Tantalizing Tales — August 2026 — Part Three

This was a weird day to start the English Premier League season, but Arsenal are top of the league, y’all! My internal calendar is all messed up now, lol. But we have some great books for you this week, including an upcoming thriller (also) set in London and written by one of my favorite podcasters — which is saying a lot because I have a really hard time concentrating on podcasts!

Jonathan Sims of The Magnus Archives is back to terrify readers with his latest novel, The Burn Line. London is suffering through the hottest summer on record when five travelers on the Tube are trapped deep underground one morning. These five people unwittingly become witnesses to something so profoundly disturbing that when they manage to return to their ordinary lives, they can’t remember exactly what it was they saw. All they know is that it was monstrous… and hungry.

But ordinary life isn’t as comfortably normal as they’d been used to. Each of them keeps losing time, and friends abruptly go missing. Something, it seems, is stalking them from the shadows. The five will have to reunite in order to figure out what’s happening to them and its connection to what they saw that day on the train, before something horrific can emerge from below to swallow the whole world.

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Another dark and otherworldly mystery — tho set in New Orleans instead of London — lies at the heart of Jasmine Smith’s recently published romantic urban fantasy novel Death Card.

It’s an otherwise ordinary Monday morning when eighteen year-old witch Mikaela Broussard receives the shock of her life while performing a reading for a new client. Mikaela has a vision of the beautiful stranger sitting across from her in her family’s occult shop stabbing her through the heart, for reasons entirely unknown to her.

Determined to keep her enemy close while she tries to figure out why the other woman would want her dead, Mikaela decides to spend as much time as possible with the alluring Joelle. But trouble of a greater sort is brewing in the Big Easy. Dark magic is at work in the city, as witches inexplicably find their powers stolen. As the next Witch Queen of her coven, Mikaela has to be involved with the investigations, even as she worries over her own imminent death and her growing, if uneasy attraction to the woman who seems to be at the heart of it.

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Flipping the script, our next selection is told from the point of a con artist determined to let nothing, not even murder, stand in her way.

Christina Li’s Young Adult thriller The Hardest Ones To Fool revolves around high schooler Amelia Wu, who’s so good at relationships that she’s actually in three of them. After all, why should she have to choose between the tennis star, the debate captain or the indie filmmaker? Sure, it’s unethical that none of them know about each other, but would they be so willing to lavish her with expensive gifts and luxuries if they did know? All she has to do is time everything perfectly and never lose track of which version of her — Amy, Ellie or Mia — is dating whom.

But when Amelia’s best friend Ingrid turns up dead, her carefully constructed life begins to unravel. The investigation into Ingrid’s murder is exposing secrets Amelia would definitely prefer to keep hidden. The sooner she can get to the bottom of things, the sooner she can get back to scamming her three boyfriends. To do so, however, she’ll have to partner up with her academic nemesis Jackie, the school paper’s editor-in-chief and lover of all things true crime. Will they be able to set aside their differences and uncover what really happened to Ingrid?

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Our next selection come with some amazing testimonials, including Caroline Kepnes’ rave review over how immersive it felt! Rio Youers’ What They Did revolves around two women who were best friends until a split second decision tore their lives apart.

When they were younger, Carly Rivers and Dana Lee were inseparable. Dana instigated their wild, reckless fun while Carly always made sure they came out of their experiences unscathed. But when a fateful choice ends in tragedy, so too does their friendship. The girls never speak of what happened and Carly moves away, eventually becoming a police officer in Florida and building a beautiful life for herself with her husband and son. Dana, meanwhile, drifts from relationship to relationship before finally settling in Michigan to work for a meth dealer.

After Carly’s husband, a fellow cop, is killed in the line of duty, their son Anthony loses his way. Looking for a fresh start, he heads north and unexpectedly makes a connection with Dana. Their relationship places him squarely in the sights of some dangerous people tho, drawing Carly and Dana irresistibly back together. Will the two women finally be able to confront their shared trauma, and keep history from repeating?

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Turning our gaze back to books publishing soon, we have Tear The City Down, the hotly anticipated debut novel of former NFL player Andre Hardy.

From the publicity materials:

“Coltrane Davis is at once a knight and a hustler. He has risen to wealth and success, graduating from San Diego’s back alleys to the halls of power through his partnership with Saul Sollman, a crooked kingmaker among the city’s elite. Running multimillion dollar scams with Saul, he has been Saul’s fixer, but now he wants out of the hustle so that he can focus on his teenage daughter’s burgeoning tennis career and finally be the dad he has always wanted to be.

“But when the Los Angeles Chargers’ star running back vanishes one evening before a big game, Coltrane is drawn into an investigation of what happened by Saul and his protégé, the player’s agent; the stakes escalate with a gut-punch when the trail leads into San Diego’s underworld of drugs and prostitution and reveals clues to the disappearance of his daughter’s best friend, whose loss has haunted him.

“Torn by the unreconcilable demands of the life he can’t seem to quit and the fierce desire he has to protect his own, Coltrane brings himself and his loved ones to the brink of destruction in his quest to free himself once and for all of Saul’s control–and focus on what really matters: family.”

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Finally, we have a globetrotting political/espionage thriller in debut author K B Brodsky’s Beyond Honor, the first in a new series.

Paramilitary operative Kevin Rhoads has been recruited to perform a solo extraction mission in deepest Siberia, but uncovers a devastating betrayal. CIA analyst Whitney Skyler isn’t sure what to do when her investigations into a Russian-backed bank lead her directly to the Oval Office. Meanwhile, Director Cynthia King is leveraging a decades-old debt of honor to save a captured American agent.

Whitney soon finds herself trapped in a terrible position between her mentor and her love: protect national security by exposing Cynthia’s dangerous game, or reveal to Kevin a truth that will turn him into a force of deadly vengeance. From war-torn Damascus to the frozen tundras of Siberia, and from the polished corridors of Langley to the rugged Kenai Peninsula, those who serve in the shadows must weigh duty against betrayal, making hard if not impossible choices in order to safeguard what matters most.

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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!