Archives de catégorie : Fiction

SISTER, BUTCHER, SISTER de KD Aldyn

The chilling prose of Karin Slaughter meets the high-stakes plotting of The Butcher and the Wren in a dark debut following three normal sisters, their own forgotten traumas, and the serial killer that lives within one, begging the question: can you ever truly recognize the evil around you?

SISTER, BUTCHER, SISTER
by KD Aldyn
Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks, June 2025

Three sisters. One killer. Which one is SHE?

The Rowling sisters have always been people you can understand – with partners and children, homes and dreams. And secrets, the sisters have those too. But when Kate, the eldest, finally returns to buy her late grandfather’s home, the dark things each sister has kept buried soon rise to the surface.

Is Kate having unexplained visions tied to a past she can hardly recall? Is Aurora, the married mother of two, finally acting out in the face of her sisters’ indiscretions? Is Peggy, the youngest and a recovering addict, able to move on from the memories that haunt her?

And then there’s SHE.

SHE is one of them, but SHE is not like them at all. SHE is defined only by the carnage she lets the world see, the murders that have swept through their coastal community. And as the police close in on their newest serial killer, scrutiny lands on the Rowlings, forcing them to face their demons and reveal all they have kept hidden.

KD Aldyn lives everywhere and nowhere (home is where the Wi-Fi is). She most often wears black (and sometimes red) and sometimes dances like Elaine from Seinfeld. SISTER, BUTCHER, SISTER is her debut.

THE GIRLS BEFORE de Kate Alice Marshall

There is a girl in a basement. The door has stopped opening. The light is gone.
The next book from this acclaimed and bestselling author.

THE GIRLS BEFORE
by Kate Alice Marshall
Flatiron Books, February 2026

Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But what will happen if the door opens? Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there’s always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town’s wealthiest family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.

Kate Alice Marshall is the USA Today bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, A Killing Cold, and multiple novels for younger readers. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.

GHOST DETECTIVE d’Alice Arisugawa

A detective’s ghost investigates his own unsolved murder in this Japanese modern crime classic.

GHOST DETECTIVE
by Alice Arisugawa
Pushkin Press, Autumn 2026

The beach at night. A detective by the name of Tatsuya Kanzaki is summoned by his division chief and killed, but his lingering attachments and bewilderment at his sudden murder leave him unable to pass onto the next world.

Unfortunately, nobody can see Kanzaki—not his killer, Kyodo, nor his fiancée, Sumako—nobody except Hayakawa, his psychic junior.

While investigating his own murder through Hayakawa’s powers, Kyodo is found dead in a locked room. His death can only mean one thing. Somebody else is the mastermind behind Kanzaki’s murder…

Step by step, Kanzaki and Hayakawa inch closer to the truth. But reaching closure means passing on, and Kanzaki must brace himself for his final goodbyes.

Translated by Cathy Hirano.

Alice Arisugawa was born in 1959 in Osaka and graduated from Doshisha University. While there, he studied mystery novels and eventually debuted as an author in 1989. Ghost Detective, first published in 2000, is one of his best-loved novels and has been adapted for the stage in Japan.

PARALLEL LINES de Tashie Bhuiyan

A heart-wrenching speculative-tinged adult debut from author Tashie Bhuiyan, for fans of Matt Haig, Rebecca Serle, and Everything Everywhere All At Once.

PARALLEL LINES
by Tashie Bhuiyan
Gallery, Summer 2026
(via Park, Fine & Brower)

Two estranged twin sisters. One who left. One who stayed.

Astoria and Grace Sadiya share a past, but their presents couldn’t be more different. Seven years ago, after a massive fight, Astoria left home and never looked back while Grace stayed with their parents in New York. They haven’t seen each other since. Until their twenty-fifth birthday, when they blow out their candles and make the same wish—only to wake up in an alternate universe together. Stuck traveling from universe to universe, Grace wants nothing more than to return to her own world, despite her growing fear that her parents will only ever see her as a burden. Meanwhile, Astoria is desperate to find a timeline where her best friend and first love unquestionably reciprocates her feelings. Unable to move through the multiverse without each other, the sisters reluctantly join forces in hopes of locating a universe where both their wishes come true.

But the longer Astoria and Grace spend together, the closer they come to confronting the secrets and suffering of their childhoods, and the pain and betrayal of the night Astoria ran away. Can the sisters accept that they are reflections of one another, two halves of the same whole, when neither of them likes what they see in the mirror? And after seven years of festering silence, can they find their way to a universe where they have unconditional love and each other—or are their paths destined to always run parallel?

Tashie Bhuiyan is the author of the Young Adult novels Counting Down With You, A Show For Two, Stay With My Heart, and the forthcoming I’ll Pretend You’re Mine. She is a New Yorker through and through, and hopes to change the world, one book at a time. She loves writing stories about gaining agency through growth and surviving against all odds. When she’s not doing that, she’s probably traveling, attending a concert, or bothering her cat, Zuko.

THE EMPTY CRADLE de Lisa Rookes

A completely gripping and chilling suspense novel, with a shocking twist.

THE EMPTY CRADLE
by Lisa Rookes
Orion, August 2025
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Amy’s so sure that her husband, Joel, is deeply invested in their future together. After all, it’s his dream of a family together that has them trying so hard to have a baby, despite a series of disappointments. It’s this certainty that leaves Amy absolutely floored when she learns of Joel’s affair with her best friend.

Heartbroken and horrified, Amy flees to a dilapidated cottage in a Yorkshire village, a place she’d bought with dreams of making it feel homey and warm. In the new village, she feels like a clear outsider, but a group of local women soon take her under their wing. They gather for a routine book club, they say. Before Amy knows it, these women are in her life, and in her home.

Amy wakes one night to find herself outside in the fields. Strange offerings seem to be left on her doorstep. And the surveillance camera she installs shows shapes creeping around her house in the night. Strangest of all, she suddenly finds she’s pregnant. A pregnancy that feels like a cruel joke.

The book club is incredibly invested in Amy’s pregnancy. And it might just be in Amy’s mind, but the women’s interest doesn’t always seem safe. What do the women want with her? And what do they want with her baby?

Lisa Rookes is an award-winning journalist and lecturer. She spent the start of her career as a crime reporter and news editor before moving to national newspapers and women’s magazines. She is currently head of the undergraduate Journalism programme at the University of Sheffield and has won further multiple awards for her teaching. She lives in Holmfirth in South Yorkshire with her two sons, an arthritic Labrador and a disabled pug.