|
|
New Fiction, Mystery & Science Fiction December 2025 |
|
|
|
|
|
The Heir Apparent
by Rebecca Armitage
Lexi Villiers, granddaughter of the Queen of England, has left royal life and is finishing her medical residency in Tasmania. After her father and twin brother die in a skiing accident, she becomes first in line to the throne and is summoned back to England, with one year to decide if she will accept her royal duty. Her decision is complicated by a budding romance and painful memories of how the palace culture destroyed her late mother.
|
|
|
|
Huguette
by Cara Black
August 1945: Seventeen-year-old Huguette Faure is a survivor. The war has taken everything -- her parents and her sense of safety. Now, pregnant and on the lam, she must outrun her father's enemies, who want her dead. After narrowly avoiding jail time, thanks to the help of a kind-hearted police officer named Claude Leduc, Huguette lands a job assisting a legendary film director. As her role develops from helping him with chores to cooking his books, she sees an opportunity to break free from the ghosts of her past once and for all.
|
|
|
|
Sharpe's Storm: Richard Sharpe and the Invasion of Southern France, 1813
by Bernard Cornwell
In 1813, France is a battlefield, and winter shows no mercy. Amid brutal conditions, Major Richard Sharpe finds himself saddled with an unexpected burden: Rear-Admiral Sir Joel Chase, dispatched by the Admiralty with sealed orders, unshakable confidence, and a frankly terrifying enthusiasm for combat. Sharpe's mission from Wellington is clear, yet anything but simple: keep Sir Joel alive, because he could hold the key to defeating Napoleon once and for all.
|
|
|
|
Cape Fever
by Nadia Davids
The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh in a beautiful, decaying home. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits. While Mrs. Hattingh awaits her son's visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes -- a ritual that binds the them to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.
|
|
|
|
Canticle
by Janet Rich Edwards
In thirteenth-century Bruges, Aleys is unusual: stubborn, bright, and prone to religious visions. She and her only friend, Finn, have been learning Latin together in secret; but just as she thinks their connection might become something more, her father promises her in marriage to a merchant she doesn't love. She runs away, finding shelter among the beguines, an independent community of religious women who refuse to answer to the Church. Aleys glimpses for the first time the joys of belonging. But forces both mystical and political are at work, bringing Aleys into danger and a new understanding of love and sacrifice.
|
|
|
|
The Rest of Our Lives
by Ben Markovits
When Tom Layward's wife had an affair twelve years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work. So, rather than returning home, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past -- an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son. He's moving towards a future he hasn't even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he's made that have brought him to this particular present.
|
|
|
|
The Land in Winter
by Andrew Miller
In the English countryside during the winter of 1962, Irene, the pregnant wife of the local doctor, befriends her neighbor, the witty but troubled Rita, who is also expecting. Rita spends her days trying on the idea of being a farmer's wife, but her head still swims with images of a raucous past that her husband, Bill, prefers to forget. There is still affection in both their homes; neither marriage has yet to be abandoned. But when the ordinary cold of December gives way to the harshest winter in living memory, so do the secret resentments harbored in all four lives.
|
|
|
|
The Birdwatcher
by Jacquelyn Mitchard
When she is convicted of a double murder, Felicity Wild, a brilliant grad student turned high-priced escort, declares, I may not be innocent, but I'm innocent of this. Journalist Reenie Bigelow knows that her childhood best friend is not capable of murder, so she uses her connections to unravel the truth. The more she uncovers, the more Reenie is convinced that the story the prosecution told is wrong, despite the puzzling fact that Felicity said not one single word in her own defense. But there's one thing Reenie knows for certain: Felicity would never lie.
|
|
|
|
House of Day, House of Night
by Olga Tokarczuk
A woman settles in a remote Polish village where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. There's the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There's the man whose death -- with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech -- was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history, but a cosmology.
|
|
|
|
The Quiet Mother: A Detective Konrad Novel
by Arnaldur Indridason
A woman is found murdered in her Reykjavik home, her apartment ransacked. On her desk lies a note with retired detective Konrad's phone number. Days earlier, she had begged him to find the child she gave up nearly fifty years ago. But Konrad, reluctant to reopen old wounds, turned her away. Now, haunted by guilt, he vows to uncover the truth-for her and for himself. As Konrad digs into her tragic past, he is drawn into a web of secrets, lies, and betrayal. Each revelation points to a hidden life that connects her death to a decades-old murder-and to shadows from Konrad's own family history.
|
|
|
|
Vengeance
by Rick Campbell
Despite decades of treaties, military missions, and covert actions, Iran has finally assembled its first nuclear bomb and the U.S. has decided it's time to take direct action. The first move is to blockade the Persian Gulf with a carrier strike group, but Iran strikes back quickly. With Russia's backing, Iran launches a devastating attack, and now the U.S. forces are in a race against the clock to survive until reinforcements arrive and a counter-strike launched. And while events grow desperate in the Middle East, a plot to kill the President is unfolding.
|
|
|
|
The Living and the Dead: A Novel about a Crime
by Christoffer Carlsson
The investigation into the deaths of two teenagers after a party is sidelined when a landslide nearly destroys the small Swedish town, until another death 20 years later reopens old wounds.
|
|
|
|
The Gallagher Place
by Julie Doar
When Marlowe Fisher returns to her family's Hudson Valley home for the holidays, she discovers a body in the woods -- a murder that draws her back into the haunting case of her teenage best friend's disappearance two decades earlier. As police descend on the sprawling Fisher property, Marlowe is pulled into an investigation that threatens to unravel the town's fragile loyalties, and she must confront the fallibility of her own memory and the feeling that everyone -- including her brothers -- is hiding something.
|
|
|
|
White Wolf: An Evan Ryder Novel
by Eric Van Lustbader
A revolutionary communication program renders modern encryption obsolete, threatening to topple global power structures and give rise to technology-driven totalitarian states. Evan Ryder races against time in a landscape where secrets can no longer hide behind digital walls. Ilona Shokova, the elusive, deadly assassin White Wolf, holds the key to mastering this unhackable method. Two powerful, deadly women, one quest. Will either one of them survive?
|
|
|
|
Silent Bones
by Val McDermid
When torrential winter rain causes a landslide on a motorway, it reveals the skeleton of an investigative journalist who'd been poking his nose into the murky politics of the Scottish independence referendum, and who was the prime suspect in the murder of his girlfriend when he vanished. It's the perfect case for DCI Karen Pirie, chief of Police Scotland's Historic Cases Unit. But when an allegation of murder surfaces over the supposedly accidental death of a hotel manager, it unearths a series of interlinked puzzles that will test Karen and her team.
|
|
|
|
The Snow Lies Deep: A Mercy Carr Mystery
by Paula Munier
At Northshire's annual Solstice Soirée, a child is telling Santa Claus what she wants for Christmas when the bearded man suddenly leaps up and staggers away from the festivities. By the time he is found in the woods, Santa, aka the town mayor, is lying on his back, dead. A yule log made of oak sits on his chest, burning bright, a beacon of light on the darkest day of the year. This strange murder is the first of a series of similar Solstice-themed killings by the Yuletide Killer, targeting the town's most prominent citizens.
|
|
|
New Science Fiction & Fantasy
|
|
|
|
Outlaw Planet
by M. R. Carey
This is the story of a lone outlaw, haunted by her past and with all the multiverse against her. Sometimes the fate of entire worlds can be decided by a woman with nothing to lose, and the smartest gun in the multiverse in her hand.
|
|
|
|
Slow Gods
by Claire North
My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze. In telling my story, there are certain things I should perhaps lie about. I should make myself a hero. Pretend I was not used by strangers and gods, did not leave people behind. Here is one truth: out there in deep space, I died. And then, I was reborn. I became something not quite human, something that could speak to the infinite dark. And I vowed to become the scourge of the world that wronged me. This is the story of the supernova event that burned planets and felled civilizations. This is also the story of the many lives I've lived since I died for the first time.
|
|
|
|
The Bookshop Below
by Georgia Summers
Below the streets of London, a secret network of magical bookshops has existed for millennia. But they're slowly disappearing, and no one knows why. Only one dishonored bookseller can uncover the truth and rewrite her story.
|
|
|
|
|
|