Fresh New Books, April 23, 2026 | Kiss Your $ Goodbye!

             

 New Books This Week!

This is where I spotlight the sparkling new weekly releases that are tempting me so you can succumb to temptation too. The focus will be on dark fiction and romance with the occasional thriller tossed in that catches my eye. 

HORROR,   HORROR-Adjacent & THRILLERS

Bromeliad House by Jessika Grewe Glover

Bromeliad House, once a sprawling heirloom estate on Florida’s Treasure Coast, is now a crumbling relic of a family worn to its barest threads. Within its walls, Delphine began seeing the doppelgängers of loved ones before they died. A phenomenon known as a fetch...

Delphine Pembroke sees a fetch for the first time at ten years old in a mirror at her family’s decaying subtropical estate. Soon after, she goes to live with her aunt and uncle and their two boys, who attempt to give her a normal life. Since childhood, she had witnessed the impending death of loved ones, creating a compulsion to never look in reflections. When Delphine becomes heir to Bromeliad House, she is ensnared in a sentient house desperate to keep her, and ghosts within set to keep her out. As head architect on the property’s renovation, Delphine battles both human and spectral foes, while falling in love with someone whose fetch she had seen years earlier. Someone who should be dead. Delphine must learn to manage her second sight. Even if each time she sets foot in Bromeliad House, she is pushed further towards the fate of her family members forever entombed within its reflections.

Learn more at Goodreads

The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer

Follow the Rites...

Nothing less than the survival of humanity is at stake.

From Marcus Kliewer, a new “titan of the macabre and unsettling” (Erin A. Craig, #1 New York Times bestselling author), comes a supernatural horror about a young woman who accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater—and more dangerous—than she ever could have imagined.

EXCITING OPPORTUNITY:

Caretaker urgently needed. Three days of work. Competitive pay. Serious applicants ONLY.

Macy Mullins can’t say why the job posting grabbed her attention—it had the pull of a fisherman’s lure, barbed hook and all—vaguely ominous. But after an endless string of failed job interviews, she's not exactly in the position to be picky. She has rent to pay, groceries to buy, and a younger sister to provide for.

Besides, it’s only three days’ work…

Three days, cooped up in a stranger’s house, surrounded by Oregon Coast wilderness.

What starts as a peculiar side gig soon becomes a waking nightmare. An incomprehensible evil may dwell on this property—and Macy Mullins might just be the only thing standing between it, and the rest of humanity.

Follow the Rites...

Follow the Rites...

Follow the Rites...

..--- / ..... / ---..

Learn more at Goodreads.

Cross Roads by Laurel Hightower

*This is a reprint by a new publisher. I read it back in 2021 and it is excellent. My review never made it here (I might've been on hiatus) but I'll fix that soon. It is up at Goodreads. 

How far would you go to bring back someone you love?

When Chris's son dies in a tragic car crash, her world is devastated. The walls of grief close in on Chris's life until, one day, a small cut on her finger changes everything.

A drop of blood falls from Chris's hand onto her son's roadside memorial and, later that night, Chris thinks she sees his ghost outside her window. Only, is it really her son's ghost, or is it something else—something evil?

Soon Chris is playing a dangerous game with forces beyond her control in a bid to see her son, Trey, alive once again.

Learn more at Goodreads.

May the Dead Keep You by Jill Baguchinsky

Perfect for fans of Don't Let the Forest In and Wuthering Heights , May the Dead Keep You is a gothic YA horror about the pasts that haunt us and the stories we decide to make for ourselves.

There’s nowhere Catie East would rather be than the redwood forest that surrounds her family’s unusual historic home, the Heights.

She prefers being alone in the forest. People are…complicated. But when a scientist and his son move into the estate’s cottage, planning to study the woods around them, the boy catches Catie’s eye. And when a dead woodpecker miraculously comes back to life in his precious hands…he captures her heart.

Necromancy isn’t the only strange thing happening in the Heights. There’s an unfamiliar face in the mirror. Blood on the floors. Eyes in the wallpaper. And the men around her—including her once-sweet nature boy—are becoming something else. Something possessive and frightening. Something violent.

As the Heights’s dark history starts to come to light, Catie discovers that the home she loves is imbued with pain. And even though the pain isn’t her own, it will corrupt her and the people around her all the same—unless she can stop it.

A story about breaking cycles of abuse and overcoming generational trauma, May the Dead Keep You is an edge-of-your-seat listen—equally horrifying, heart-wrenching, and hopeful.

Learn more at Goodreads.

Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks

A fascinating, first of its kind exploration of Stephen King and his most iconic early books, based on groundbreaking research and interviews with King—all conducted by the first scholar to be given extended access to his private archives

After Caroline Bicks was named the University of Maine's inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, she became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writer's creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by one question millions of King's enthralled and terrified readers (including her) have asked What makes Stephen King’s writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we’ve closed the book?

Bicks focuses on five of his most iconic early works—The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, 'Salem's Lot, and Night Shift—to reveal how he crafted his language, storylines, and characters to cast his enduring literary spells. While tracking King’s margin notes and editorial changes, she discovered scenes and alternative endings that never made it to print, but that King is allowing her to publish now. The book also includes interviews Bicks had with King along the way that reveal new insights into his writing process and personal history.

Part literary master class, part biography, part memoir and investigation into our deepest anxieties, Monsters in the Archives—authorized by Stephen King himself—is unlike anything ever published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it’s also a story about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.

Learn more at Goodreads.

 

Odessa by Gavrielle Sher

In a powerfully imagined Russia at the height of the pogroms, a grief-stricken family turn to ancient magic to bring their daughter back from the grave.

Yetta is a bright, quick teenage girl with a wild, searching spirit. Stifled by her mother's anxiety, her father’s rules, and the path that’s been laid out for her, she craves the kind of freedom she doesn’t know the edges of. But her family has reason to be cautious and restrictive. Fear has wrapped itself around their shtetl. Jews are mysteriously disappearing, and there are whispers of an impending Gentile attack. When violence comes to their door, Yetta is killed.

Her father, in his grief, fumbles through his nascent knowledge of ancient texts and old magic to bring her back. By some miracle, Yetta is returned—but although she looks the same, Yetta is not the girl she once was. She knows there is a secret her family is keeping from her. The answer resides, in part, in the monstruous being stalking the villagers and their enemies, lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl, something that may be of her father’s making, and a being which has plans of its own.

Learn more at Goodreads.

Split Scream by Sonora Taylor & Matthew Pritt

*I've loved Sonora Taylor's work in the past and am looking forward to her new novelette included here.

This place is not a place of honor. This place is Cursed. These New Weird Horror novelettes are a danger to the Body, and to the Mind, and they can Kill.

Sonora Taylor - Passing Glance

Washington, D.C.’s sprawling and storied Moore Mansion is built upon intrigue and secrecy, playing host to both political elites and the merely curious alike. Its labyrinthine rooms and passageways, festooned in eclectic art and mysterious mirrors, captivate all who explore them.

Dylan arrives at the mansion for her friend’s 30th birthday party at a crossroads of her own: adrift, eager to reunite with old friends, and seeking to rekindle a long-held lust for one of the group. But tonight she will discover the true terrifying secrets of Moore Mansion: a house built to be a city, and one which unfolds like a trap.

Matthew Pritt - Lash Egg

The people of the Doe’s country walk in the Balance, attuned to the land and guided by their benevolent nature spirit. For Ben, a refugee who narrowly escaped the madness-infested Bear’s country to the south, the Doe remains a mystery. Ben has never heard the Doe speak, and marvels at his neighbors’ firsthand experiences with his new home’s Protector. Fortunately his ten-year-old daughter, Lydia, doesn’t share his struggles, and adapts to life in the Doe with ease.

But when a mysterious wasting plague attacks the local wildlife, Ben suspects he is the cause of it. As the plague spreads and threatens to collapse the Doe’s entire ecosystem, Ben must discover how he has offended the Doe, or risk losing the only safe place he and his daughter have ever known.

Learn more at Goodreads.

ROMANCE

Managing the Vampire's Mansion by K.M. Shea

Starting over as a house manager in a charming small town sounded perfect. Until my new boss turned out to be a vampire.

After burning myself out at my corporate career, I take a job managing a mansion in a picturesque tourist town to reset my life.

The house is historic. The town is charming. The locals are welcoming. And, as I accidentally discover, my unfairly handsome employer, Beckett Kinge, is a vampire in hiding.

Beckett prefers order, privacy, and absolutely no supernatural mishaps.

Unfortunately for both of us, a rogue vampire is attacking the locals. The same people who have been nothing but nice to me. As attacks escalate and secrets unravel, staying uninvolved is no longer an option.

And somehow the only person who steps up to find the vampire is me—the mansion manager with poor people skills who knows absolutely nothing about supernaturals.

At least… I think I’m the only one working this case. But somewhere between tracking a killer and trying not to die, I realize Beckett isn’t just protecting his secret. He’s protecting me. And that might be far more dangerous for my emotional well-being.

Regardless, the rampaging vamp has to be found, or no one in town will be safe. Not even me.

This stand alone cozy urban fantasy story is set in the same world as the Magiford Supernatural City trilogies, but is located in a different (real life!) town in Wisconsin.

Learn more at Goodreads.

---

Anything catch your eye this week? Let me know in the comments.