Tantalizing Tales — October 2026 — Part Four

Hello, dear readers! Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re turning from Harvest Moon to Hunter’s Moon, and settling in with some very awesome reads.

First up is Amber Chen’s recently published An Auction Of Souls, the first half of a brand new fantasy duology! Meng Wu, the House Of Dreams, is a legendary auction house run by Meng Lingxi and her grandmother. But when a mysterious traveler arrives, bearing an even more mysterious fragment of soul, Lingxi’s world turns upside down. Her grandmother abruptly disappears and Meng Wu itself is assailed by restless spirits.

Lingxi has no idea what to do, even before two Guardians of Hell unexpectedly appear. Fortunately, they’ve come to help. But Yan Jun and Yan Shan have yet another surprise in store for her: Meng Wu itself sits upon the gateway to hell, and her grandmother has been serving the god of the underworld all along. Now tho, the three of them will have to find and bring her grandmother home, while solving the mystery of that dangerous fragment of soul. Not everyone will want to help them, as they find themselves confronting humans, gods and demons alike on their quest. They just know that if they don’t succeed, all hell will literally break loose.

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Next up is the latest book in a series I’m planning to dive into for the very first time later this week, Courtney Smyth’s fourth and final installment of The Undetectables, The Unsolvable Case.

This last book of the the queer, witchy, modern fantasy, murder mystery series finds Mallory, Cornelia and Diana on their biggest case yet, even as The Undetectables are on the verge of shutting down. It’s three days until Samhain and their resident ghost Theodore is on the run after the events of the last novel in the series. He’s gone into hiding but is making some perhaps surprising alliances in exile.

Unfortunately, a copycat killer has emerged who seems hellbent on repeating a vicious historical cycle. Our doomed protagonists are called up for one last case that might finally reveal who actually killed Theodore… and could very well save all of Occulture in the process.

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Bethany Joy Lenz recently received critical and popular acclaim for her memoir Dinner For Vampires, about her struggle to break free from a cult she’d inadvertently joined while starring in the TV show One Tree Hill. The Betrayal Of Cora Wexford is her debut novel, a historical psychological suspense set around the grisly reign of Jack the Ripper.

Our titular heroine is thirty-eight and alone, with secrets that drove her to flee America for 1880s London. Now she supports herself by painting portraits of the dead. When a suffragist and a highly respected gallery owner commission Cora for an unusual assignment, it could mean the making of her career. They want Cora to paint a series of portraits, the subjects of which are all women whose recent deaths were either caused or enabled by an uncaring system.

Cora is taken aback, to put it mildly, when a killer in Whitechapel begins to murder women in the same gruesome ways as her subjects. But her concerns take a backseat to her personal life, as she falls ever deeper under the spell of Miles Vale, the charming man whom she only recently met and was captivated by on the eve of her latest birthday. Even as she works tirelessly to honor the women brutalized by this so-called Jack, she becomes increasingly disoriented and unraveled by Miles’ love and demands. Will she be able to find her way out from under his spell before she loses herself for good?

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Finally, we have my most anticipated book of this coming week, three-time Hugo Award finalist Yoon Ha Lee’s newest space opera, Code And Codex. The press materials seem deliberately opaque, but I’d read anything of Mr Yoon’s sight unseen (which also reminds me that I still haven’t finished The Machineries of Empire, waaaaah):

“In the stars-spanning Censorate, languages other than the Republic’s own lingua rubra, which has reality-altering properties, are forbidden. Nevertheless, there are discrepancies. The Censorate’s star forces are called the Athenaeum Navy, and each of its ships is referred to as a codex. Instead of port and starboard, its soldiers refer to verso and recto. The unholy “stigmata” gouged into the ships’ hulls might, to a foreign scholar, bear a resemblance to verboten texts in other languages.

“The Censorate is ruled by its Peacock, Aurelia, feared for the power of panopticon: she can look through anyone’s eyes. Moreover, Aurelia’s mastery of lingua rubra lets her force anyone who can understand her to follow her orders. Valentina, sold to Aurelia’s family as a child to be Aurelia’s oath-sister and companion, is its Swan, responsible for extracting useful information from foreign texts, then destroying them as well as entire languages through arcane arts. Valentina is assisted in her work by lower-ranking linguists and AI assistants who accept temporary contamination by foreign languages as a necessity of their work.

“But this isn’t enough for Aurelia. She wants to control and deploy the Censorate’s thousand-year traitor and prisoner, the Basilisk, a man with a gaze so lethal that he destroyed its fleet of old through camera feeds. Unfortunately for her, the Basilisk gave himself a form of aphasia that makes him immune to her commands.”

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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!