Either her husband is crazy, or he is lying, or he is telling the truth and can really communicate with spirits of the deceased. Each possibility is more frightening to Evelyn than the prior, for she holds a dark secret that Robert or his Spiritualist medium companions might discover from a ghost and memory that still haunts her.
I greatly enjoyed The Killing Spell, the debut urban fantasy novel by Shay Kauwe. I’ll admit that the first chapter was a little challenging for me, because the protagonist, Kea Petrova, starts out feeling a bit overwhelmed by her family responsibilities as the young head of a household, with siblings and cousins to support, and a somewhat unreliable magical talent. She continues to be off balance and seemingly gets in over her head when a political activist is assassinated and she becomes responsible for figuring out the killing spell and tracking down the killer, but eventually she hits her stride and finds some allies. She learns that she is most powerful when she stops trying to do everything by herself and leans into her heritage and her people’s connections with nature.
Mary Anning was a real-life professional fossil collector and dealer in the first half of the 19th century; given the breadth and depth of her knowledge, she was also a paleontologist, but that wasn’t officially acknowledged until after her death, since she was a woman and therefore ineligible to join the Geological Society of London. In her excellent debut novel The Geomagician (coming March 31), Jennifer Mandula reimagines Mary as a woman living in a world with magic, in which fossils are the best medium for storing magical power. Hunting for freshly exposed fossils after a landslide, she is thrilled to discover a pterodactyl skeleton — and then one of the fossilized eggs comes to life and hatches in her hands! Mary is suddenly faced with new opportunities in her life, and new challenges.
Black Ambrosia is quiet, introspective and slowly draws the reader into the mind of its unreliable protagonist Angelina’s mind, slowly revealing the building consequences of her thoughts and actions.
Using medical logs and other ship records, Dorothy quickly finds out the baby’s genetic heritage, but its origins are still swaddled in mystery. There’s a highly suspicious gap in the memory of someone who really ought to know what happened, so Dorothy has to do a bit of digging to find out the motives of several people involved (or not) with this little bundle of joy.
An amazing new talent has burst onto the Southern Gothic horror scene. On Sundays She Picked Flowers is the self-published debut novel of Yah Yah Scholfield, but I sure wouldn’t have guessed that from the text (reissued Jan. 27, 2026 by Saga Press). Protagonist Jude is a fa character, the environment she lives in is rich enough to sink into it, the love story is disturbing yet striking, and in the end, Jude finds a way to make peace with her violent past and her current situation. Violent? Oh, yes, this book contains very graphic violence, from beatings to fights and homicides, with very messy results. It is deliberatively transgressive along several other axes, too, but for the story, not for shock value. Nothing feels cheap or sensational here, but rather, thoughtful and deeply felt (and often sensual).
