learn how to lie and to drive and to placate her increasingly anxious, alcohol- and nicotine-addicted father. Sometimes, she can pretend that this is a regular childhood and not a kidnapping, as she and her father play games, sing songs and meet kind people in Trieste, Bologna, Rome and beyond. But experiences like this cannot last forever. Ilaria will have to figure out how to deal with her unstable father and somehow forge an identity and life of her own.

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Another fraught dynamic lies at the heart of Matthew Pearl’s The Award, an irreverent thriller that skewers the cutthroat contemporary literary scene.

From the publicity materials:

“David Trent is an aspiring novelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, trying to navigate his ambitions in a place that has writers around every corner.

“He lives in an apartment above a Very Famous Author named Silas Hale who, beneath his celebrated image, is a bombastic, vindictive monster who refuses to allow his new neighbor even to make eye contact with him.

“Until young David wins a prestigious award for his new book.

“Suddenly Silas is interested—if intensely spiteful.

“But soon, the administrator of the award comes to David with alarming news, forcing the writer into a desperate set of choices.

“Fate intervenes—with shocking consequences…”

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And finally, we come full circle with another book about four people trapped in a luxury estate, Kit Frick’s Friends And Liars.

Five years ago, heiress Clare Monroe unexpectedly and tragically died while celebrating New Year’s Eve at her family’s Italian palazzo. It was a horrible accident, but her college friends Luca, Harper, Sirina and David chose to hide the truth about what happened instead of coming clean. It was their lies and betrayals that had led to Clare’s untimely death, after all. The weight of all this subsequently and perhaps inevitably contributed to the end of their once-strong bond.

But now they’ve been invited back to the palazzo by the Monroe family, for a memorial ceremony that they can scarcely decline. When it becomes clear that someone is targeting them for harassment and worse — and that this someone seems to know exactly what happened that fateful night — the four once-friends will have to figure out what they can risk and what else they can sacrifice in order to make it away from idyllic Lake Como alive.

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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!