Happy release week to author Emily Renk Hawthorne! From the Depths is now available!
If you enjoyed Black Water Sister, Daughter of the Moon Goddess, or The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, you will enjoy Of Mountains and Seas—a Chinese mythology–inspired urban fantasy duology set in California.
From The Depths (Of Mountains and Seas #2
Release Date: June 9, 2026
Genre: Urban Fantasy
In the wake of a failed coup, peace comes at a cost.
A new regime enforces order by erasing the memories of every Shifter.
But Nivi remembers everything.
Immune to the memory-wiping tincture that silenced her kind, Nivi carries the weight of the past alone. Her powers set her apart, but so does the truth she can’t forget. Once again, Nivi finds herself isolated from her family and friends, and something begins to fracture, within herself and within the forest of her hometown Yuras.
Strange happenings are accumulating. A road of abandoned homes in Yuras. A missing crabbing crew in Alaska. A student abduction at the local Shifter school.
With danger creeping closer and reality unraveling for both Shifters and Statics, will the fight for what’s been lost be worth unearthing truths they fear?
When you are a prisoner of your secrets, the death of shame is the only path to liberty
Annabel Banks was promised work as a maid with a prestigious Edinburgh family. But on her first day, she’s nowhere to be found. Concerned relatives contact Sarah Fisher to help. Sarah might know her way around the city – its light sides and dark – but soon she’ll discover the plight of dozens of girls ensnared in its many brothels: lured, abused and left ruined in the eyes of the world.
Meanwhile, a prominent society figure throws himself from the Scott Monument. Will Raven is asked to establish whether the death was suicide or if someone else was involved. Drawing upon real historical events, The Death of Shame takes the Raven and Fisher series into a treacherous labyrinth of shame and the pitfalls of a culture obsessed with moral purity.
Ambrose Parry is a pseudonym for a collaboration between Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman. The couple are married and live in Scotland. Chris Brookmyre is the international bestselling and multi-award-winning author of over twenty novels. Dr Marisa Haetzman is a consultant anaesthetist of twenty years’ experience, whose research for her Master’s degree in the History of Medicine uncovered the material upon which this series, which begun with The Way of All Flesh, is based. The Way of all Flesh was longlisted for both the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award and the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year. @ambroseparry
My thoughts: i really like this series, probably because it’s well written, well researched and the cases are so fascinating. Blending historical figures of Edinburgh’s past with the fictional Will Raven and Sarah Fisher, who dig into mysteries surrounding the medical fraternity of the city.
This time, it’s Will’s father-in-law at the centre of the case. Having apparently committed suicide, from the Scott Monument, but Will’s wife, Eugenie, insists her father would never do that. Will discovers that he was being blackmailed. Could that be why the eminent doctor took his own life?
Meanwhile Sarah has been asked to find her late husband’s niece, Annabel, who arrived in Edinburgh for a job as a nursery maid but then disappeared. Has she met a terrible end or is she as tough as Sarah and somehow survived?
As Will and Sarah investigate, an unwanted figure from Will’s estranged family appears and Sarah finds herself in terrible danger.
Another absolutely gripping adventure for the two doctors (Sarah’s determined to be one) and investigators, which finally also gives us some answers about their relationship too.
*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 book tour for Once Upon a Midnight Walk by Tetyana Walker!
Once Upon a Midnight Walk
Release Date: April 24, 2026
Genre: Romantic Fantasy
Strong and cunning heroine
Forced partnership
Slow burn romance
Enemies to lovers
“Who did this to you”
A LOT of bickering & yearning
Angst and tension with historical romance undertones
In a kingdom where the sun never sets, and only men are born with magic, Agnes Peregreene had to grow up entirely too soon.
After her mother’s death, Agnes devoted her life to caring for her younger sister. Bound by a vow she refused to break, she ensured no price was too great for Solomia’s well-being. But when Solomia is betrothed to a known wife-killer, Agnes is forced to confront the reality of her own powerlessness.
Before Agnes can find a way to save her sister, she is handed a death sentence of her own.
Desperate to buy time, she strikes a frantic bargain with the Aclanian king—she will venture into Nocturna, the realm of ever-night, and retrieve a long-lost talisman in exchange for her life and her sister’s freedom.
Lost in a realm unlike any other, Agnes must rely on her cunning mind to survive. Determined to return home successful, she sets on a path of discovery, unraveling secrets that a mysterious and wealthy man named Odeon Nox has spent years trying to keep buried.
Secrets that come with a price neither one of them is prepared to pay.
Step into this standalone fantasy romance, set between a realm of sunlight and castles and a world of night and cities rivaling 1920s New York.
Every choice has a price, and every heart hides a secret.
For fans of Jane Austen, Sarah J. Maas and V.E Schwab
Or at least, that’s how it was supposed to go. Kova of Stormwatch made a promise when she left her mother and sweetheart weeping on the shore back home: she’d earn her fortune slaying the beasts that haunt the woods and the horrors that lurk in the shadows, or she would die trying. But to do that, she needs an apprenticeship with a master monster hunter. The best of the best: Sayre Boarbane.
Pity that Sayre works alone.
When Sayre drags Kova home by the ear, they’re both in for a rude awakening. Kova’s mother? Missing. Kova’s lover? Taking long walks on the beach with a stranger.
And all those monsters Kova wanted to slay? They’re back in Stormwatch, dragging villagers into the ocean.
Discover nine dark and twisted mysteries from bestselling author Rachel Amphlett in this second collection of disturbing short stories.
This second page-turning collection features The Date, in which Lucy and Michael meet every year for a sinister anniversary; in All Night Long Zoe soon wishes she wasn’t working the late shift; and in A Burning Question a young Detective Kay Hunter suspects a serial arsonist is targeting a small community of river dwellers with chilling results…
Case Files: Collected Short Crime Stories Volume 2: The Date The Back Nine The Protégé Devil of a Favor Six Underground Three Ways to Die A Toxic Remedy All Night Long A Burning Question
Case Files: short crime fiction stories that will have you on the edge of your seat.
Before turning to writing, USA Today bestselling crime author Rachel Amphlett played guitar in bands, worked as a TV and film extra, dabbled in radio, and worked in publishing as an editorial assistant.
She now wields a pen instead of a plectrum and writes crime fiction with over 30 crime novels and short stories featuring spies, detectives, vigilantes, and assassins.
A keen traveller and accidental private investigator, Rachel has both Australian and British citizenship.
My thoughts: This collection of short crime stories is enjoyable and clever. Some of the stories are very short, clever little snapshots of killers and thieves, detectives and alligators!
I really liked these bite size tales, some self contained and others feel like little bits of much bigger stories. Perfect for dipping into when you need a crime fix.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
A woman vanishes from a remote lake in Cumbria. All that’s left behind are her abandoned clothes, a ringing phone, and a stretch of dark water that won’t give her back. And everyone here knows that Sleddale Tarn keeps its silence.
Moses Crow knows this place too. He grew up here, before he went to prison, before he became the kind of man who scans every room for the nearest exit. When the case reignites rumours about a girl who disappeared in the local caves, Moses is summoned home to help the family who raised him keep the police at arm’s length.
As the search intensifies, so does the question he’s been avoiding for decades: what really happened here, all those years ago? And what will it cost to drag the family’s secrets into the light?
David Mark spent more than fifteen years as a journalist, including seven years as a crime reporter with the Yorkshire Post, before becoming an author. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Dark Winter and has been championed by Val McDermid, Peter James, Mick Herron and Martina Cole. He lives in rural Northumberland with his family.
My thoughts: Moses was fostered by the wealthy and messed up family, the Rinkov-Torsneys, at the centre of this book. When Oksana, the carer for patriarch Andrei drowns despite being a strong swimmer, his brother Hugo calls on him to return to the family home and look after things.
When first a journalist, and then a former police inspector appear, both following the death and a string of other similar drownings, Moses is in their sights but he knows he didn’t kill anyone, so who did?
Intense, sinister and compelling, this book hooks you in and carries you along with Moses as he attempts to unravel the family’s dark secrets and find a killer.
*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 ARC tour for Cast Off by Enola M. Douglas – Available July 10th!
Cast Off (Jewels of the Nine Kingdoms Book 2) Expected Release Date: July 10, 2026 Genre: Romantasy/ Why Choose
• Arranged marriage
• Omegaverse
• Royalty
• Court Intrigue
• Forced Proximity
• Found Family
• Healer FMC / Warrior MMC
• Mutual pining
• Slow Burn
• Hurt/Comfort
• Touch her & Di3
• Second Chances
• Grovelling
• Chronic Pain/Disability Rep
• Interracial Marriage
An arranged marriage. A fragile alliance. A love neither thought possible.
Omega Princess JingYi of Xûen-Sarai has always lived in the shadows—unseen, unwanted, valued only for her skill as a healer. When she’s sent to marry a powerful Alpha lord in a distant kingdom, she sees it as an escape. A chance to reclaim her dignity.
Alpha Lord Alexander Wulfbane expects a flawless bride to restore his disgraced House—but the Omega who arrives is nothing like he imagined. The moment their eyes meet, disappointment lingers, and their fragile alliance begins to fray.
But beyond the cold marriage bed and strained diplomacy, a darker plot is brewing. Across the realm, Omegas are vanishing—and whispers of a forbidden substance threaten to destabilize the Nine Kingdoms. To survive, JingYi and Alexander must become more than a political match.
She’s not the bride he wants.
And she never asks him to be her hero.
But when the storm comes, they’ll have to choose—
stand together or be swept away.
Cast Off can be read as a standalone—but for the fullest plunge into the Nine Kingdoms, start with WHISKED AWAY. It’s the gateway that sets up the world, politics, and payoffs you’ll feel even harder in Book Two.
Note: Cast Off is an Omegaverse fantasy romance. It is Book Two in Jewels of the Nine Kingdoms—a series of interconnected stories, each following different main characters or pairings, all bound by a shared world and a central conflict. This book can be read on its own—but Whisked Away (Book 1) offers deeper context and emotional resonance within the overarching plot.
A Hollywood idol. The Virgin Mary. An everyday girl from Hull. Three women, three eras, surprising things in common.
On the night she should have died, Marilyn Monroe has a visitor who changes her life. The Virgin Mary appears in her kitchen with a message. Inspired, Marilyn abandons her home, her life, her fame, and disappears into the night…
Fifty-four years later, in a Hull kitchen, Flora Baker finds Mary, bathed in light. She has a similar message for the working class woman on the poverty line. Flora makes changes that impact not only her life but the lives of those around her…
Do Marilyn and Flora have more in common than Mary’s visit? Are they linked across time? And is Mary’s message for all the women of the world? Wonderful is about the way women are portrayed in both history and the world of celebrity, about women not being quiet, and about women united by the shared stories that shape them.
As a child, Louise Beech told everyone she was going to be a world-famous novelist one day. She once bet her mum ten pounds that she’d be published by thirty – her first newspaper column was published when she was thirty-one. She finally got a publishing deal in 2015 with Orenda Books.
Her debut, How to be Brave (2015), got to No4 on Amazon and was a Guardian Readers’ Pick; Maria in the Moon (2017) was described as ‘quirky, darkly comic and heartfelt’ by the Sunday Mirror; The Lion Tamer Who Lost (2018) shortlisted for the Popular Romantic Novel of 2019 at the RNA Awards and long listed for the Polari Prize 2019; Call Me Star Girl (2019) long listed for the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize and was Best magazine’s Best Book of the Year 2019; and I Am Dust (2020) was a Crime Magazine Monthly pick. This Is How We Are Human was published in June 2021. Louise still hasn’t given her mum that tenner though.
Louise also writes under the name Louise Swanson, and her first book in that guise, End of Story, was published in March 2023 by Hodder & Stoughton and her second, Lights Out, in September 2024. Her play, How to be Brave, toured in 2024. Wonderful was published June 2026.
My thoughts: I, like the author and Flora in the book, love Marilyn Monroe, I am fascinated by her and she talents, she could have gone on to be an even more incredible actor if she hadn’t died at 36.
Which is where this book starts, instead of dying, she disappears and starts over, using her new life to do something good and help other women, women like her who need support and care.
Flora lives in Hull, caring for her mentally ill sister Bella, working in a club and trying to keep her head above water. CARE runs a shelter for women and once took in her sister when she needed help. When the Virgin Mary appears to Flora and tells her to volunteer there and Bella will be ok.
Slowly Marilyn and Flora’s lives come together and the coincidences that bring them together, including another brief appearance from Mary (who I agree with Marilyn, I wish we knew more about her, and her life (I know she ran a catering firm – it’s in the Bible))
It’s genuinely a lovely book, a lovely story and left me with a smile on my face. I wish Marilyn’s story had ended like this, much happier and less tragic than it did in this life, maybe in another universe somewhere it did.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
When Jen Monroe hears her father’s remains have been found, she returns home to disprove his death, only to find the forests of rural Washington are hiding something ancient and dangerous…
Seven years ago, Jen Monroe left behind her hometown of Barrow, Washington after her father, a forest ranger passionate about protecting old trees from the aggressive logging business that runs their small town, vanished seemingly into thin air. She vowed never to return…until she gets a text from her estranged mother. Her father’s remains have been found.
It seems impossibleto Jen who has always believed her father is still alive, and she returns home, determined to find out what really happened. When her ex-boyfriend proposes a camping trip into the woods in her father’s memory, it feels like the opportunity Jen had been hoping for: to find her father. To find the truth.
But what she finds lurking in the forest may be deeper, darker and deadlier than she could have ever imagined. And it has no intention of letting her leave.
Unsettling, tense, and atmospheric, this is a feminist suspense novel for those who have always known there’s something hungry waiting in the woods.
My thoughts: If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise…sadly not a teddy bears’ picnic but the forest fighting back. Those ancient trees of the Pacific Northwest of America, thousands of years older, possibly growing before any humans set foot on the land.
The town of Barrow is a logging town, her ex-boyfriend’s family own the company that cuts down the trees and employs many of the residents. Her dad was an employee of the forest service and loved the ancient trees the most, fighting to protect and preserve them.
Jen’s return and the decision to head into the forest to find out what really happened to her dad, accompanied by her old friends and a few new faces ends in something dark and terrifying (if you’re not nice to the trees, why should they be nice to you?).
There are some pretty old trees near me, here in the UK, might go pat them gently and ask them not to sacrifice me to the hulderfolk please. I’m quite fond of woods and trees so hopefully they’ll be nice and not eat me. Genuinely creepy book, this. Don’t read it on a camping trip or you won’t sleep.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
It’s a TV drama with a set full of secrets, but who’s calling the shots?
A dream role in a hit TV drama is not all it seems when actor Holly Elding is warned to turn down the part and run for her life!
A missing actress, a superyacht full of stolen art, an FBI man with a hidden agenda, a chateauset to burst into flames, a love triangle and a web of deceit.
Can Holly and disgraced cop turned stuntman Josh Corton bring down the gang before they’re written out for good?
A fast -moving adventure thriller set in England, Spain, the Greek islands and France.
As a TV reporter, producer and newsreader for both BBC East and ITV Anglia, Phil Johnson covered everything from tracking down criminals in Spain and going on high octane-police chases, to interviewing pop stars, politicians and celebrities. Writing as PN Johnson, Phil’s books aim to entertain, with thrilling crime mysteries in exciting locations.
My thoughts: The scam being run is clever but the criminals haven’t been as smart as they thought when actor Holly and stuntman Josh catch on to their scheme. Chasing the stolen items across Europe with the help of Spanish police inspector Blanca, they thwart kidnappers and thieves, gunmen and escape from an exploding chateau. Action packed indeed!
If Holly and Josh ever decide to quit acting, they’d make quite the investigative duo.
Really entertaining and enjoyable adventure and a satisfying ending as the bad guys go down for their crimes and the brave duo finally admit their feelings for one another. What might they uncover on their next acting gig?
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 