Tantalizing Tales — July 2026 — Part Five

Hello, dear reader! It is the last day and last Tantalizing Titles column of July, and while the weather has gotten better around these parts, it still feels too hot to do anything but stay indoors and read a good book, like one of these upcoming titles!

First up is a guaranteed blockbuster sure to serve you chills alongside its thrills, Riley Sager’s The Unknown. I loved his Middle Of The Night so much that I forgave him for the desperately mid The House Across The Lake. Hopefully, this latest novel will be far more of the former than the latter.

The premise is extremely promising. Struggling actress Marin Keane can’t believe her luck when she lands a role in what’s sure to be a major motion picture. The plot of the film revolves around the mysterious disappearance of five women a century earlier from New Avalon, an island in the middle of Vermont’s Lake Faraday. The island was a commune for spirit mediums right up till 1926, when the women living there simply vanished, leaving behind five dresses hanging eerily from an oak tree in the island’s center.

Rumors have abounded ever since. Some of the locals think that the women simply up and left, while other people claim that they were murdered. Even darker rumors of a seance gone terribly wrong both haunt the popular imagination and serve as the basis for this upcoming film project. Marin is intrigued, especially when she, the rest of the cast and the director are sent there for a weeklong research trip before filming even begins.

Things get spooky fast. When the filmmakers become stranded there and people start vanishing, Marin will have to figure out a way to escape with her life. The way out could lie in the diary of Daisy Rue, one of the mediums who disappeared. If Marin solves the mystery of what happened back then, will she be able to stop history from repeating?

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Another woman whose job thrusts her into the middle of (admittedly, much more contemporary) crime scenes is the protagonist of our next selection, Brianna Labuskes’ Clean Slate.

Olive Hunt is good at her job as a crime scene cleaner, and super happy to be doing it even after a decade of the grueling work. To her, being able to erase suffering is a way of restoring peace to the world, and helps her lay her own demons to rest. Nothing she sees in her line of work really phases her any more… until she discovers the same unusual item at the scene of two seemingly unrelated suicides, one at a seedy motel, the other in a far more upscale establishment.

Twice could be a coincidence but when she finds the item again at the scene of a third purported suicide, she knows that these deaths are anything but. A serial killer is at work, but the cops won’t listen to “just” the cleaning lady.

The killer himself, however, is appreciative of her discernment. He leaves her flowers, then a note, beckoning her to follow the trail of breadcrumbs that he’s leaving for her. Olive is terrified, but what choice does she have when no one else will help her stop the killer from harming more people?

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A perilous journey also lies at the heart of Paul Yoon’s Etna, a modern day odyssey that reflects on the power of belief in a way home.

Our title character is a military dog, working in a fictional present day country that’s been riven by a devastating war. Now that the conflict is finally over, Etna decides that it’s time to leave the men he’s been fighting alongside for years. He wants to return home, or at least to the place he distantly remembers being taken from so many years ago.

Even in peacetime, however, survival is a struggle. As Etna journeys through a ruined landscape, he’ll meet other animals and people trying to figure out how to begin anew, how to learn to trust again after profound loss, and how to create a place to belong from the ashes of the past. It won’t be an easy or peaceful journey for our hero, as his resilience and faith are both tested by his sometimes violent encounters. Will Etna finally be able to find his way home?

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Endings rather than beginnings are at the heart of Araki Akane’s apocalyptic murder mystery Murder At The End of The World, translated from the original Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood.

A meteor is hurtling towards Earth, and humanity has only three months left before an impact that will surely obliterate all life as we know it. Unsurprisingly, the world has descended into madness. Twenty-three year-old Haru, however, is determined to focus on finally getting her driver’s license. It’s not like she has a lot else to do before the end of the world, after all.

When she and her driving instructor Isagawa open the trunk of her car one day to discover the dead body of a woman who’s been stabbed to death inside, they’re both shocked. Isagawa, however, is an ex-cop who still has a passion for justice, and Haru is more than willing to help him figure out whodunnit and why. As they seek answers on a road trip through a crumbling world, they’ll find more bodies dispatched in a similar manner. Racing to find and stop a serial killer, they’ll have to ask themselves what kind of person would become a serial killer with only three months left to live, and what, ultimately, is the meaning of justice in the face of human extinction?

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Looking back to books I wish I’d been able to get to in a timely manner when they were first published in 2025 (and that I’m still hoping to find time for in the future!) we have award-winning South African author Nadia Davids’ Gothic novel of psychological suspense, Cape Fever.

In a small city of a 1920s colonial empire, Soraya Matas applies for the position of personal maid to the eccentric Mrs Hattingh, feigning illiteracy when handing in her letter of recommendation. Mrs. Hattingh comes from money, and her house is beautiful but decaying. More importantly, it isn’t far from where Soraya lives with her parents in the city’s Muslim Quarter.

As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is literally haunted. But no spirit plagues her more than her new boss, who demands more and more of her time even as Mrs Hattingh herself eagerly awaits the visit of her son from London. In return for Soraya agreeing to be live-in help, Mrs Hattingh offers to help her stay in contact with her fiance Nour by writing him letters on her behalf every week. All Soraya needs to do is dictate these letters, letters that her employer won’t let her see before sending them away. It soon becomes clear that Mrs Hattingh is at least as much of a liar as Soraya is, as the two women, trapped in a house of ghosts, become locked in a struggle for their very sanity.

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Finally, we have Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Emotions, translated from the original French by Mark Polizzotti.

From the publicity materials:

“A European civil servant specializing in strategic foresight, Jean Detrez works on the future with scientific rigor. However, the unexpected seems to invade his life, both professional and personal. The Brexit referendum, the election of Trump, the separation from his partner, the death of his father, but also a night inexplicably spent with a stranger. Questioning what to do with time, the one passing and the one to come, leads him from professional life where anticipation is a scientific discipline, to private life where the past troubles the future.

“Do we want to know what the next few days or weeks have in store for us? Do we want to know if we are going to experience a new romantic or sexual adventure in the hours to come? Or how close death really is? This novel is an experiment in the ways in which fiction disrupts our representation of reality. Jean Deprez foresees events that do not occur, does not imagine those that will crush him, does not always perceive what he is experiencing, and is never certain that his reconstruction of the past is faithful to what happened.”

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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!