I thought it would be fun to put together an On My Radar post and I’m glad I did because I didn’t realize that almost every book I’m interested in comes out August 4. As usual these are books that I have either preordered, will get once they are out, have ARC’s of, will get from the library or just keep my eye out to read in the future.
August 4
n 1926, five women disappeared from a remote island in Vermont. Now, one hundred years later, it’s happening again.
Struggling actress Marin Keane is shocked when she lands a role in a major motion picture about the unsolved mystery of New Avalon, an island on sprawling Lake Faraday in Vermont. She’s even more surprised when she learns that the role requires a weeklong research trip to that very spot.
Because New Avalon isn’t your ordinary island. A century ago, it was a commune for spiritual mediums—until they all vanished in 1926. The only trace of them was five dresses hanging from the branches of an old oak tree in the middle of the island, one for each missing woman. Some locals say they simply left. Others think they were murdered. But the prevailing opinion, thanks to a diary left behind by one of the vanished, a young woman named Daisy Rue, is that a séance gone wrong conjured something supernatural that took them all one by one.
Not long after arriving, Marin and her castmates, including legendary actress Violet Wright and white-hot director Ronan Peters, begin to realize all is not right with New Avalon. They hear strange noises in the night and notice mysterious symbols left behind by the island’s previous occupants. And after a sudden health emergency leaves Marin, Ronan, and the other actors stranded on the island, the disappearances begin again.
Is it the work of someone trying to derail the movie? Or is the island’s alleged supernatural past catching up with the present? As fear and suspicion mount, Marin turns to Daisy’s diary, hoping it holds the key to figuring out what really happened to the women of New Avalon—and how to keep the island’s terrible history from repeating itself.
The newest next thriller from #1 Bestselling Author Sarah Pekkanen combines a decades-old mystery with spine-tingling paranormal elements in this twisty novel of the seen and unseen.
Extrasensory perception.
The Gift.
A Sixth Sense.
Or something else….
In 1964, four remarkable young women at a prestigious university became the subjects of parapsychology experiments by a visionary scientist. On the cusp of a historic breakthrough, the women mysteriously vanished and the program was erased from history. Decades later, Riley Bell, newly divorced and desperate for a fresh start, accepts a caretaker job for an elderly widow named Betty. Riley steps into a home that is frozen in another era – no microwave, television, or cell phones, and Betty has never heard of the internet. Why has Betty lived in such profound isolation for so many years, and why does she need Riley now? As the story unfolds across two timelines – Betty’s 1960s era of 5 o’clock martinis and high-stakes experiments, and Riley’s quest to uncover the truth about the missing women – old secrets rise to the surface. And the only way to survive is to confront the mystery that has lingered for sixty years.
Once Upon a Time meets The Office in the follow-up to the New York Times bestselling sensations Assistant to the Villain, Apprentice to the Villain, and Accomplice to the Villain by laugh-out-loud TikTok darling Hannah Nicole Maehrer.
The Assistant and the Villain series is best enjoyed in order.
Reading
Book #1 Assistant to the Villain
Book #2 Apprentice to the Villain
Book #3 Accomplice to the Villain
Book #4 Adversary to the Villain
They’re being hunted…
When sixteen-year-old Georgie and her troublemaking brother are shipped off to the wilderness for their stepmother’s newest reality show, Georgie is convinced it’ll be the worst experience of her life. Two weeks. No phones. Hiking. Camping. Cameras catching every humiliating second.
Then she meets Mack Gray. Tattooed, unreadable, and―among a cast of kids already branded as trouble―he’s the one she’s sure is dangerous.
One night, the counselors are chanting affirmations around the fire. By morning, they’re gone.
But the kids are not alone.
Georgie can feel it, stalking them from the shadows―watching, waiting, picking them off one by one. Whatever it is, it isn’t just hunting.
It’s playing.
And in this game, there seems to be only one ending: no one gets out alive.
Gothikana meets Dexter in this sinfully delicious dark romance about a horror-obsessed film student who’s secretly tracking the murders of a serial killer–unaware he’s also her brooding professor.
There’s a serial killer prowling the city, and no one has noticed…
Except for me.
I see the connections between his kills–
The artistic references,
The careful curation of the scene,
The macabre motifs that turn violence into vivid works of art.
When I recreate one of his murders for my film project at Cresswell University,
I unknowingly present it to the very man who committed the crime.
Professor Maddox Shaw.
A world-renowned artist struggling to recapture his muse.
A serial killer caught deep in the web of a dangerous secret society.
A man who makes me come alive.
Sleeping with your professor is bad enough.
Sleeping with a serial killer is just asking for trouble.
When trouble finds me, it’s not Maddox, but the powerful people pulling his strings.
There’s no line they won’t cross to keep their secrets safe.
And there’s no line Maddox won’t cross to keep me.
After all, he’s good at killing people.
In #1 New York Times bestseller Allison Saft’s enthralling new romantic fantasy, a chess grandmaster will go to any length to save the person she loves the most.
Six years ago, Shea Fury’s sister was whisked away by the High King of the Otherworld, the ruler of the treacherous land of fae. Although Shea has spent the years since dreaming of rescuing her sister from captivity, the Iron Veil that separates the human world from that of the fae has made it only a wish. That is, until an invitation to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime chess tournament in the Otherworld arrives on Shea’s doorstep. The winner of the tournament may ask the High King to grant one wish, and Shea is finally within reach of hers.
But entering the tournament and winning it are two different matters. Dark magic lurks around every corner in the Otherworld, and Shea’s cutthroat opponents are willing to bend the rules to make their own wishes come true. To make it to the end—and to find her sister—she is forced to strike an alliance with her longtime rival, the sharply beautiful fae princess, Ciara of Bri Leith. One wrong move, though, and Shea could lose more than just the competition: She’d lose her sister, her dignity, and maybe even her life.
In Immortal Game, Allison Saft has written a high-stakes sapphic love story brimming with competitive tension set against a lush, Irish folklore-inspired fantasy world.
For fans of the hit Netflix series Inventing Anna and The Girls I’ve Been comes a bold young adult thriller about a teen scammer who won’t let boys, friends, or even murder get in her way.
Amelia Wu is great at relationships. So great, in fact, that she’s in three of them. Why choose between the suave debate team captain, the charming indie filmmaker, and the tennis star when she can be with them all?
The catch? None of them know about each other. It works perfectly. They’re in love with her—or the versions of her that they get. Amy. Ellie. Mia. And she’s in love with the lavish dinners, fancy yacht trips, and expensive gifts. Times three.
But schemes always get complicated, don’t they? When Amelia’s best friend ends up dead, her alleged murder shocks their placid beachside city. And soon, Amelia’s carefully planned relationships start to dangerously unravel.
In a fit of desperation, Amelia teams up with her academic nemesis Jackie, the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper and a self-proclaimed true crime junkie, to get to the bottom of this.
After all, Amelia needs to keep her boyfriends close and her enemies closer if she wants to keep her scam—and herself—afloat.
August 18
The heir to one of the world’s most influential families reckons with the demonic secret to their power, in this contemporary dark fantasy that melds occult magic with shocking family drama from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.
Mourning Mayne knows he’ll one day bear the duty of managing his family’s vast empire of wealth and power. But the feckless Mourning has always struggled to accept this legacy, which is one of cruelty, domination, and exploitation… and something even darker.
Because the Maynes are no ordinary family: Hidden in our world are the fiends—half-human, half-demon, and possessed of dark magic born from buying human souls—and the Maynes are one of the oldest and most influential fiendish families.
But when Mourning’s estranged father, the formidable and terrifying Hadrian Mayne, demands that he return to the fold, Mourning has to make a decision whether to accept his legacy and embrace his role in the family, or to forge his own destiny, and with it, change the course of the world.
Because along the way home, he will meet Key, a black-market seller of human souls, and Quinn, an artist who may hold the dark truth behind the fate of the fiends. Alone, they have all struggled with the darkness of their fiendish nature… but together, they might find a path out of the shadows.
When two estranged sisters inherit a home possessed by the horrors of its dark past, they must work together to survive in this viscerally chilling Southern gothic novel from the critically acclaimed author of This Cursed House.
Do not go into the attic, the note warned.
But that’s exactly what sisters Mickie and Delilah do when they inherit a distant relative’s house in Savannah, Georgia. They intend to sell the property, divide the proceeds, and go their separate ways once and for all.
But 724 Hartford Street has other plans.
As the sisters realize there is far more to this house and its history than meets the eye, past wounds begin to fester and spill into the present in eerie ways. Tensions also flare between the sisters and the sleepy little Savannah community, many members of which suspect more than they are willing to share about what has occurred inside at this address.
When Delilah’s behavior turns first strange and then alarming, it becomes apparent that selling the home is no longer an option. And Mickie must fight to save her sister from the house, which is holding on to its own dark past—or they will both succumb to that which hungers inside its walls.
These Walls Remember is Southern gothic literature at its finest, by an author whose evocative, penetrating writing and use of hauntings to unflinchingly depict historical trauma gets right under the skin and explores the many ways loss, grief, and remembrance manifest themselves in the home as well as in the people who live inside it.
August 25
From the New York Times bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes and We Live Here Nowcomes a thrilling, genre-bending mystery about two murdered girls, the ones who might be next, and a town with dark secrets.
It’s happening again…
Anna Maybourne feels trapped in Harper’s Creek, a nowhere town of dusty farmland plagued by drought, known for the murders of two young women who died exactly three years apart. The presumed murderer, killed as he tried to escape the police, was known as the Farmhand. But Anna, new in town and caring for her grandmother with dementia, wonders if the closed case is actually unsolved.
As the three-year anniversary of the last Farmhand murders nears, Anna’s younger sister worries it could happen again and she and her friend might be next. Anna’s grandmother’s experiences odd paranoid episodes, and she claims to know things about the girls who died.
Anna begins to think her grandmother may be the key to discovering the truth about the murders. Something strange is happening in their old house, Grandma knows more than she should, and instead of being over, the mystery seems like it’s starting again.
They Say a Girl Died Here is a novel of thrilling and terrifying secrets, with a mind-bending twist that could come only from Sarah Pinborough.
Books With Cassie 