Tantalizing Tales — August 2024 — Part One

Happy August, readers! I have never had a year in which I’ve looked so forward to my kids going back to school. I love spending time with them but they’ve felt a little needier — and definitely a lot louder! — than in previous years, so it’ll be nice to get some nice, quiet reading time to myself again soon.

In the meantime, here’s a round up of the terrific books that have just published in the last two weeks that I haven’t yet been able to get to, but still want to highlight for being super interesting. First up is The Wedding People by Alison Espach, which has been highly recommended to me by people whose opinions I trust. It’s also the Read With Jenna Book Club pick for the month of August!

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, with no baggage and no company. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event.

Phoebe has dreamt of coming here for years. She once hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe ― which makes it that much more surprising when the women can’t stop confiding in each other. By turns uproariously funny and devastatingly tender, this is a look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

~~~~~~~

Our second selection is one I chose out of pure nostalgia for my college days, when I was obsessed with The X-Files and seriously considered a career path towards federal investigation (my parents strongly discouraged that, ofc, so now I just solve the crimes presented to me by modern media, lol.) In addition to watching the TV show obsessively, I had so much of the loot: books, comics, audio books (Mitch Pileggi is a terrific voice actor,) posters, you name it. That said, my favorite parts of the show — besides Mulder & Scully, ofc — were the monster of the week episodes. I could honestly take or leave all the aliens and government conspiracy stuff.

So it’s not a surprise that I didn’t really care for the movies, either the ones that came during/around its run or the more recent one years after. I probably wouldn’t even have said yes to The X-Files: Perihelion if it weren’t for the fact that none other than Claudia Gray is the author! I love her Jane Austen-inspired Mr Darcy & Miss Tilney series, and I have absolute confidence in her ability to tell a cracking good mystery with two romantically involved leads.

Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are still reeling from the death of their son William as they struggle to find purpose away from the X-Files. Though their current relationship is tenuous, they hope to seize their second chance to be a family, despite the many questions surrounding Scully’s current pregnancy.

Then the FBI asks for their help on a case that hits all too close to home: a serial killer in the Washington, DC area who targets pregnant women. The killer appears to possess a mysterious, uncanny control over electricity, which is enough for the Bureau to re-open the X-Files — if Mulder and Scully are willing.

They cautiously agree, concerned about the safety of their own unborn child yet committed to finding justice for the killer’s victims. But their return to the FBI sparks the interest of a shadowy cabal, the heirs to the now-dead Syndicate. Mulder and Scully soon discover that what at first seems to be just another X-File is connected to a worldwide threat on an unprecedented scale… one with their own future at its heart.

~~~~~~~

I have such a weakness for books that explore the commodification of relationships, especially in this modern nightmare of a gig economy, so Kat Tang’s Five-Star Stranger sounded right up my alley. This debut novel follows the adventures of a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app — a service through which users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman or an extra mourner for a funeral. Referred to only as Stranger, our narrator navigates New York City under the guise of the characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients.

But when a nosy patron threatens to upend his long-term role as father to a young girl, Stranger begins to reckon with his attachment to his pretend daughter and her mother, and with his own fraught past. Now he must confront the boundaries he has drawn and explore the legacy of abandonment that has shaped his life.

In addition to exploring what it means to strive to be everything to everyone, even strangers, this novel discusses isolation in a hyperconnected world, and the risk of asking for what we want from those who cannot give. This is the story of a man who finds out who he is by being anyone but himself.

~~~~~~~

The description for our next book is one of the most intriguing blurbs — in a Dick Wolf sort of way — that I’ve read in a while! Told across two timelines and tapping into a horrific crime, Victoria Selman’s All the Little Liars is a gripping novel about toxic friendship, sisterly love and the ripple effects of murder, that asks just how much you would sacrifice to belong.

California 2003: Finn “Kat” Jackman is a 10-year-old girl living with her tween sister, father, and beloved housekeeper. When a 13-year-old girl disappears from a party at Turtle Lake, and the word LIAR written in blood is discovered on the trunk of a nearby tree, Kat’s life is turned upside down.

What we know: Three teenagers went to the lake that night but only two came back. Later, they confess to murdering their friend. But why? Did they act alone? And what was the involvement of the mysterious and alluring Manson-like figure Ryder Grady?

What REALLY happened at Turtle Lake? You think you know. Think again.

~~~~~~~

Erica Wright’s Hollow Bones has my favorite of the covers of books we’re discussing in this post. What really drew me to this novel tho, is the promise of it being a retelling of a Shakespearean classic (I won’t say which, as that would be a wee bit of a spoiler.)

Essa Montgomery and her brother Clyde were brought up in New Hope, a serpent-handling church in Vintera, West Virginia, until the shocking deaths of their parents closed the church down. Now twenty years old, reclusive Essa lives alone in her childhood home in the shadow of the church, which to her horror has been taken over by a new, charismatic and unsettling pastor who continues the dangerous practice. So when the church burns down, she’s glad – until she learns that two people died in the blaze and that her brother’s the prime suspect . . .

Life has made Juliet Usher, who scratches out a living as a psychic medium, both assertive and ruthless. With a baby on the way, it’s the worst possible time for her partner Clyde to be arrested. She’ll do anything to survive and keep him out of prison, no matter what it takes.

Merrit Callahan has always been ambitious. A striving news reporter, she’s willing to go the extra mile and break the rules to get the big scoop. And in small-town Vintera, she thinks she might have found the story that will be the making of her career.

The fates of these three women intertwine in a thrilling novel full of shocking twists and turns.

~~~~~~~

Finally, we have the sequel to one of my most memorable mysteries of 2023. Charlotte Vassell’s follow-up to The Other Half continues the adventures of Detective Inspector Caius Beauchamp as he navigates the race and class politics of modern England. In The In Crowd, DI Beauchamp must investigate two cold cases which couldn’t possibly be related… could they?

Early one morning, a men’s rowing team discovers a body floating face down in the Thames. Many years before, the chief executive of a clothing manufacturer walked off with a multi-million dollar corporate retirement fund and disappeared without a trace. Now, the discovery of this body has reopened that cold case.

Meanwhile, DI Beauchamp has his own evening at the theater upended by the discovery of a corpse just a few seats away. Two decades ago, Eliza Chapel, a fourteen-year-old student at a girls’ boarding school in Cornwall, disappeared in the middle of the night under dubious circumstances. A second body means this second cold case reopened.

As DI Beauchamp — along with his associates Matt Chung and Amy Noakes — investigates these parallel missing persons cases, he finds himself ensnared in the unexpected political machinations of a duke-in-waiting. The deeply irritating Rupert Beauchamp (no relation, probably) returns in these pages, but I’m rather glad Nell doesn’t play a prominent role, as I thought she was kind of a drip in the first book. Regardless, I’m looking forward to finding time to dive in and enjoy Caius, Matt and Amy’s company once more!

~~~~~~

What an odd coincidence that this post was bookended by covers featuring a hand breaking the surface of the waters! Perhaps it is a sign that I will no longer feel like I’m drowning in book reading soon, haha. It’s just as likely that this is my subconscious trying desperately to give me a sign. Perhaps a visit to (a) Cornwall is in order, too.

Let me know if you’re able to get to any of these books before I do, dear readers! I’d love to hear your opinions, and see if that will help spur me to push any of them higher up the mountain range that is my To Be Read pile.

And, as always, you can check out the list of my favorite books this year so far in my Bookshop storefront linked below!