Tantalizing Tales — March 2025 — Part One

I continue to be flummoxed by the concept of time, dear readers, as March comes in like a lion here in my mid-Atlantic state. It has also been, quite frankly, a tough time to be a professional reader. It feels like one catastrophe after another threatening everything I hold dear, through the diabolical intersection of short-sighted technoligarchy with ethno-nationalist fascism. Frankly, I’m exhausted (and don’t get me started on how the Daylight Savings time change during the fasting month has thoroughly messed with my circadian rhythms.)

But at least I have books to help me through, even if they’re books that I can only look forward to reading once I finally find the time again. The first of these, timed perfectly to Women’s History Month, is Marianna Marlowe’s Portrait Of A Feminist: A Memoir In Essays. Through flashes of memory of her childhood in California, Ecuador and Peru, interspersed with scenes from the present day, Ms Marlowe details the evolution of her identity as a biracial and multicultural woman.

With her experiences being the child of a Catholic Peruvian mother and an atheist American father in a family that lived abroad for years, she confronts the realities that so many of us share, including unequal marriages, class structures, misogynistic literature and patriarchal religion. Her essays bring her to the two most important questions in feminism today: What does it look like to live a life in defense of feminism? And how should feminism continue to evolve in the present day?

I’ve heard mixed reviews of this one, which only piques my interest all the more. So many people have different ideas of what feminism means that it’s always intriguing to see how someone boldly proclaims the title of feminist for themself, especially in the context of intersectionality. I’m looking forward to getting a chance to dive in.

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Next up, we have a fictional but still fierce portrait of a feminist, in the form of a rebel ready to take her church camp by storm in Jenna Voris’ queer Young Adult rom-com, Say A Little Prayer.

Riley quietly left her church a year ago when she realized that there was no place for a bi girl like herself in the congregation. But it wasn’t until the pastor shunned her older sister for getting an abortion that she really decided she wanted to burn it all down.

It’s just her luck, then, that she’s sent to the principal’s office for slapping a girl talking smack about her sister. In order to avoid suspension, she has to spend spring break at church camp. The only saving grace is that she’ll be there with her best friend Julia, even if Julia’s dad is the pastor in charge of camp.

Now on a mission, Riley won’t let a technicality like “repenting” get in the way of her true goals. Instead of spending the week embracing the seven heavenly virtues, she’s going to commit all seven deadly sins. If she can show the other campers that sometimes being a little bad is for the greater good, she could start a righteous revolution! What could possibly go wrong? Aside from falling for her best friend, the pastor’s daughter, that is…

In addition to loving that plot description, I’m kinda obsessed with the amazing cover of this book. From the color palette to Riley’s expression to the brilliant typography choices, I love everything about it. Hopefully, the interior is just as excellent.

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For a more suspenseful kind of love story, check out Laura Stevens’ Our Infinite Fates, as two souls reincarnate through the centuries. They’ve loved each other in a thousand lifetimes. They’ve also killed each other in every one.

Evelyn remembers all her past lives. She also remembers that in every single one of them, she’s been murdered before her eighteenth birthday by Arden, a supernatural being whose soul ― and survival ― is tethered to her own.

The main problem this time around is that she’s quite fond of the life she’s currently living. Even more importantly, her little sister needs her for bone marrow transplants in order to stay alive. If Evelyn wants to save her sister, she’ll have to:

1. Find the centuries-old devil who hunts her through each life ― before they find her first.
2. Figure out why she’s being hunted and finally break their curse.
3. Try not to fall in love.

That’s a tall order for any 17 year-old. Will she be able to save her life, her sister’s and, potentially, the life of the lover who will kill them both? There’s only one way to find out: by diving into this rich novel of fate and doomed romance.

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Another engrossing novel with a teen protagonist that I’m hoping to find time for soon is Dur E Aziz Amna’s award-winning American Fever, newly released in paperback!

Hira is a sixteen-year-old Pakistani student on a yearlong exchange program in rural Oregon. A skeptically witty narrator, Hira finds herself stuck between worlds, as she swaps Kashmiri chai for volleyball practice and tries to understand why everyone around her seems to dislike Obama.

At first, her foreign exchange experience is memorable for reasons both good and bad: a first kiss, new friends, racism, Islamophobia, homesickness — all the usual stuff she’d expected and even hoped for (or hoped to avoid) before the trip began. But along the way Hira starts to feel increasingly unwell. After she begins coughing up blood, she receives a diagnosis of tuberculosis, pushing her into quarantine and turning her newly established home away from home upside down.

This winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award For Literature is right up my alley as it explores what it means to come of age as a citizen of the world in 21st century America. I can’t wait to crack it open!

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Our next novel is by a champion of progressive causes, lawyer Mike Papantonio. In addition to being senior partner at a firm that regularly champions the average consumer against the worst excesses of corporate greed, he’s also a media presence as host of America’s Lawyer and co-host of the syndicated radio show Ring of Fire. His latest novel The Middleman is an epic drama of whistleblowers, murder, thrills and legal combat, all torn from today’s headlines.

Nicholas “Deke” Deketomis and his law firm take on America’s Big Pharma when Deke’s college pal Matt Redmond presents him with a case of criminal fraud involving EirePharma, a powerful Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM). PBMs serve as the “middlemen” between drug manufacturers and insurance companies. The Deketomis firm unravels the details about how governmental graft enables PBMs like EirePharma to create America’s catastrophic price gouging crisis.

EirePharma was recently taken over by the charismatic CEO Connor Devlin, who has a Rasputin-like influence over the company’s president. Devlin utilizes racketeering practices — and perhaps even murder — to raise the prices of insulin and other drugs, both for his own profit and to the detriment of consumers.

At great peril to herself, Amy, the president of EirePharma, decides to become her company’s whistleblower and provide evidence to Deke and his team. When key witnesses and even Redmond family members start meeting mysterious and violent deaths, Amy finds herself caught in the center of a frightening and deadly game of wills between a formidable mobster — who in the eyes of the public is a respected businessman — and a law firm that is determined to put an end to the Middleman’s crimes.

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Bestselling Danish author Sara Blaedel is back with the latest installment of the Scandinoir Louise Rick series. A Mother’s Love is the eleventh book featuring her smart, sensitive detective, as Louise takes on a new role with the Danish police.

When innkeeper Dorthe Hyllested is found dead in the idyllic tourist town of Svendborg, the police are surprised to discover a secret toy-strewn room in her upstairs apartment. As far as anyone knows, the widowed Dorthe was childless. So why is there a recently inhabited nursery in her home? More importantly: where is the child now?

Detective Louise Rick is the head of the freshly created Mobile Task Unit, an elite squad charged with solving Denmark’s most difficult cases. With Dorthe’s murder as her first investigation — and the clock ticking on finding the missing child — Louise is dismayed to learn that none of her handpicked group of seasoned investigators have been approved for transfer to her new unit. Instead, she must cobble together a brand-new, unproven team from a group of officers she’s never met. Worst of all, the case will necessitate collaborating with the Missing Persons Department — which means working closely with Louise’s former fiancé Eik, who abruptly broke things off the previous year, leaving her devastated.

Could the mystery of Dorthe’s murder and the hidden child have something to do with the cabin in the woods behind the inn, where men are often seen coming and going at all hours? With no witnesses to Dorthe’s murder and no real leads, and an unproven and potentially untrustworthy team behind her, Louise finds herself grasping at unlikely connections. But the twisted story she uncovers turns out to be darker and more dangerous than she could have ever imagined. . .

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Finally and appropriately given the surreal horrors of everyday life right now, we have Justine Pucella Winans’ How To Survive A Slasher, a smart and funny take on horror tropes that rewrites what it takes and means to survive.

Few people can say that they faced the infamous Satterville Wolf Man and lived. But CJ Smith can. She doesn’t care to talk about that, though.

CJ, you see, has survived the horror movie that is her life by following one unbreakable rule: blend in and stay out of things. That’s hard to do when your trauma gets turned into a bestselling book series tho. The Slasherville books are a true crime phenomenon, documenting the Wolf Man massacres that changed CJ’s life forever. CJ hates everything about the books and their fans, but at this point she’s just grateful that there aren’t any more murders to write about.

Until, that is, the day that an unpublished Slasherville book shows up on her doorstep, predicting new Wolf Man killings. CJ is sure that it’s just a bad prank. But then the events detailed in the book start coming true. CJ breaks her one rule and is horrified when the Final Girl – the person who, according to the book, was supposed to stop the Wolf Man – ends up dead. Suddenly, blending in and staying out of things is no longer an option. CJ will have to use everything she knows about the rules of horror to make it out alive.

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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 in my Bookshop storefront linked below!