November favorites

The Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict.  St, Martin's Press, 11 February 2025.

London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder, that of a young woman found strangled in a park in France who may have connections leading to the highest levels of the British establishment.

May Daniels, a young English nurse on an excursion to France with her friend, seemed to vanish into thin air as they prepared to board a ferry home. Months later, her body is found in the nearby woods. The murder has all the hallmarks of a locked room mystery for which these authors are famous: how did her killer manage to sneak her body out of a crowded train station without anyone noticing?

The Magpie Oracle of Sense and Serendipity by Ciara Blume.  Dolce Villa Press, 30 September 2025.

When the elusive Djinn Night Market appears under each crescent moon, it draws the lost and the searching to its shimmering alleys. Everyone arrives seeking something that’s missing, but what visitors leave with is rarely what they came looking for.

Coriander just wanted one last chance to dine with her mother, so she made a reservation at the Afterlife Cafe. Rosie desperately needs to locate the stolen grimoire that holds the key to her true power and identity. And Barzilay, keeper of memories and dragons, and a guide for lost souls, must somehow find his way home after forgetting his own story.

As a cryptic oracle floods Primrose Court with magical warnings and gossip-filled prophecies, all paths seem to lead back to the Night Market. But with time slipping away and second chances growing scarce, will three lost souls discover their role in mending not just their own hearts, but each other as well?

A spellbinding tale of healing, chosen family, and the magic that lives in small moments. It also features a sentient bookshop, literary squirrels, and the never ending quest for the perfect wedge of cheese.

Beach Reads and Deadly Deeds by Alison Brennan.  MIRA Books, 17 June 2025.

Mia Crawford is responsible to a fault. She has to be. Between her high-demand job and taking care of her grandmother and her cats, she has little time for anything else. What time she does have, she pours into reading. Mysteries, romances, thrillers…books filled with women who are far more impulsive than she would ever dream of being. Now, forced into
taking a long-overdue vacation, she finds herself on a luxurious private island where she just might have a chance to reinvent herself—for a little while, anyway. She can explore the island. Flirt shamelessly with a cute bartender. Have a vacation fling. Live like a heroine in one of her favorite novels.

Or she can curl up with a good book on the beach. Turns out reinventing yourself is easier planned than done. But when gossipy notes written in the margins of an old book turn out to be clues to the disappearance of another guest, Mia finds herself diving headfirst into a dangerous adventure. With everyone at the resort hiding secrets of their own, she’ll have to solve this real-life mystery before she becomes the next target. 

Wexford Carole (Imogen Durant Mysteries #2) by Janice MacDonald.  Ravenstone Books, 22 October 2025.

After all the drama during her last trip, Imogene Durant is looking forward to spending some time in the Irish countryside, visiting with an old school friend and working on the edits for her new book. With good food, friends and lots of comfy sweaters, her idyllic surroundings are rudely interrupted when a young woman with a bright future is found dead and worse, Imogene’s friend’s daughter is accused of the crime.

Witches of Dubious Origin by Jenn McKinlay.  Ace, 28 October 2025.

Zoe Ziakas enjoys a quiet life, working as a librarian in her quaint New England town. When a mysterious black book with an unbreakable latch is delivered to the library, Zoe has a strange feeling the tome is somehow calling to her. She decides to consult the Museum of Literature, home to volumes of indecipherable secrets, some possessing dark magic that must be guarded.

Here, among their most dangerous collection, the Books of Dubious Origin, Zoe discovers that she is the last descendant of a family of witches and this little black book is their grimoire. Zoe knows she must decode the family’s spell book and solve the mystery of what happened to her mother and her grandmother. 

With assistance from the eccentric staff of the Books of Dubious Origin department—including their annoyingly smart and handsome containment specialist, Jasper Griffin—Zoe must confront her past and the legacy of her family. 

A Resistance of Witches by Morgan Ryan.  Viking, 15 July 2025.

Stubborn, plain-spoken and from an unimpressive family, Lydia Polk never expected to be accepted into the Royal Academy of Witches. Now, with Hitler’s army rampaging across Europe, the witches of Britain have joined the war effort, and Lydia is key to the cause: she must use her magic to track down magical relics before Hitler and his sycophants can. When a Nazi witch infiltrates the Academy with heart-breaking consequences, the coven is left shaken, exposed and divided. The elder British witches have no interest in further loss of coven life in service of a government that has forced them into hiding for decades, no matter the consequences to the world. But with the discovery of the Grimorium Bellum, an ancient book that leaves a trail of death and destruction wherever it goes, Lydia knows her mission has never been more urgent.

Alone and woefully outnumbered, Lydia makes her way to the heart of occupied France, where she finds allies in Rebecca Gagne—a fierce French resistance fighter chockful of secrets—and Henry Boudreaux—a handsome Haitian-American art historian with a little magic of his own. Together, they traverse the country, stalked by the natural and supernatural alike, in search of the grimoire. But, as Lydia soon discovers, finding the book is only half the battle—the Grimorium Bellum has a dark agenda all its own. Lydia must subdue it before the Witches of the Third Reich can use it—but first, she’ll have to survive the book herself.

April favorites

The Witches Catalogue of Wanderlust Essentials by Ciara Blume.  Dolce Villa Press, 6 May 2025.

Zani, a vampire-slaying, relic-hunting witch whose satchel is always packed for adventure, faces her most mortifying mishap yet: losing a dangerously enchanted artifact. Just her luck that the bloodstone amulet goes missing right before an eclipse that could awaken its curse.

Enter Will, a half-fae rogue with the rare gift of opening portals through space and time. He’s always admired Zani's adventurous spirit from afar. When she approaches him with the request to journey through history to help her recover the bloodstone, he can't resist the opportunity—or her company.

The Library of Lost Dollhouses by Elise Hooper.  HarperCollins, 1 April 2025.

Tildy Barrows, Head Curator of a beautiful archival library in San Francisco, is meticulously dedicated to the century’s worth of inventory housed in her beloved Beaux Art building. She loves the calm and order in the shelves of books and walls of art. But Tildy’s life takes an unexpected turn when she, first, learns the library is on the verge of bankruptcy and, second, discovers two exquisite never-before-seen dollhouses.

After finding clues hidden within these remarkable miniatures, Tildy sets out to decipher the secret history of the dollhouses, aiming to salvage her cherished library in the process. Her journey introduces her to a world of ambitious and gifted women in Belle Époque Paris, a group of scarred World War I veterans in the English countryside, and Walt Disney’s bustling Burbank studio in the 1950s. As Tildy unravels the mystery, she finds not only inspiring, hidden history, but also a future for herself—and an astonishing familial revelation.

The Champagne Letters by Kate MacIntosh.  Gallery Books, 10 December 2024.

France, 1805: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot has just lost her beloved husband but is determined to pursue their dream of creating the premier champagne house in France, now named for her new identity as a widow: Veuve Clicquot. With the Russians poised to invade, competitors fighting for her customers, and the Napoleonic court politics complicating matters she must set herself apart quickly and permanently if she, and her business, are to survive.

Chicago, Present day: broken from her divorce, Natalie Taylor runs away to Paris. In a book stall by the Seine, Natalie finds a collection of the Widow Clicquot’s published letters and uses them as inspiration to step out of her comfort zone and create a new, empowered life for herself. But when her Parisian escape takes a shocking and unexpected turn, she’s forced to make a choice. Should she accept her losses and return home, or fight for the future she’s only dreamed about? 

The Secrets of Flowers by Sally Page.  Blackstone Publishing, 25 February 2025.

A heartwarming novel about a grieving woman who rediscovers herself by uncovering the lost story of the girl who arranged flowers on the Titanic. 

One year after her husband's death, Emma has become a wallflower, hiding among the brighter blooms in the florist shop where she works.

But when a colleague invites her to a talk on the Titanic, she begins a quest to uncover who arranged the flowers on board.

As Emma discovers the lost story of the girl and the great ship, she realizes that flowers may unlock long-buried secrets in her own life.

The Otherwhere Post by Emily J. Taylor.  Penguin Young Readers, 25 February 2025.

Seven years ago, Maeve Abenthy lost everything: her world, her father, even her name. Desperate to escape the stain of her father’s crimes, she lives under a fake name, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots.

Then she receives a mysterious letter with four impossible words: Your father was innocent.
To uncover the truth, she poses as an apprentice for the Otherwhere Post, where she’ll be trained in the art of scriptomancy—the dangerous magic that allows couriers to enchant letters and deliver them to other worlds. But looking into her father’s past draws more attention than she’d planned...

Her secretive, infuriating mentor knows she’s lying about her identity, and time is running out to convince him to trust her. Worse, she begins to receive threatening letters, warning her to drop her investigation—or else. 

March favorites

 

The Mudpuddle Manual of Natural Magic by Ciara Blume.  Dolce Villa Press,                                  1 October 2024.

The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes.  William Morrow, 4 March 2025.

The Perfect Passion Company by Alexander McCall Smith.  Knopf Doubleday,                               13 February 2024.

The Year of What If by Phaedra Patrick.  Park Row Books, 25 June 2024.