Archives par étiquette : Writers House

PLAYING COLTRANE d’Andre Hardy

Former NFL player Andre Hardy’s debut, featuring a young man who has risen from the rarely seen dark side of San Diego to the upper echelons of the city’s elite, serving as the fixer to a corrupt kingmaker who now wants to get out and focus on his family, but first he’s got to survive one last job. A potent and atmospheric new vision of the hard-boiled detective and noir genres.

PLAYING COLTRANE
by Andre Hardy
Grand Central, September 2026
(via Writers House)

Like the complex, morally ambiguous protagonists written by Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, Cain and their many descendants, Coltrane Davis is at once a knight and a hustler. He has risen to wealth and success, graduating from San Diego’s back alleys to the halls of power through his partnership with Saul Sollman, a crooked kingmaker among the city’s elite. Running multimillion dollar scams with Saul, he has been Saul’s fixer, but now he wants out of the hustle so that he can focus on his teenage daughter’s burgeoning tennis career and finally be the dad he has always wanted to be. But when the San Diego Chargers’ star running back disappears one evening before a big game, Coltrane is drawn into an investigation of what happened by Saul and his protégé, the player’s agent; at the same time, Coltrane’s daughter’s closest friend disappears into San Diego’s underworld of drugs and prostitution, and Coltrane is haunted by his failure to save her from San Diego’s sex industry. Torn by the unreconcilable demands of the life he can’t seem to quit, Coltrane brings himself and his loved ones to the brink of destruction in his quest to free himself once and for all of Saul’s control.

PLAYING COLTRANE is brimming with gorgeous writing about place, music, and the hard-fought struggle for personal growth against legacies of violence and neglect.

Andre Hardy is a former NFL running back and Antioch University MFA graduate whose essays and short fiction have appeared in journals and anthologies. His extraordinary journey from professional athlete to Big Five-published novelist infuses his storytelling with grit, rhythm, and authenticity. With this novel, he establishes himself as a breakout voice in contemporary crime fiction, speaking to identity, resilience, and justice with global resonance.

MURDER MOST DELICIOUS de Danielle Postel-Vinay

Thursday Murder Club meets Butter—with a dash of the healing fiction of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop—in this heart-warming and delectable mystery set in Paris featuring two women in need of comfort: an American sommelier who has lost her sense of taste and an agoraphobic detective afraid to leave her quaint Parisian neighborhood.

MURDER MOST DELICIOUS
by Danielle Postel-Vinay
HarperCollins, May 2026
(via Writers House)

Olivia Branch has a legendary palette—or, rather, had. She was a master sommelier—a distinction given to only 269 people in the world, and only a handful of them women–with a mental catalogue for the scent and taste of wines that ran into the thousands. She was even, for a time, the youngest-ever Head Sommelier at the most prestigious French restaurant in New York City. That is, until Covid robbed her of one of her greatest weapons: her sense of taste.

While Olivia manages to keep this a secret for as long as she possibly can, her cover is blown one disastrous evening when she fails to identify one of the most important wines of her career. Reeling from the public humiliation, adrift, and massively depressed, she gets a miraculous second-chance opportunity in the form of an invitation from Jacques de Bizet—an old friend and celebrity chef in Paris—who invites her to fly to France to interview with him. Everything finally seems to be turning around for Olivia…until the esteemed gourmand takes his first sip and immediately drops dead.

Augusta Dupin is a former detective. Eccentric and intimidating in her intellect, she’d solved some of the hardest cases to come through the Sûreté de Paris. That is, until Covid arrived, and with it, a severe flare-up of her childhood agoraphobia. Unable to leave the borders of her tiny neighborhood, she was forced to quit her job, but she just can’t seem to give up her passion for mysteries. And now, one has landed right at her doorstep: Who killed the neighborhood’s dear friend and favorite chef Jacques? And who is the mysterious American woman who fled the scene of the crime?

In this captivating mystery full of sensual delights and adventures, Olivia and Augusta must join forces with a group of neighborhood amateur sleuths—a pâtissier, a café owner, a perfumer, and a florist—to solve the crime, and along the way find fresh purpose for their lives. Set against the backdrop of the enchanting Seventh Arrondissement, readers will be immediately transported to the cozy, charming Parisian neighborhood where friendship, food and creature comforts have the power to soothe the soul in dark times.

Danielle Postel-Vinay is the French alter-ego of The New York Times and internationally bestselling author Danielle Trussoni, whose books have won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Le Prix Bête Noire des Libraires and been translated into more than thirty languages. She spends part of the year in Paris with her French husband and their family.

FEW BLUE SKIES de Carolina Ixta

In her latest novel, Pura Belpré Award-winning author Carolina Ixta weaves a tender story about love and hope, following a teen as she works to protect her family and community from a major corporation taking over her town.

FEW BLUE SKIES
by Carolina Ixta
Quill Tree Books, February 2026
(via Writers House)

Paloma Vistamontes is heartbroken. A year ago, her ex-boyfriend, Julio Ramos, broke up with her after his father’s death, a tragedy that drove Paloma and him apart. Ever since then, the mountains have felt flatter, the sky farther away.

Now, her hometown of San Fermín, a place where honest people work on farms and in factories, is in danger. Selva, a massive e-commerce conglomerate, threatens to open one of their warehouses beside her high school.

This isn’t the first time they’ve done this. Since Selva arrived, they’ve opened warehouses everywhere where there used to be green spaces. Because of them, the air pollution is so bad that school is often canceled. Many people, including Paloma’s ever-practical Ma, want to leave.

But Paloma wants nothing more than to stay. Because when the smog clears, there is still hope. That hope drives Paloma to reconnect with Julio to expose and challenge the dangers that Selva introduces to communities like their own. Can they stop Selva from destroying everything they know? Is there still a chance for their budding romance?

Carolina Ixta is a writer from Oakland, California. A daughter of Mexican immigrants, she received her BA in creative writing and Spanish language and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and obtained her master’s degree in education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her debut novel, Shut Up, This Is Serious, was a Morris Award finalist, an LA Times Book Prize finalist, and the winner of the Pura Belpré Award. Few Blue Skies is her sophomore novel.

TO OUR UNTAMED CORE de Sonora Reyes

The stunning first YA fantasy novel from award-winning author Sonora Reyes! The Hunger Games meets Chain Gang All Stars in this tournament to the death.

TO OUR UNTAMED CORE
by Sonora Reyes
HarperCollins, September 2026
(via Writers House)

Centuries after a plague arrived alongside the conquistadores, Temo’s people are left largely infertile and with a fraction of their former strength. But as a gift from the people of El Centro, where many of the conquistadores now live, Temo and all other residents of the afueras take a daily capsule that allows them to live a civilized life, uninhibited by their untamed nature.

But the sacrament doesn’t work on everyone and every ten years, El Centro hosts El Torneo, where any afueras who were unable to be tamed by the sacraments must fight to the death in a labyrinth of a temple that once belonged to their ancestors. Hundreds of afuereños compete against each other and one conquistador champion. And each games, the conquistador champion from El Centro inevitably wins, earning his title as their next king, and proving to the people of the afueras how barbaric and inferior they are without the sacraments.

Everything changes when Temo’s boyfriend, Ollin, is unjustly arrested and sent to a certain death in El Torneo. But instead of hiding, Temo gets himself arrested too, willingly entering El Torneo knowing this will be the only way to save his gentle boyfriend from a gruesome fate, if Temo even manages to survive himself.

Sonora Reyes is the bestselling and award-winning author of The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School, The Luis Ortega Survival Club, The Broposal, and The Golden Boy’s Guide to Bipolar. Born and raised in Arizona, they write fiction celebrating queer and Mexican stories in a variety of genres, across ages. Outside of writing, Sonora loves breaking their body and vocal cords by playing with their baby niblings and dancing/singing karaoke at the same time.

POSSESSION ISLAND de Sarah McCarry

Interview with a Vampire meets Heavenly Creatures in Sara McCarry’s queer gothic New Adult thriller. Full of undying loyalty, loss, and creatures with teeth, Possession Island is a darkly funny ode to the lengths we’ll go to for the people (and monsters) we love.

POSSESSION ISLAND
by Sarah McCarry
Wednesday Books, Fall 2026
(via Writers House)

What was it my mother said? Like a woman, a vampire is made, not born. She is a creature of her own invention.
And in all the best stories, the monster always wins.
As she should.

Twenty-year-old Angela Bell comes home from college to her family’s mansion on a remote Pacific Northwest island, haunted by the legacy – and fans – of her late mother’s wildly successful vampire novel. When her estranged best friend Mo is murdered, Angie winds up in the crosshairs of the bungled police investigation.

Determined to clear her name and avenge Mo’s death, Angie finds herself entangled with Sally, a high school nemesis with more than a few secrets of her own. As Angie and Sally delve deeper into the sinister underbelly of their small town, Angie’s forced to reckon with one question: How far is she willing to go for the women she loves?

Fiendishly clever, sharp-sighted, and surprising, POSSESSION ISLAND combines the knife-edge suspense and revamped gender stereotypes of Gone Girl with a gothic horror twist.

Sarah McCarry is the author of the novels All Our Pretty Songs, Dirty Wings, About A Girl, and The Darling Killers; the editor and publisher of the chapbook series Guillotine; and the Executive Director of the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation. Her work has been shortlisted for the Lambda Award, the Norton Award, and the Tiptree Award. She received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Joint Quantum Institute, the Launchpad Writers’ Workshop, and The Arctic Circle. She’s taught letterpress printing, writing, and zine-making across the United States.