Stephens’s middling debut and duology launch sets classic urban fantasy tropes against the backdrop of a contemporary New Orleans teeming with the supernatural. Seraphine “Phine” Barreau has spent a decade hiding from the magical world when she wakes to a magical shock signaling that she has been chosen to succeed her mother as the Prime, most powerful of all witchkin. Her inheriting this position breaks the mold, as the role traditionally alternates between the heads of the two witchkin magical Houses. This, combined with Phine’s special ability as a Syphon, one capable of draining people’s essence or stealing their powers, makes many in the magical world mistrustful of her. But with a mysterious magical blight threatening witchkin, Phine must rebuild relationships with New Orleans’s supernatural communities—encompassing shape-shifters, vampires, and Sidhe—while reestablishing a connection with her older sister, Josephine, the family’s golden child. Not much feels fresh, and the narrative struggles to balance personal and world-altering stakes. Stephens sets up some powerful alliances for Phine and lays the groundwork for a climactic confrontation in the second volume, but readers may be left unsure whether the route there will be enough to hold their interest. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

This unnerving haunted house tale from Pokwatka (The Parliament) elegantly blends domestic drama and psychological horror. Tenn, a former filmmaker who has set aside her ambitions for marriage and motherhood, moves with Ward, her husband of 14 years, and their children into her dream home, which Ward bought for her in hopes of getting their struggling relationship back on track. But as Tenn’s sense of isolation deepens and strange disturbances ripple through the home, she begins to suspect that something malignant has taken root within its walls. Pokwatka pulls taut the line between perception and reality as Tenn questions whether the threat stalking her family is supernatural or born from the quiet accumulation of compromise, expectation, and resentment in her marriage. The author excels at crafting a creepy atmosphere, using shifting perspectives and domestic detail to blur the boundaries between literal haunting and psychological fracture. Though the structural pivots and gradual escalation may test the patience of readers seeking a more immediate payoff, the ambiguity ultimately reinforces the narrative’s emotional core. Interrogating motherhood, identity, and the cost of domestic bliss, this resonant horror story provides much to chew on. Agent: Stacia Decker, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Kelli Reynolds, the autistic heroine of this thrilling, prescient, and emotionally rich sci-fi adventure from Hoffmann (The Outside), is one of the few humans on Jupiter “talented enough to get a steady wage for the kind of work a machine couldn’t do.” She works as a script supervisor for a popular pirate-themed television show produced by Inspiration, the AI megacorporation that bought up the rights to all existing stories and is now the only approved source of information and entertainment. Kelli’s surprised to hear from Rowan, an ex from her school days who has since undergone illegal gender transition, who reaches out for help clearing his debts. Only after agreeing does Kelli learn that Rowan is a smuggler of illegal media working for a crime syndicate, and soon she finds herself embroiled in a dangerous heist. This high-stakes plot is complemented by flashbacks to the leads’ school days, when Rowan, then known as Am, used prompt engineering to thwart the robot assigned to help Kelli mask her autism (by, for example, enforcing eye contact) and the pair spent their days making up stories while slowly realizing that their desires fell outside of allowed options. Both timelines gracefully build toward crisis as Kelli navigates situations she struggles to fully comprehend. It’s an exceptional balancing of action, interior turmoil, and chilling dystopia. Readers worried about the future of storytelling in the age of AI will gobble this up. Agent: Hannah Bowman, Liza Dawson Assoc. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

For generations, in the world of this fun if familiar arranged-marriage romantasy from Kova (A Dance with the Fae Prince), one human queen has been chosen from among the young women in the town of Capton and sent to the elven lands to ensure the balance of magic. Luella, Capton’s only trained healer, feels she owes the town everything after the locals came together to send her to school. To pay them back, she’s hard at work trying to find a cure for the withering sickness known as the Weakness that is decimating Capton’s population. When the elf delegation arrives to claim their queen, almost everyone is shocked when they choose Luella and she must return with the elves to their land. There are hints of the Hades and Persephone myth in this setup, which Kova uses to great effect as she dives into Luella’s struggle to balance her newfound role with her deeply held values and lingering desire to do right by her people. Her blossoming relationship with the king, Eldas, is built on mutual discovery and respect as the pair work together to rebalance the worlds despite politics and generational trauma. The plot is fairly predictable, but Kova’s delicious attention to detail and elegant characterization keep the pages turning. The author’s fans will not be disappointed. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Drawing from mythology and Elizabethan literature, Christopoulou’s ambitious but somewhat overwrought debut offers a muddled melange of romance and redemption. The heroines are two of drama’s most virulent criminals: Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, who helped her husband murder his way to the Scottish throne, and Klytemnestra, whom Aeschylus showed rewarding her husband’s return from Troy by butchering him in his bathtub. After these canonical killings, Shakespeare’s weird sisters, here revealed to be one and the same as the Fates of Greek mythology, summon both women, now going by Anassa and Claret, respectively, and set them on a quest to save their souls by protecting innocents like Helen of Troy and Ophelia from meeting their tragic fates. After narrowly avoiding killing each other, the antiheroines fall into rapturous love as they travel as “partner[s] in penance” through shadowy realms of intersecting stories, encountering classic characters and overcoming sinister wraiths sent by the Mistress of the House of Books. Christopoulou packs her leads’ lightly episodic adventure, told in alternating first person, with classical allusions but doesn’t engage particularly deeply with her source material. The result is inconsistent characterization and occasionally clunky prose, especially in the dissonance between generally effective descriptive passages and jarringly contemporary-feeling dialogue. (At one point, Claret instructs Anassa to “Keep it together please” while Anassa bemoans “I’m such an idiot.”) Readers in it for the romance may be pleased, but others will long for more depth. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Hairston (Archangels of Funk) mixes a serial killer investigation with elements of urban fantasy and sci-fi to create a cozy, magical, and strikingly unique concoction. She pits a quirky cast—headlined by cleaner and aspiring detective Paula B. Queenie, podcaster An’qwenique Robinson, and multiverse-traveling St. Bernard/poodle mix Oona—against a mysterious villain targeting a “necklace of picturesque New England towns.” Paula opens the story musing that “everybody is entangled in miracles and mysteries,” and Hairston demonstrates this aptly over the ingeniously constructed first section of the book. It toggles between Paula and An’qwenique, narrating from “today” and “yesterday,” respectively, as a neighbor is murdered and An’qwenique and many others become stranded at the mysterious Redemption Center, a crumbling mansion, with seemingly no way out. Oona and her magic red wagon lead everyone back to where they belong, but not before the killer strikes again. Hairston balances a phantasmagoria of mystical and interdimensional elements with a cast of sharply drawn characters, creating very real-feeling people moving through a delightfully irreal world. The result is a lively and lovely tale of community triumphing over evil. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

The six sapphic tales of the supernatural in this anthology from Berman (editor of Final Curtain) feature consistently inventive plots but inconsistent writing. Ivy James delivers a second chance enemies-to-lovers romance in the plotty but rushed “Witch Touched,” as two feuding young witches reunite in search of a missing friend. In the familiar-feeling postapocalyptic America of Mia Dalia’s impactful “A Witch to Live,” a lonely folk healer must choose between her first love and the only family she’s ever known. An urban legend takes on new meaning in Audrey R. Hollis’s “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary” when a young girl seeks connection with a historically misunderstood woman in the mirror. The remaining stories are somewhat less successful: Berman’s creepy and out of place “D Is for Delicious” delves into cannibalism; L.A. Fields’s unfocused “Hex en Pointe” follows a teenager seeking love and purpose at her combination ballet conservatory and witch training school; and the time skips in Joachim Heijndermans’s “It Not Being So Would Be Crazier” make its central monster-witch love story jarring. There are plenty of moments of quirky charm throughout, but as a whole this fails to coalesce. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Beckbessinger follows Girls of Little Hope with a darkly entertaining feminist satire that finds 44-year-old Londoner Ellie experiencing hot flashes, brain fog, and mysterious new body hair. A diagnosis of perimenopause adds stress to her life as she oversees the launch of a mental health app that delivers soothing meditation recordings. She’s stunned when she’s passed over for promotion and incensed when the “literal clown” of a new CEO takes credit for her ideas for the app. As the same time, she must care for the people around her, including her daughter, who has anorexia; her father-in-law, who has dementia; and her out-of-work brother. She pushes down her frustration and rage in the face of it all until the night of a full moon when she sprouts fangs, claws, and fur. In a parallel plot, 82-year-old curmudgeon Brenda finds her cat Melek—“the last living creature on this earth who’d have noticed if [she] was gone”—torn apart by the teeth of a huge animal and sets out to catch his killer. Despite a somewhat slow start, this tale of women’s rage against societal marginalization builds to a satisfying and bloody end, with Beckbessinger using the tropes of werewolf horror to provide her tough-as-nails heroines with a sense of power, retribution, and gratification. This has bite. (May.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Reality television goes galactic in Branham’s thrilling sapphic sci-fi debut. After poverty-stricken trash collector Artemis Ialan has an unfortunate public run-in with the prince and princess of the Expan empire, she’s invited to appear on Love Galaxy, a reality dating show that matches royals and others high in the empirical hierarchy with important people from other systems in the empire, like a diplomatic—and deeply propagandistic—version of The Bachelor. The prince, Nix, has taken a liking to Artemis, and the princess, Spielan, offers her a massive payout to join the contestants vying for his hand, money that could drastically improve Artemis’s circumstances and potentially save her mother’s life. As one of the few contestants from the fringe systems, Artemis has no idea what to expect from the show and quickly finds herself in over her head. When a fellow contestant turns up dead, it’s all she can do to stay afloat while dealing with a killer on the loose, intergalactic intrigue, and the combined attention of both royal heirs. Branham does a fantastic job weaving seemingly disparate threads together. The murder mystery is fairly clued and the antagonistic attraction that emerges between Ellie and Spielan feels real and heated. Fans of science fiction with a romantic edge should snap this up. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

A meditation on morality and mortality, this sharp speculative WWII drama from Hugo Award winner Nayler (Tusks of Extinction) pits four young refugees against a host of hostiles, with their only aid coming from a murder of hyperintelligent crows. Neriya, a Jewish girl whose family summers in the Lithuanian countryside, is led away from the village by her best friend, Buster the crow, to escape the oncoming German invasion. Joining her in the woods are Czeslaw, a Polish man who defected from the Russian army; Kezia, a Roma woman who witnessed the murder of her family; and a nonspeaking young boy whose name the others do not know. Together, they try to survive in the forest despite the seesaw battles of frontline soldiers and backwoods partisans, relying on one another’s skills and help from their unexpected avian allies. Nayler weaves a tapestry of resilience and resistance as intricate and well-constructed as the braided twigs of a crow’s nest. In his compassionate hands, the distinction between human and animal blurs as, together, both groups thrive better than either could alone. It’s an impassioned paean to togetherness even in the midst of the chaotic isolation of war and to the power of storytelling to keep memory and hope alive. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink