Fresh New Books February 17, 2026 | Kiss Your $ Goodbye!
New Books Because You Deserve Them!
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.
First the HORROR because it'll always be my first love along with the HORROR-adjacent & THRILLERS
A Sociopath's Guide to A Successful Marriage by MK Oliver
A whip-smart and darkly funny crime novel—perfect for fans of My Sister, the Serial Killer and The Maid—that follows a wife and mother with a deadly secret that she must suppress if she wants to maintain her picture-perfect façade.
Meet Lalla Rook. Lalla has a lot on her plate: She needs to guarantee her husband makes partner, secure her dream house in Hampstead, and get her daughter into a prestigious prep school. And on the afternoon she stabs a stranger seven times after he breaks into her living room, she has a four-year-old’s birthday party to host.
With an unambitious partner, two demanding children, and a barely adequate large house in a nice (if not quite fashionable) part of town, Lalla’s life isn’t quite perfect yet. And she can’t pretend she hasn’t missed the adrenaline rush that comes with transgressing. Besides, as a wife and mother, she’s already an expert multi-tasker. So, disposing of a body, framing a friend, and being the world’s best mother can easily be managed alongside the usual domestic minutiae.
It’s just that her husband Stephen seems distracted, her daughter’s drowning of the class hamster is affecting her academic future, and then there is the unexpected intruder. Who is this man and what does he want from her? Because Lalla has a past she’d rather keep hidden—and the sudden appearance of the police means that avoiding them will be yet another task to cross off her to-do list.
Funny, calculating, hypercompetent, and ambitious, Lalla is your next favorite antiheroine. Just don’t mention it to her mother-in-law.
Ok the comps may have got me this time. "Perfect for fans of My Sister, the Serial Killer"
Learn more at Goodreads.
Bloodfire, Baby by Eirinie Carson
A maternal gothic tale of new motherhood and the torment of a centuries-old haunting.
Before the shadow appeared, Sofia thought mothering would be all sun-drenched light and white linen sheets, as seen advertised by the momfluencers of Instagram. In her gorgeous home anchored in a posh suburb, far removed from her origins, Sofia revels in her success.
Motherhood seems like the natural next step, but when her husband travels for a work trip, leaving Sofia all alone with their unnamed three-week-old baby, she can’t quite square how mothering falls solely in her lap. Nobody seems able or willing to help her: not her husband, not her best friend, and certainly not the zealot mother she cut off long ago.
Her postpartum reality is overtaken by an ominous figure. Sleep-deprivation collides with a darkness that creeps in and begins to spread, threatening to consume her entirely. As her grip on reality slips away, Sofia learns of an insidious haunting that has plagued the eldest daughters in her family for generations. With her baby’s safety on the line, Sofia realizes she must confront her murky history or risk losing more than just the veneer of perfection.
Learn more at Goodreads.
This Wretched Beauty by Elle Grenier
Happiness needs to be earned in the face of impossible odds, or there’s no beauty in it.
London, 1867. Dorian Gray is the heir to a title and their family’s estate, but they’ve never been given the chance to decide whether that’s actually what they want out of life. Forcibly estranged from their father by their manipulative grandfather, Dorian feels trapped in the life that has been decided for them.
Then one night they sneak out of their grandfather’s house, they meet a sweet and talented young painter named Basil, who immediately recognizes Dorian as his new muse. They agree to sit for Basil for a portrait, and Dorian is struck by the beauty and depth that Basil paints into their likeness—and they dare to begin hoping there might be more to life than being their grandfather’s perfect, empty-headed heir.
Dorian is further elated when Basil introduces them to the world of molly houses and drag performers—they’ve never seen such joyful variety of humanity and gender expression. But, as the barrier between the London they know and the one they're discovering begins to crumble, Dorian must face the fact that freedom and safety do not come hand in hand.
The aftermath of this realization pulls Dorian into a terrible downward spiral, torn between guilt over their own actions and hatred for the suffocating expectations of society. They push away those closest to them, surrounding themself instead with vapid courtiers and decadent socialites. And as Dorian’s spiral of self-loathing deepens, something strange happens—Basil’s portrait of them begins to change. Their smile becomes a little sharper, the glint in their eyes a little colder.
Dorian will have to choose—embrace the wickedness within and allow themself to become what they were always meant to be, or dare to try for something far more fragile and dangerous: a life of their own making.
Learn more at Goodreads.
Temple Fall by R.L. Boyle
A macabre and chilling supernatural gothic horror about a group of teenagers cursed to die on their 18th birthday from the Stoker Award shortlisted author of The Book of the Baku. Perfect for fans of Clay McLeod Chapman, The September House by Carissa Orlando and The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.
Flynn heads with her boyfriend, Jackson, and a group of their friends to spend the night in Temple Fall, a mysterious house up on the moors with a strange history. Breaking in for a night of drinking and teenage debauchery they instead find themselves trapped in a strange nightmare after a joke seance goes wrong. Suddenly forced into strange acts and behaviours outside their character, the tight-knit group starts to fall apart - and then Jackson falls to his death.
In the aftermath Flynn must confront the traumas of her childhood, her upbringing in captivity with her mother who suffered from crippling paranoia and OCD. As a foster child she has been forced to make her own place in the world, to forge a new family out of the few scraps of hope and compassion she has been offered in her life. And everywhere she looks she sees the ghostly figure of a Victorian woman, that no one else can see.
The woman that pushed Jackson.
Reeling from the tragedy the group find themselves split apart, each grieving and trying to survive on their own. But when they start to die, one-by-one, on the very second of their 18th birthday, Flynn must keep them all together to keep her found family alive. And she must dig into the lost secrets of her family past, to stop the curse being passed down to the next generation again.
Learn more at Goodreads.
Kayak by Kristal Stittle
For eighteen-year-old Keith—floating alone on a series of lakes and rivers, lost and without supplies—his kayak is his means of survival. Solid ground means certain death at the scissor-claws of vicious invading creatures.
What he needs is to find more people; but terrible guilt anchors him in solitude. A year earlier, when the creatures first appeared, it was Keith's choices that brought disaster to the island community that took him in.
Now, it's time to take responsibility for his actions, heal his scars, and survive.
Told in two alternating timelines, Kayak is a story of family, the strength we draw from others, and the strength we learn to draw from ourselves.
Learn more at Goodreads.
Grandma's Little Secret by Becca C. Smith
Inspired by true events, one girl’s life is changed forever when she foils a murder—and becomes a target herself.
When imaginative eleven-year-old Emma and her parents and friends go to a remote island in the Pacific Northwest during the summer of 1985, she thinks it’ll be a normal family vacation.
But when she starts dreaming of her loving Grandma Virginia killing people, she realizes there’s more to the sweet matriarch than she thought. And when she has a premonition that her grandmother intends to kill her husband, she knows she has to take matters into her own hands.
When she foils Virginia’s first plan to murder Grandpa Roy, Emma becomes a target herself.
Allied with her friends, Emma must differentiate between make-believe and psychic visions to try and save both her grandfather’s life and her own.
Learn more at Goodreads.
Denizens by Brenna LaFaro
Just because it’s dead doesn’t mean it’s allowed to rest…
A small southern town surrounded by a living cemetery was the last place Sam Everett expected to find himself after the sudden death of his wife. Desperate to get away from the city and its memories, Sam flees to the tight-knit community of Maylene’s Hollow.
Except the Hollow holds a secret. The town won’t allow its dead to rest. Forced to wander the earth for hundreds of years, the denizens of the woods have had enough.
With the help of a mysterious widow who may also be a murderer, the town’s matriarch who seems to possess magical abilities, and an ornery giant who believes the dead may be right to rebel, Sam must learn to let go of the dead in order to truly live.
Learn more at Goodreads.
Splatter by Angelique Jordonna, Rowland Bercy Jr., Michael R. Collins & Christo Healy
4 Authors.
1 Family.
Gallons of Blood.
Meet the Collins family.
There are run-of-the-mill psychopaths and then there’s the Collins’s.
When Grandma Collins returns from a mental institution, she finds her family in a state of disarray. Sure, they’re murdering people, but it’s just not being done right.
Under their grandmother’s watchful eye, the Collins clan are about to get even crazier.
Learn more at Goodreads.
If you need a little ROMANCE break these sound pretty good:
The Halifax Hellions by Alexandra Vasti
From the day of their debut, when Matilda smoked a cheroot and Margo tied a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue, the Halifax twins have flouted convention at every turn. But when Matilda runs off with the dangerous Marquess of Ashford - who has every reason to hate her - she may have gone a bit too far.
Determined to stop Matilda's inexplicable elopement, her sister Margo turns to her oldest friend for because if anyone can get her to Scotland in time, it's starchy solicitor Henry Mortimer. But the road to Scotland is paved with secrets. Beneath his buttoned-up exterior, Henry is ardently, wildly, miserably in love with Margo. And Matilda and Ashford's relationship too may not be quite what it seems.
Between salacious engravings, secret identities, and demanding feral cats, nothing about the journey goes as planned. With the Halifax Hellions at the reins, a week in a carriage is exactly enough time to turn the world upside down . . . and, perhaps, find the love stories they never expected.
For the first time ever in print, The Halifax Hellions brings together Margo and Matilda's novellas, along with a swoony new epilogue.
Learn more at Goodreads.
Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett
A woman who runs a cat rescue in 1920s Montreal turns to a grouchy but charming wizard to help save the shelter in this heartwarming cozy fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of the Emily Wilde series.
Agnes Aubert leads a meticulously organized life—and she likes it that way. As the proudly type-A manager of a much-needed cat rescue charity, she has devoted her life to finding forever homes for lost cats.
But after she is forced to move the cat shelter, Agnes learns that her new landlord is using her charity as a front—for an internationally renowned and thoroughly disreputable magic shop. Owned by the disorganized—not to mention self-absorbed, irritating, but also decidedly handsome—Havelock Renard, magician and failed Dark Lord, the shop draws magical clientele from around the world, partly due to the quality of Havelock’s illicit goods as well as their curiosity about his shadowy past and rumors of his incredible powers. Agnes's charity offers the perfect cover for illegal magics.
Agnes couldn’t care less about the shop—magical intrigue or not, there are cats to be rescued. But when an enemy from Havelock’s past surfaces, the magic shop—and more importantly, the cat shelter—are suddenly in jeopardy. To save the shelter, will Agnes have to set aside her social conscience and protect the man who once tried to bring about the apocalypse—and is now trying to steal her heart?
I am so excited for this one and have heard nothing but good things!
Learn more at Goodreads.
Here's the latest MONSTER & FANTASY ROMANCE!
Love is Alien by Carlotta Page
LOVE GALAXY is cancelled. The director has fled. And I’ve been abandoned on an alien planet with the so-called love of my life.
Sometimes a short and to the point synopsis is all you need! Well, that and a ridiculously cute cover.
Learn more at Goodreads.
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