We’re thrilled to be touring A Night of Falling Stars by Lucia Damisa this week! This is the book three in the Desert of Bleeding Sand series!
A Night of Falling Stars (A Desert of Bleeding Sand Series Book 3)
Release Date: July 8, 2026
Genre: Epic Romantasy/ Young Adult
Covert Artist: Olha Volkov
War descends upon Thalesai in a storm of falling stars and growing darkness.
I never sought command, yet I, Dathan, have been chosen to lead our soldiers against the relentless Wraith Kingdom. But before the first horn sounds, I am already fighting a battle of my own.
Zair—my brave, stubborn, beautiful Zair—has been attacked by our enemies. The thought of losing her shatters me more than any blade. I would burn kingdoms for her.
And rising from the shadows is the man who once threatened all I hold dear. Cloaked in a magical disguise only I can see through, he seeks my title, my past exposed, and my family’s ruin.
With danger hunting Zair and wraiths stalking my dragon, every step forward feels like a war in itself. With Aine, a conflicted wraith spy, at our side, Zair and I must lead our people into a battle that could save our realm… or cost us everything.
A city-wide conspiracy. A serial killer on the loose. A detective battling her own demons.
If pain is the price of strength, Grace is one of the strongest people you will ever meet. Five crime scenes connected by a visible pattern. A serial killer terrorizes the citizens of Jacksonville, and the entire police force is focused on cracking the case—but will they be able to stop the murderer before more bodies are found?
Three suspects who all tell a different story. Homicide detective Grace Hartwellʼs knack for reading people has never let her down—until now. Is the killer playing a clever game or is she losing touch with herself? One determined detective with a taste for justice.
Grace’s life is dedicated to her work. But she has a dark secret—a secret that could jeopardize not only her job but her life . . .
Wendy Church is a Seattle-based author known for fast-paced and sometimes humorous crime fiction novels.
Her latest, Five Things I See, is to-date her darkest, and most psychologically complex book that Kirkus referred to as “A textbook case of how to make a police procedural pulse with energy.ˮ
Wendyʼs debut, Murder on the Spanish Seas, was named a Booklist Top Ten Debut Mystery/Thriller novel of 2023, and introduces Jesse OʼHara, an introverted and often inebriated woman with a million dollar brain and a ten-cent personality who travels to interesting places and solves crimes, sometimes on purpose.
Knife Skills, the first in Wendyʼs Shadows of Chicago series, follows a talented chef who is forced to work for the FBI. Knife Skills received a starred review from Kirkus, “Audiences who wish the TV series The Bear could make room for Russian mobsters are in for a treat.”
Wendyʼs propulsive novels are informed by her international travel and many careers. Sheʼs been a bartender, tennis pro, management consultant, nonprofit CEO, PhD researcher, and dive bar cleaner. When sheʼs not writing, doing research, or reading, Wendy spends time with her partner as full time personal valets to a dog and two cats.
My thoughts: Grace is an excellent detective, but has a habit of going off on her own and not always communicating with her colleagues. She has a theory about the killer and is determined to follow it, despite being told by her boss to stop digging.
Instead she finds a friend, a man in hiding, a former detective in witness protection, and someone she can test her theories out on, especially as a new colleague on the team is annoying her.
But Grace has secrets, her childhood was brutal and it’s left its marks. Marks she isn’t always totally aware of. Things only her psychiatrist knows. If the sheriffs office found out, she’d lose her job, and she has a killer to catch.
I really liked Grace, she’s complicated and brilliant, a smart and savvy detective, who won’t let anyone stop her from solving her cases, she sees things others miss and puts things together. She doesn’t trust easily and has few friends, which is understandable when you know about her childhood and how much she’s suffered.
Her secrets and how hard she works to keep them could be her downfall, but could also help her in solving cases, depending on how she uses them. I look forward to her next case, I’m intrigued to see where this goes.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
Welcome to the tour for Beach Club Bloodshed. Perfect for fans of summer reads and cozy mystery! Read now on Kindle Unlimited!
Beach Club Bloodshed (Barefoot Sleuth Cozy Mysteries Book 1)
Release Date: August 2025
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Tropical Setting
Slow Burn
Amateur Sleuth
Found Family
Murder
Summer Jenkins day just went from bad to a downright dumpster fire.
First, there’s the dead body covered in stab wounds. Then, she finds out her best friend Lani’s missing and considered a person of interest in the murder.
With Lani MIA, everyone is looking to Summer for answers, including one hot hunk of a detective, Cole Peterson.
Detective Hottie, uh, Peterson, is a complication Summer doesn’t need right now. He senses Summer’s hiding something behind those pretty blue eyes, but when she becomes a victim of a hit and run, all of his protective instincts emerge as Summer gets drawn farther into the web of intrigue.
As the accidents start to pile up, Summer takes matters into her own hands and lands herself in hot water with a Yakuza boss, a Russian oligarch, and Auntie Miriam.
She can’t decide who’s scarier…
With the stunning backdrop of the Big Island’s Kohala Coast and a cast of quirky characters, this story is anything but a typical murder mystery.
Beach Club Bloodshed will keep you on the edge of your seat as Summer and her friends race against time to solve the murder and clear their names.
Detective Elinor Saxby thinks she’s found her perfect rural retreat: a crooked little cottage amid the towering pines of the New Forest. But bad things still happen in beautiful places . . .
On a lonely stretch of shingle, where the Solent laps the forest’s edge, something terrible is about to wash ashore. The bloated body of a young man. Several days dead. A ragged wound gapes in his chest. Because this was no accident. He’s been shot at close range, then dumped.
City cop Elinor’s on the case — and utterly out of her depth. The frosty coastguard tells Elinor the victim is a stranger. From out of town. But Elinor would swear she knows more than she’s saying . . .
Before long, a second body is discovered deep in the forest. Same wound. Same cold-blooded MO. Same killer?
It’s up to Elinor to unravel the truth from the lies, before more victims die. But she’d better watch her back.Because here in the New Forest, secrets run deeper — and darker — than the murky waters of the Solent itself.
Trusting the wrong person might just cost Elinor everything . . .
Linda Mather is the author of the Jo and Macy Mystery series. The 6th book in this series is THE PERFECT HOUSE FOR MURDER, published in August 2023.
Her Jo and Macy Mystery books are Forecast Murder, A Sign for Murder, Murder as Predicted, The Hanged Man and A Future Murder, all published by Joffe Books and available on Amazon. They feature Jo Hughes and her private investigator boss David Macy. Jo is an astrologer, who also works as a PI and whose tenacious inquiries lead her to twisty resolutions.
The Jo and Macy Mysteries series is set in the West Midlands and Cotswolds. A sense of place is really important to Linda. She likes to research the places she writes about by visiting when she can to absorb the atmosphere, weaving the details into the stories.
The idea for her latest book came to her during lockdown during many canal walks. The cottages with their flower-filled window boxes and the idyllic pubs along the canal path are so pretty and perfect that it looks as if nothing bad could ever happen there. Linda saw this as a challenge.
Linda has recently landed a contract for 3 books in a police thriller series and is currently writing the first of these, which is set in the New Forest.
She also has plans for the next Jo & Macy Mystery.
My thoughts: Elinor is still trying to find her feet in this new role, her predecessor casts a long shadow and she feels her team don’t always listen, and neither do her superiors.
When a body washes ashore with a gunshot wound, and the coastguard volunteer claims not to recognise the victim, she’s suspicious. Then when another person is killed in the same manner, but this time on land, she and her team know something strange is going on.
I really like Nancy, the DC, she’s new to the role and still learning but has good instincts and a determination to get to the truth, although this does sometimes lead her to go off on her own and put herself at risk.
Elinor is a good detective, she’s got lots of experience and knowledge, but she doesn’t really understand the place or the people yet. The New Forest is very different from inner city Birmingham, and the people aren’t always keen on incomers.
This case follows the adage that murder is always about money or love, sometimes both. There’s plenty of twists and turns, unreliable witnesses and suspicious goings on. The team will have to separate truth from lies to solve it, and with suspects pointing fingers at each other, work out what really happened.
A really enjoyable second outing for this team of detectives and with more of their personal lives, they feel more rounded and interesting as characters. Very good.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
Introvert and self-described whodunnit enthusiast Viviane has never much believed in living life outside of the pages of a book. But when her interfering mother insists that Viviane needs some friends who aren’t fictional, she decides to head into the beautiful bustling streets of Porto in search of her community.
What better place to start than by reading her favourite mystery in the corner of a little-known café?
But when one, then two, and then outrageously six other people decide to join her silent book club Viviane realises that she is firmly out of her depth. There’s Thomas, a middle-aged man hiding his love for romance novels, Lucinda, a chic sixty-something with a penchant for Christie, and then there’s Tiago, the man of every romance novelist’s dreams.
But when one of these newfound friends disappears from the book club without a word, will the community come together to find their fellow lost soul, and will Viviane find love along the way…?
Rebecca Raisin is an internationally bestselling and RNA awards winning romance writer from Perth, Australia.
Her books are set in stunning locations around the world providing a touch of escapism for her readers and those who like to partake in a spot of armchair travel from the comfort of their own home. Rebecca writes quirky heroines who haven’t figured it all out yet but are perfectly relatable, flaws and all. You’ll find themes such as friendship, love, new beginnings, food, wine and travel. She’s known for writing books for book lovers.
My thoughts: I loved this, I happen to be going to Porto later this year so it was very nice to be taken there by book.
Viviane is lonely but won’t admit it, like many book lovers her friends are mostly found between the covers of her favourites, but as for real life ones – not so much. So when she accidentally founds a book club (or silent reading group) and finds herself genuinely liking her fellow readers, having outings, talking to them – outrageous!
But when Lucinda, one of the members of the group stops attending and Viviane worries something bad might have happened, like her favourite detective she has to investigate, with Tiago as her sidekick.
Will she find real human connection? Fall in love? Will it be sweet and funny and rather charming? Well, you’ll have to read it to learn the answers to the first two, but it’s a big yes to sweet, funny and charming.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
Welcome to the tour for Dracula in Love by Karen Essex. It’s time for Mina Harker’s story!
Available in all formats
Dracula in Love
Release Date: February 2026
Genre: Gothic Romance
Dracula in Love is a lush, sensual reimagining of Bram Stoker’s classic, told through the eyes of Mina Harker. In Essex’s version, Mina is no passive maiden besieged by darkness, but a woman divided between the life Victorian society demands of her and the dangerous, erotic, supernatural truth awakening inside her.
As Mina is drawn into Dracula’s world, she discovers that desire, memory, and identity are far more complicated than the men around her will admit. The novel transforms the familiar tale of the vampire count into a story of female hunger, forbidden love, and the terrifying cost of self-discovery. At once gothic, romantic, and psychologically intimate, Dracula in Love asks whether the monster is truly the creature in the shadows, or the world that demands women
dampen their own power.
With the dark romance and gothic atmosphere of Anne Rice, the feminist revisionism of The Mists of Avalon, and the erotic, mythic charge of A Discovery of Witches and The Historian, Dracula in Love is perfect for readers who love seductive historical fantasy, dangerous love stories, and classic tales retold from the woman’s point of view.
For fans of Anne Rice, Deborah Harkness, Elizabeth Kostova, Madeline Miller, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and readers who believe Mina Harker deserved the last word.
Itʼs carnival season in New Orleans, and Ricki James-Diaz and her friends from Bon Vee are dressing up for Mardi Gras. Theyʼve joined the notorious krewe of Chew to support Rickiʼs chef boyfriend, Virgil, who is to be crowned this yearʼs king. Itʼs all fun, throws, and over-the-top outfits until the kreweʼs captain is found strangled with his own medallion.
Step 2 – survive the festivities.
The prime suspect is Rickiʼs friend, the deceasedʼs wife who discovered he was cheating on her. It seems a straightforward case, but Ricki isnʼt so sure. The kreweʼs leader had many enemies including his mistress, his krewe co-founder who he ousted, and his college friend whose girlfriend he stole. One thingʼs clear, Rickiʼs at the center of yet another murder investigation. And if sheʼs not careful, her first Mardi Gras could also be her last . . .
Ellen Byron is an Anthony Award-nominated bestselling author and recipient of multiple Agatha and Lefty awards for her Cajun Country Mysteries, Vintage Cookbook Mysteries, and Catering Hall Mysteries (as Maria DiRico).
She is also an award-winning playwright and non-award-winning writer of TV hits like Wings, Just Shoot Me, and Fairly OddParents. Ellen was the 2023 Left Coast Crime Toastmaster but considers her most impressive achievement working as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart.
A native New Yorker, Ellen is a graduate of Tulane University and lives in the Los Angeles area with her husband, daughter, and a rotating crew of rescue pups.
My thoughts: This was a really fun read, New Orleans is high on my list of places I’d like to visit one day, and the period of time leading up to Lent when all the carnival activities take place sounds quite something.
Ricki runs a shop attached to a museum, where she sells pre-loved cookbooks, and all sorts of other things. She enjoys what she does and has made some great friends, as well as having a lovely boyfriend with whom she shares two dogs and a kitten.
A relative newcomer to New Orleans, this is the first time she’s been involved with the Mardi Gras excitement and she’s a bit apprehensive. Then the carnival krewe she’s joined is hit by a shocking tragedy – their captain is murdered in the street outside their kick-off gathering.
The cops immediately decide it was his wife – after all the couple were seen arguing earlier that night. But Ricki’s friendly with the wife, Jessica, in question, and doesn’t agree. So she starts her own investigation. But when other things start happening – including someone literally throwing a bag of rocks at her head, it seems the killer might be more dangerous than she thought.
With the help of her friends, Ricki is determined to solve the case and catch a killer, but is something else going on in the carnival krewe and how far is someone willing to go to get what they want?
A really enjoyable, entertaining book with a fun cast of characters and a clever plot with plenty of twists.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
Welcome to the tour for Capicú Summer by Luna K. Wicked – Now Available!
Capicú Summer: A Summer Barrio Second Chance Romance
Release Date: August 8, 2026
Genre: Romance/Latino/Hispanic
Rivals to lovers
Return to hometown FMC
Family Feud
Love at first sight… again
Forced Proximity
Found Family
Love Triangle
At Altura, summer brings the heat… and the past you thought you left behind.
Five years after she swore she’d never come back, Adriana Santos returns to the block that raised her and to the man who never left it. Yael Cruz still carries the weight of one choice that shattered them both. But when her dying grandfather forces them to work together, old wounds resurface demanding to felt. What starts off as simmer turns into a fire leaving them exposed to their truth.
Porque donde hubo fuego, las cenizas siempre quedan.
And as the summer heat rises, so do the stakes, because the last game has just begun.
Welcome to the tour for Becky Jane Fox’s slowwww burn fantasy romance, Veins of Power!
Veins of Power (Threads of the Fifth Realm Book 1)
Release Date: January 2026
Genre: Epic Fantasy Romance
Slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers tension
Morally grey MMC
Forced proximity & dangerous bargains
Dragons in exile & forbidden magic
A fierce, flawed heroine who would rather set the world on fire than bow to it
Your Next Obsessive Slow-Burn Fantasy Romance: Dragons, Forbidden Magic, and Unbearable Tension!
Meet Lyra Bloom—a sharp-tongued redhead with a quick mind and a volatile vein of magic she can’t quite control.
Raised scraping by in the lawless Outerlands, survival meant learning to fight, lie, and rely on no one but herself until one fatal mistake changes everything.
Captured crossing the border into the Inner Lands, Lyra is dragged into the very world she’s spent her life resenting—and forced into service under the power she swore she’d never bow to.
Inside the walls of the Citadel, her magic grows stronger. Wilder. But so does something else: a rising lust and desire for something she doesn’t truly understand. Something shadowed. Something dangerous. Something that threatens to unravel her—and everything around her.
And as whispers of rebellion spread and dragons strike from exile, Lyra must decide whether she’ll be forged into the weapon the Citadel wants… or become the spark that burns it all down.
This novel is intended for adult readers (18+). It contains explicit sexual content, strong language, violence and peril, injury detail, psychological manipulation, and references to self-harm and suicide. It also includes implied off-page rape and on-page non-consensual sexual contact (kissing, touching). If you are sensitive to any of these themes, please take care while reading.
Violet Manville knows everything about manners—and murder.
Violet is looking forward to taking some time away from the advice column she writes under the nom de plume Miss Hermione. She canʼt wait to head off to Venice to spend some time with Eli Marsh, a mysterious, annoying, and extremely attractive American.
Little does she suspect that the specter of death will come calling at her front door in the person of Ash Kumar, a man she once knew—and loved—when she lived in India. She certainly doesnʼt expect Ash to be arrested for his wifeʼs murder on her front door step. As Violet tries to unravel the murder, she is pulled between between the two men.
As the past and present become blurred, she soon discovers that the truth can be deadly.
For Anastasia Hastings, there is nothing as intriguing as a fog-filled, gas-light street, the clip-clop of a horse pulling a hansom cab, and the possibility of murder and mystery around every corner!
She has been lucky enough to bring it all alive in the Dear Miss Hermione mystery series which follows the adventures of Violet Manville, Victorian Englandʼs most famous (and enigmatic) agony aunt. Book #1, Of Manners and Murder, was a finalist for the 2024 Mary Higgins Clark Award presented by Mystery Writers of America, and The Wall Street Journal said it “evokes the shocking revelations of Wilkie Collins, the social acuity of Jane Austen and the comic melodrama of Oscar Wilde.ˮ Book #2 of the series, Of Hoaxes and Homicide, was called “captivatingˮ by Publishers Weekly.
Under a variety of names and throughout a career than spans more than 30 years, Anastasia has published 70 novels. The Secrets of Bones, written as Kylie Logan, was recently made into a Hallmark Mystery movie.
Anastasia lives in Ohio with her husband and two dogs, an Airedale named Eliot Ness and his best friend (even if he doesnʼt know it yet), Tequila Elizabeth, a Russell Terrier. She enjoys various fiber arts including knitting and spinning, as well as exploring old cemeteries and in the summer, watching the hummingbirds while she contemplates her next murder.
My thoughts: Violet is much more independent than many Victorian women would have been, which means she can investigate crimes as well as write her advice column without the need for worrying about chaperones and she clearly isn’t too worried about what anyone else thinks of her.
At the beginning of the book she’s about to head off to Venice in pursuit of possible love interest Eli. But a blast from the past, in the form of the man she might have married had things been different, Ash Kumar. His wife has recently died and he drops by to see her.
Then he’s arrested for murder, his wife’s. Violet knows he isn’t capable of it, or of the theft of a priceless ruby due to be presented to Queen Victoria. And it turns out Eli isn’t in Venice either, he’s in London, on the case of the stolen ruby.
As Violet works to clear Ash’s name and find the real killer, she keeps coming face to face with Eli. Can she choose between her past love and a possible future with this American detective? Can she catch a killer in time to save Ash from the hangman and celebrate Christmas with her sister Sephora?
It’s a clever and twisting tale, with Violet rushing all over the place, down to Southampton and across to Windsor as the Christmas season spins around her and she struggles to juggle her feelings with her work. It even comes out in the replies she pens as Miss Hermione. With time running out, the answers might be closer to home (Ash’s home, that is) than she first thought. But what does the future hold for them, if anything?
Enjoyable, funny (Sephora is very entertaining) and with a smart and intuitive protagonist in Violet, I think I’ll have to look for the previous volumes of this series soon.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
