Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2025 Adult Fiction

SEASON OF STEEL de Maia Kane

Bridgerton meets Pacific Rim in this sapphic crossover romantasy set in a glittering alternate Regency in which the London Season is more cutthroat than ever…literally.

SEASON OF STEEL
by Maia Kane
PRH/Dutton, Spring 2027
(via Park, Fine & Brower)

In an alternate Regency England where marriage to eligible noblewomen is decided by deadly mecha dueling tournaments, half-Chamorro bluestocking Lady Wilhelmina Applewhite will choose her own destiny, thank you very much. But when her father’s sudden death leaves Willa as his sole heir, her hand in marriage—and the enormous ducal estate she stands to inherit—becomes the upcoming Season’s grand prize. Determined to seize her fate—and protect her little sisters’ freedom—Willa shocks the ton by declaring her intention to hire a Bloodsworn fighter to compete for her own hand.

Except, the only one mad enough to even consider it is rakish, brooding Thomasin Drake, the first and last woman to have ever fought in a Season…until her final duel ended in defeat and disgrace. Thomasin is more interested in drowning her sorrows in whiskey than risking her life fighting for a fussy spitfire like Willa—and she swore never to return to high society after her loss. But when she discovers that the man who beat her is competing with her own old mech, she agrees to enter on one condition: if she wins, the rig belongs to her.

Together, the two women must navigate both the Season’s high society balls and dangerous duels, or Willa risks losing her family, her estate, and her freedom to fortune hunters. But if she isn’t careful, she might lose her most valuable possession—her heart—to Thomasin before the Season is over.

And in a world where marriage is a matter of life and death, falling in love is the last thing she can afford.

Maia Kane is a hapa CHamoru writer, Shudokan black belt, and media studies graduate student who completed her education in London. When not writing books or academic essays, she enjoys playing video games, reading comics, and backpacking around the world.

THE DARK IN HER VEINS de M.K. Lobb

From critically acclaimed, UK bestselling author M.K. Lobb comes a noir romantic fantasy set in a world in which sin is a fatal disease, and the rich hire the poor to carry out their basest instincts―until the forbidden romance between a sinner and a mysterious figure threatens to destroy everything.

THE DARK IN HER VEINS
by M.K. Lobb
Sourcebooks Casablanca, August 2026

In the gritty, glittering city of Valestadt, every crime—from the smallest infraction to the largest atrocity—leaves its mark in the form of Bloodrot, a wasting disease that slowly eats away at its host. For the poor, sinning is a death sentence. For the rich, it’s just another expensive pastime. After all, anyone can be bought.

Talin Keller is a sinner. She has learned to rely on nothing and no one—traits that have served her well as right-hand woman to the holiest man in the city, the Prophet. Talin’s job is to get her hands dirty so the Prophet’s can stay clean. It’s a job she’s frighteningly good at, and judging by her rapidly advancing Bloodrot, it might also be her last. But when a routine assignment puts Talin on a collision course with the Prophet’s most hated enemy, a shadowy underworld figure known as “the Warden,” she begins to see a future for herself that doesn’t involve a body bag. If she can get close enough to the Warden, she can trade his capture for her own freedom.

The closer Talin gets to the Warden, though, the more she finds herself falling for his sharp edges and twisted sense of justice. And as the lines between good and evil—between saint and sinner, between lover and enemy—begin to blur, Talin finds herself at the center of a conflict that could destroy everything.

M. K. Lobb is a fantasy writer with a love of all things dark— be it literature, humour, or general aesthetic. She grew up in small-town Ontario and studied political science at both the University of Western Ontario and the University of Ottawa. She now lives by the lake with her partner and their cats. When not reading or writing, she can be found at the gym or contemplating the harsh realities of existence. Her first young adult novel, Seven Faceless Saints (Little, Brown) released in 2023. It was a Kids’ Indie Next Pick and was shortlisted for the Barnes & Noble Children’s & YA Book Awards. The sequel, Disciples of Chaos, followed in 2024. Her third novel, To Steal From Thieves, released in 2025, with the sequel, To Deal With Kings, coming in March 2026. Her first adult romantasy, THE DARK IN HER VEINS, releases in August 2026.

WANT ME, TAKE ME, HAUNT ME, MAKE ME d’Isabel Crowley

The Conjuring takes a turn for the dark and spicy in this chilling horror romance by debut author Isabel Crowley, for fans of Sophie Lark and H.D. Carlton

WANT ME, TAKE ME, HAUNT ME, MAKE ME
by Isabel Crowley
Sourcebooks Casablanca, August 2026

Hazel Lewis has a serious problem. The guy who hired her to conduct a seance before he died turned out to be a serial killer with a demonic contract, and the seance itself was a trap. Hazel escaped with her life, but not as she knew it: the bite of a demon is spreading through her body, letting the supernatural bleed into the world around her, and the now-dead serial killer is waiting to take over her body if she dies.

Hoping to contain the damage, Hazel moves to a small house in a remote location. She figures she’ll stay on her own until she gets a handle on her new dark reality, but she soon finds out that she’s not alone. There’s the reporter demanding answers, the friendly neighbor with chemistry she doesn’t need and problems he can’t talk about… and the mysterious face she sees beyond her window, watching her every night with glowing red eyes.

Making her hunger.

Hazel knew a little bit about the world beyond the physical. Now she’s learning how much she doesn’t know, including who she can trust…and who she can become if she trusts herself enough to give in to the shadows stalking her dreams.

Blending the chills of a horror movie with the spicy thrills of sexy dark romance plus a propulsive mystery underscoring the heroine’s haunting, this book has something for every reader.

GOOD INTENTIONS de Marisa Walz

A deft and immersive psychological suspense debut about a luxury party planner who becomes obsessed with a woman she encounters in a hospital waiting room.

GOOD INTENTIONS
by Marisa Walz
St. Martin’s Press, February 2026

Cady has worked hard to have a good life. She has a thriving luxury event-planning business, the man she’s loved since she was seventeen, and a social calendar she can barely keep up with. She also has Dana, her identical twin, her beyond best friend, her most trusted confidante. When Cady gets a call that Dana has been in a serious accident and arrives moments too late to say goodbye, her world falls apart.

But to Cady’s family’s growing concern and confusion, it’s not Dana’s death that consumes her. It’s Morgan, a grieving mother Cady encountered in the hospital waiting room, the day her sister died. It can’t be a coincidence, that they both experienced tragedy at the same moment, in the same place―Cady doesn’t believe in coincidences. Instead, she is convinced that she must help this stranger overcome her tragedy, in order to come to terms with her own.

Or…is there more to it? Is it possible that Cady wants something else from Morgan? Something she can’t even admit to herself?

Slyly twisted and deeply provocative, GOOD INTENTIONS captures the moral ambiguity that can arise in the face of impossible choices. Like the aftermath of a car accident―and against your better judgment―you won’t be able to look away.

Marisa Walz is a Federal Reserve executive who also writes novels about people behaving badly. She lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and two young children.

EVERYTHING LOST RETURNS de Sarah Domet

The poignant, utterly original story of two women separated across time but united by the arrival of Halley’s comet, as blazing and as daring as their stories.

EVERYTHING LOST RETURNS
by Sarah Domet
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, February 2026

1986. The Earthshine Soap Company has given Nona Dixon everything, from making her the brand’s first Earthshine Girl to launching her acting career. It also threatens to be the very thing that causes her to unravel when a group of Jane Does file a class action lawsuit accusing the company of putting harmful ingredients into their products. When Nona begins investigating Bertie Tuttle, the company’s third-generation owner, she uncovers a complicated history involving her benefactor and a mysterious woman named Opal Doucet.

1910. Seventy-six years earlier, Opal Doucet, a rural doctor’s wife, is pregnant, on the run, and desperate to get to Paris and to the charismatic spiritualist who supposedly communed with her first love. To save money, Opal goes to work in the Earthshine Soap factory as an Earthshine Girl where she uses her knowledge of medicine, and the spiritualist’s teachings, to prescribe cures to the women who’ve come down with mystery ailments. As she and Bertie Tuttle secretly partner in a labor strike intended to improve the working conditions at the factory, Opal must decide the cost of her own freedom.

Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Everything Lost Returns is a story of desire and friendship, guilt and redemption, and the power we have, in our own small way, to change the course of history.

« Sarah Domet has written a tenderhearted and brilliantly crafted story, full of tension and surprises, uniting women across time in their struggles, losses, and victories. This novel is a paean to the courage it takes to rise up against injustice, and the magic of friendships formed in the most difficult circumstances. Beautiful, engrossing, and revelatory–Everything Lost Returns is its own celestial event. » –Nina de Gramont, New York Times bestselling author of The Christie Affair

Sarah Domet is the author of the novels The Guineveres and Everything Lost Returns, and the craft book 90 Days to Your Novel. She is a professor and the coordinator of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.