Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2025 Adult Fiction

MURDER AT 30,000 FEET de Susan Walter

Under the cover of turbulence, a killer strikes. With nowhere to land and nowhere to hide, who will save the passengers from this nightmare at 30,000 feet?

MURDER AT 30,000 FEET
by Susan Walter
Blackstone Publishing, February 2026
(via Laura Dail Literary)

It’s a ticket to paradise. Flight 868 has nonstop service to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Over a dozen tipsy passengers are off to a destination wedding. A team of high school baseball players are headed to a tournament. The plane is packed with people eager to escape their lives, and others who can’t wait to return to their beloved home.

But sweet anticipation turns to terror when a lightning strike short-circuits the avionics and plunges the plane into darkness. When the lights come back on, a passenger is found brutally murdered, with only a bewildered air marshal to solve the crime. He soon realizes that several passengers are harboring dark secrets, but the identity of the murderer eludes him. There’s only one certainty: The killer is on the plane.

Thousands of feet above the earth with thunderstorms closing in, the danger outside is as grave as the mounting threat within. Can the captain outrun the storm? Or will the murderer among them bring the plane down first?

Passion, betrayal, and murder collide in this high-stakes, locked-room mystery. A must-read for fans of T. J. Newman and Jeneva Rose.

Susan Walter is a recovering screenwriter and film director who started writing books to kill people because it was frowned upon in real life. Her first two novels are set in the movie business, but then she discovered there are places that are even more dangerous and is now murdering people on airplanes, on ski hills, and in safe houses while on the run from organized crime. When not writing (and also maybe while writing) Susan can be found streaming Red Sox baseball and drinking too much coffee.

DIRECT DESCENDANT de Tanya Huff

This cozy horror novel set in modern-day Toronto includes phenomenal characters, fantastic writing, and a queer romance—the perfect balance of dark and delightful. This stand-alone novel from the bestselling author of the Peacekeeper novels mixes the creepy with the charming for plenty of snarky, queer fun—for fans of T. Kingfisher, Grady Hendrix, Sangu Mandanna and Erin Sterling.

DIRECT DESCENDANT
by Tanya Huff
DAW, April 2025
(via JABberwocky)

Generations ago, the founders of the idyllic town of Lake Argen made a deal with a dark force. In exchange for their service, the town will stay prosperous and successful, and keep outsiders out. And for generations, it’s worked out great. Until a visitor goes missing, and his wealthy family sends a private investigator to find him, and everything abruptly goes sideways.

Now, Cassidy Prewitt, town baker and part-time servant of the dark force (it’s a family business) has to contend with a rising army of darkness, a very frustrated town, and a very cute PI who she might just be falling for…and who might just be falling for her. And if they can survive their own home-grown apocalypse, they might even just find happiness together.

Queer, cozy, and with a touch of eldritch horror mixed in just for fun, this is a charming love story about a small-town baker, a quick-witted PI, and, yes, an ancient evil.

Tanya Huff spent three years in the Canadian Naval Reserve then earned a degree in radio and television arts from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. She is the author of numerous short stories and more than twenty novels, including the bestselling Blood books, the Smoke series, and the Keeper’s Chronicles. She has been the guest of honor at numerous American and Canadian conventions, and her work has been nominated for several awards, including winning the Aurora Award for Best Novel. She lives in Ontario, Canada. 

THE LOVE AN ABALONE FEELS FOR THE SEA de Genki Ferguson

Take a cool dive into the waters of coastal Japan, the setting for Genki Ferguson’s exquisitely rendered coming-of-age novel, featuring traditional “ama” freedivers.

THE LOVE AN ABALONE FEELS FOR THE SEA
by Genki Ferguson
Counterpoint, Spring 2027
(via The Friedrich Agency)

During one fateful dive, Nagisa, a determined young woman joins the ama—who dive to depths of up to 65 feet without any scuba gear to hunt abalone and other shellfish —and doesn’t return to the surface.

Ren Ioka, Nagisa’s seventeen year old brother, finds himself unmoored by grief and uncertainty upon his sister’s disappearance. But after discovering an unsent love letter written by Nagisa years earlier, Ren becomes convinced that this confession holds the secret behind her inexplicable final dive.

In the process of retracing his sister’s hidden love, Ren meets Aiko, an inscrutable ama who once dove with Nagisa. As Ren gradually uncovers the truth behind his sister’s confession, he finds himself falling for Aiko, not realizing that she’s harboring a secret herself.

Genki Ferguson is a Canadian-Japanese writer and filmmaker, who spent the Spring of 2023 immersed in the world of ama divers in Mie, Japan, and based much of this story on his experiences living and working in their village. Genki’s previous novel, Satellite Love, was published in 2021 by McClelland & Stewart to critical acclaim and several award nominations.

CHILDREN OF THE SAVAGE CITY d’Elizabeth Heider

Fast-paced, evocative, and steeped in the tension of moral compromise, CHILDREN OF THE SAVAGE CITY explores the thin line between hope and illusion in a city where every choice carries a price.

CHILDREN OF THE SAVAGE CITY
by Elizabeth Heider
Penguin Books, February 2026
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

Some cities feed on secrets. Naples is ravenous.

A peaceful evening mass at the historic Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo is shattered when a young au pair is killed in one of the cathedral’s quiet chapels. The daughter of the US Ambassador sees it happen–but she’ll speak only to one person: Nikki Serafino.

Shaken by betrayal in her last high-profile case, Nikki has retreated from the relentless vigilance that once defined her work as liaison between Italian police and the US military. Withdrawn and mistrustful, she works her shifts, cares for her aging family, teaches self-defense classes, and avoids entanglement. But this case threatens her self-imposed invisibility–drawing her into a web of lies and resurfacing old wounds and buried loyalties. The murder investigation leads Nikki and her friend, Naples officer Valerio Alfieri, into a shadow architecture of power: built to protect the guilty and hide their secrets at any cost.

Can she and Valerio—each carrying dangerous debts—resist the undertow of corruption that swallows truth whole?

Set against the chaos of modern Naples—the city of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend—where grace and corruption share the same narrow streets, Nikki and Valerio navigate a landscape where even the most principled must confront the cost of survival.

Elizabeth Heider is the author of May the Wolf Die, named a New York Times Best Crime Novel, a Washington Post Best Mystery, and one of Publishers Weekly‘s best books of the year. Her short fiction has been recognized by the Santa Fe Writers Project and New Century Writer Awards. She holds a PhD in physics and most recently worked as a program manager for Microsoft’s AI4Science and as a scientist in the European Space Agency’s human spaceflight program. She’s authored original scientific research, a patent, analytical reports for the US government and military, and coauthored a journal article with astronaut Thomas Pesquet. She lived and worked in Naples, Italy, as a civilian analyst embedded with the US Navy’s mission in Africa, where she deployed aboard US and European naval ships. Originally from Utah, she now lives in The Hague, where she’s working on the next Nikki Serafino novel.

UND FEDERN ÜBERALL de Nava Ebrahimi

Award-winning author Nava Ebrahimi immerses us in the world of a provincial backwater, weaving the lives of six people into a stunning social novel that asks whether it is possible to retain our humanity and compassion in the face of adversity. For fans of Jenny Erpenbeck, Dörte Hansen and Lucy Fricke.

UND FEDERN ÜBERALL
(Feathers Everywhere)
by Nava Ebrahimi
Luchterhand/PRH Germany, August 2025

A small town, six people embarking on a new chapter in their lives, and one day that changes everything

The fog lingers over the fields and the canal. In the small town of Lasseren near the Dutch border, it is as if winter were refusing to end. Nothing much happens here, in the flatlands. Anyone looking for work inevitably ends up at Möllring, the gigantic poultry slaughterhouse on the edge of town. Here, a handful of people has woken up this Monday morning with great expectations: single mum Sonia hopes to get a job far away from the conveyor belt and portioning machine; for young engineer Anna, more or less everything depends on today’s trial run of the latest automation solution; meanwhile, Merkhausen – a process optimisation manager with a weakness for Polish women whose wife has left him – is looking forward to a first date tonight; Nassim, a visually impaired refugee from Afghanistan, has got himself entangled with Justyna, who is twenty years older than him, and is convinced his poems will soften the hearts of German bureaucrats; and German-Iranian author Roshi has travelled all the way from Cologne to translate the poems for him.

When a careless cyclist breaks Nassim’s cane right in the middle of town, and the story is picked up by the local radio station, Nassim becomes a local legend – but more than that too: he inspires people to look their truth squarely in the eye.

Nava Ebrahimi, born in Tehran in 1978, is one of Austrian literature’s most exciting new voices. She is the winner of the 2021 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, and her novel Sechzehn Wörter (« Sixteen words ») won the Austrian Book Prize and the Morgenstern Prize. After studying journalism and economics in Cologne, she became editor at Financial Times Deutschland and at the Cologne-based Stadtrevue. She has been shortlisted for the Open Mike debut prize, and has attended the Bavarian Academy of Writing. Alongside her novels, she also writes a column for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.