Archives de catégorie : Fiction

ASHVALE: THE VAMPIRE’S THRALL de Jade Church

The Vampire Diaries meets Vampire Academy in this deliciously bloody vampire romance filled with tension, magick, feminine rage, and morally grey characters.

ASHVALE: THE VAMPIRE’S THRALL
by Jade Church
self-published, August 2023
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Leonora Romilly was murdered. The catch? She didn’t stay dead.

Instead, she finds herself alive-ish and swept away to Ashvale to learn how to be a fully-functioning, albeit undead, member of society.

At Ashvale, the blood runs free and the sexual tension never sleeps, but under the surface, something much more sinister lurks.

With her would-be murderer still roaming free, a new-found love, and her lost memories on the line, can Leonora survive Ashvale with both her head and her heart intact?

From bestselling romance author Jade Church, ASHVALE is a new adult paranormal romance with vampires, blood bonds, an academy setting, dark forests, ‘I-hate-that-I-want-you’ tension, hidden identities, murder, a dark debut ball, and an FMC just as morally grey as the MMC. Readers who love angsty romance, bites that feel good, and bloodthirsty main characters will devour this story!

Jade Church is an avid reader and writer of spicy romance. She loves sweet and swoony love interests who aren’t scared to smack your ass and bold female leads. Jade currently lives in the U.K. and spends the majority of her time reading and writing books, as well as binge re-watching The Vampire Diaries.

SO FAR GONE de Jess Walter

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins—and in the wild, propulsive spirit of Charles Portis’ True Grit—comes a hilarious and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

SO FAR GONE
by Jess Walter
Harper, June 2025

A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he’d done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around—except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no phone, no computer, and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a madcap journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. SO FAR GONE is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and ultimately moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

Jess Walter is the author of seven previous novels, including the bestsellers, The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins, the National Book Award Finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction, collected in The Angel of Rome and We Live in Water, has won the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize and appeared three times in The Best American Short Stories. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

A CURSE FOR THE HOMESICK de Laura Brooke Robson

Laura Brooke Robson has crafted a fascinating story about the choices we make, the responsibilities we carry, and the ambiguities of regret.

A CURSE FOR THE HOMESICK
by Laura Brooke Robson
Mira/HarperCollins, February 2025
(via Harvey Klinger, Inc.)

On Stenland, there comes a time known as skeld season: when a woman can wake with three black lines on her forehead, the mark of a skeld, and turn anyone she sees to stone. Skeld season comes around without warning, and while each only lasts three months, the people skelds turn to stone are very much dead.

That’s how Tess’s mother killed Soren’s parents. Maybe for this reason alone, Tess and Soren should not have fallen in love. Since the time her mother was a skeld, Tess has wanted to leave Stenland, to run from the windswept island, from her family and friends. She is unwilling to bear the responsibility of one day killing anyone, let alone someone she loves. Soren, though, has always been determined to stay, to live out his life in the only place he’s ever known as home, even if that life could be cut short. They cannot see eye to eye—and yet, they cannot stay apart. She tries to come back for him. He tries to leave for her. But can your love for one person outweigh everything else? And how do you decide how much you’re willing to risk, if it might mean destroying someone else in the process?

“A lyrical, melancholy, and deeply moving story about the people we love and the places we long for, even when we know we shouldn’t. Aching and poignant.” —Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning

Laura Brooke Robson grew up in Oregon and studied English and Creative Writing at Stanford. She is also the author of the young adult novels Girls at the Edge of the World and The Sea Knows My Name. Laura lives in New York.

CONTEMPLATION OF A CRIME de Susan Juby

Buddhist butler and reluctant investigator Helen Thorpe bands together with her fellow butler school graduates to rescue her very wealthy employer and his son.

CONTEMPLATION OF A CRIME
by Susan Juby
HarperCollins Canada, June 2025

Butler Helen Thorpe is not one to judge, but the participants in Close Encounters for Global Healing are astonishingly unpleasant.

The five-day program brings together people from across the political spectrum with the goal of helping them bridge their ideological and personal differences. The motley assortment of participants includes a burned-out environmental activist, an internet troll, a clued-out consumerist, an alleged white nationalist, and a man who was arrested at the Freedom Convoy. No one seems interested in a civil conversation, much less global healing, and each person has shown up with their own secret agenda.

No rapprochement between the warring or at least endlessly bickering parties seem possible. But when something deadly happens, they must learn to work together. First, they must figure out who among them can be trusted.

Susan Juby is the award-winning, bestselling author of many novels, including Mindful of Murder and A Meditation on Murder, the first two books featuring Helen Thorpe.

PARENTS WEEKEND d’Alex Finlay

From the bestselling author of If Something Happens to Me, comes one of the year’s most anticipated thrillers.

PARENTS WEEKEND
by Alex Finlay
Minotaur Books, May 2025
(via The Aaron Priest Literary Agency)

In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families plan on a night of dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids―five residents of Campisi Hall―never show up at dinner.

At first, everyone thinks that they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours click by and another night falls with not so much as a text from the students, panic ensues. Soon, the campus police call in reinforcements. Search parties are formed. Reporters swarm the small enclave. Rumors swirl and questions arise.

Libby, Blane, Mark, Felix, and Stella―The Five, as the podcasters, bloggers, and TikTok sleuths call them―come from five very different families. What led them out on that fateful night? Could it be the sins of their mothers and fathers come to cause them peril or a threat to the friend group from within?

Told through multiple points of view in past and present―and marking the return of FBI Special Agent Sarah Keller from Every Last Fear and The Night Shift―PARENTS WEEKEND explores the weight of expectation, family dysfunction, and those exhilarating first days we all remember in the dorms when our friends become our family.

Alex Finlay is the bestselling author of the 2021 breakout novel, Every Last Fear, the 2022 Goodreads Choice nominee for Best Mystery and Thriller, The Night Shift, the 2023 Library Reads Hall of Fame recipient, What Have We Done, and his latest release, the USA Today bestseller, If Something Happens to Me. Alex’s novels are regularly on “best of the year” lists, have been translated into twenty-five languages, and have been optioned for film or television. Every Last Fear is in development for a major limited series. Alex lives in Washington, DC and Virginia.