Archives de catégorie : Crossover

THE MIDNIGHT CLUB de Margot Harrison

Four friends solve the decades-old murder of their best friend with the help of a drug that can not only bring them back to the past, but change it.

THE MIDNIGHT CLUB
by Margot Harrison
Graydon House, September 2024
(via Context Literary Agency)

Sonia Toller will never forget the night in college when her brilliant, troubled friend Jennet drowned. And she will never forgive herself for what she was doing that night: kissing Jennet’s boyfriend.

So when she receives an invitation to an exclusive reunion in her Vermont college town, twenty-five years after Jennet’s death, she seizes on it as a chance to get her derailed life back on track. The circle of college friends reunites to find out what really happened to Jennet that May night in 1989.

They have one extraordinary advantage: their host has found a method to not only help them remember, but re-experience, what they forgot. It’s called sog, smells like pine, and local kids have been using it for decades to see the past in glorious detail.

But every one of the reunited friends has something to hide, Sonia most of all. Unsettling, unearthed memories support their host’s theory—that Jennet was murdered.

Maybe even by one of their own.

Margot Harrison has an impressive TikTok following of thousands of readers, mostly people there for Gen X nostalgia (retro book reviews, childhood memories). She is the author of the YA novels Only She Came Back (Hachette 2023), We Made It All Up (Hachette 2022), The Glare (Hachette 2020), and The Killer In Me (Hachette 2016). This is her first adult novel.

BEHIND THE CRIMSON CURTAIN d’E.B. Golden

Firin and Bregan never should have met, let alone started a relationship that would haunt them their whole lives.

BEHIND THE CRIMSON CURTAIN
by E.B. Golden
47 North/(Amazon, September 2024
(via Laura Dail Literary Agency)

Firin is a face-changing con artist trained by her domineering father. Bregan is an actor turned heroic leader in the Reform movement that’s overthrowing the coal-choked island of Luisonn.

As the flames of revolt settle, Firin joins Bregan on the stage. She’s determined to create a life with the honorable man she never forgot. But love and truth are hard to hide—especially when one of Firin’s victims, now President, chooses Bregan as his right-hand man. In a web of war and false identities, Firin must choose a side. Will the price of freedom be her heart?

« A steamy, epic romance with two backdrops — a revolution and the theater — that somehow work together perfectly.” – Ali Hazelwood, author of The Love Hypothesis and other TikTok sensations/New York Times bestsellers

“A lyrically haunting love story masterfully woven into a world that is a poignant mirror to our own. Genre fans will be enraptured by the morally gray cast, shocking plot twists, and imaginative foray into the world of theater. Fans of Erin Morgenstern, Shannon Chakraborty, and R.F. Kuang will be undone. Perfect for readers who love their fantasy razor sharp. » – J. Elle, New York Times bestselling author of House of Marionne and Wings of Ebony

Though born and raised on the coast of Maine, E.B. Golden spends most of her free time exploring the mountains of southwest Colorado with her husband and daughter. Since she could hold a pen, she’s used speculative fiction to make sense of a nonsensical world, and when she’s not writing, she’s usually traveling or coaching other writers, because the world always needs more stories.

THESE SHATTERED SPIRES de Cassidy Ellis Salter

A crossover upper-YA gothic fantasy, with the snark and worldbuilding of Gideon the Ninth mixed with the romances and backstabbing of The Atlas Six.

THESE SHATTERED SPIRES
by Cassidy Ellis Salter
On submission
(via Zeno Agency)

The world of Fourspires, is lucious in its grotesqueness. It is a world constantly on the edge of self-destruction and, whether you’re slinking through the rerouting passages of the library or fighting off cutlery-welding starvings in the poisonous forests of the Ulcer, it propulsively pulls you through unforgettable tableaus.

The crumbling castle of Fourspires is the centre of the sole city that exists under the desecrae, a bloody, domed sky that encloses this small world. This is a world where mirrors are banned lest they allow horrors through, where dead nuns stalk the corridors looking to snap the necks of rule breakers, and where magic is real but comes with a price. Because you can reanimate the dead, control someone through their blood or simply make the flowers grow, but it comes with pain. Pain so unbearable you would do anything to avoid it. Which is why Fourspires developed a system of human familiars. Now Arcanists can go about their days quite happily, knowing that their young familiars will be forced to take the pain for all their magic.

Taro and Nixie just graduated from The Academy of familiars. And they’ve been assigned to the head arcanists of the Bone and Botanist disciplines. As high familiars they see each other all the time, but they can never talk, never touch. Which is a shame for Taro because she thinks they’re in love and Nixie is her girlfriend. It’s also a shame for Nixie, because she hates Taro with a passion and wants to throttle her. Despite their differences, on the eve our story begins, Taro and Nixie are planning to escape. Anything’s better than the life of a familiar and, if they can just sneak out of the castle, maybe they can kiss each other or kill each other – whichever’s more practical.

But that’s the night the Tick Tock king finally dies and everything is thrown into chaos. In 48-hours, Taro and Nixie will have to accompany their arcanists into The Fifth Tower and kill or be killed in the fight to the top…

THESE SHATTERER SPIRES is a twisty, multiple-viewpoint tale that keeps you guessing until the very last page. It’s also a very prescient, very necessary novel, prominently featuring queer characters, characters struggling with their gender identity and characters with selective mutism.

Cassidy Ellis Salter is a queer, non-binary author from London’s Brixton. They have published two middle grade books (The Bone Snatcher and Where the Woods End) and THESE SHATTERED SPIRES is their first fantasy for older readers. They work in marketing in their day job and have a personal author TikTok account where their videos have amassed more than a million views and they now have just shy of 10,000 followers. Alis’ struggle to discover themselves as non-binary is very much based on Cassidy’s own coming to terms with their gender identity.

NOW COMES THE MIST de Julie C. Dao

A sexy, romantic, feminist retelling of Dracula from the point of view of Lucy Westenra.

NOW COMES THE MIST
by Julie C. Dao
Podium, October 2024
(via Context Literary Agency)

Lucy Westenra is beautiful, rich, and admired by men. But under her sparkling, flirtatious façade, Lucy is melancholy and obsessed with death after losing her beloved father; she both fears and is captivated by death and dreads leaving her loved ones behind, especially Mina Murray, for whom Lucy cherishes an unspoken romantic attraction.

Lucy balks against the rules of upper-class society. She longs for experiences that are considered inappropriate for a respectable young lady, from traveling to indulging in her sexual curiosity and enthusiasm as men do. When she meets the sexy, mysterious Vlad, she realizes she has the chance to get everything she ever wanted. Or lose it.

Julie C. Dao is the critically acclaimed author of many books for teens and children including Forest of a Thousand Lanterns and Broken Wish. Her novels have earned starred reviews from Booklist, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, won recognition as Junior Library Guild Selections and Kids’ Indie Next List picks, and landed on multiple best-ofyear lists including YALSA and the American Library Association. A proud Vietnamese- American who was born in upstate New York, she now lives in New England.

DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL de Matt Dinniman

The apocalypse will be televised! They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it’s anything but a game. This series is modern day Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Ready Player One meets Hunger Games (with a dash of The Running Man to boot!)

DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL (Book 1)
by Matt Dinniman
Independently published, September 2020
(via The Gernert Company)

A man. His ex-girlfriend’s cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible.
In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground. The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe. Only a few dare venture inside. But once you’re in, you can’t get out. And what’s worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it’s game over.
In this game, it’s not about your strength or your dexterity. It’s about your followers, your views. Your clout. It’s about building an audience and killing those goblins with style. You can’t just survive here. You gotta survive big. You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that « it » factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That’s the only way to truly survive in this game—with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy.

Book 5 in the series was published in February 2022.

Matt Dinniman is a writer and artist from Gig Harbor, Washington. He is the author of the bestselling Dungeon Crawler Carl series along with ten other novels and dozens of works of short fiction. He lives with his wife, family, and menagerie of animals.