New Releases Tuesday: The Best Books Out This Week

Slocumb, author of The Violin Conspiracy, has just released another musically-minded banger. In it, Bern Hendricks feels like his dreams are coming true when he gets a call from Mallory Roberts to help authenticate a valuable musical piece. As an expert on the most famous American composer — Frederick Delaney — Hendricks feels honored that the board of the Delaney Foundation, and a descendant of Delaney, would use his services. But looking into the authenticity of the famous composer’s supposed final work reveals some unflattering truths. Hendricks is led to the streets of 1920s Manhattan, where he finds Josephine Reed — a young Black woman who seems to have been the actual genius behind Delaney’s masterpieces. As Hendricks gets closer to the truth, he also gets closer to making an enemy of a powerful organization that doesn’t want that truth to come out.

After The Vegetarian, Kang returns with this novel about connection between two increasingly lonely people. In Seoul, a young woman in a Greek language classroom finds herself unable to speak. She and her teacher find a kind of solace in each other as he starts to lose his sight. But they connect on more than that — her mother has died and she’s lost custody of her young son, her teacher finds himself between two cultures, making him disconnected from both. It’s through both characters that Han explores loneliness and how we connect with each other.

Women from a Louisiana Takoda reservation have been disappearing. In the past and currently. And as Anna Horn, a high school student, dodges bullies and unsavory casino guests, she begins to wonder if the cause of the missing women is related to an ancient myth of her people made flesh. A myth that she feels stalking her. Once her younger sister also goes missing, she does everything to find her, but she’ll have to wade through her reservation’s monsters of lore, as well as the newer ones rooted less in mythology. This novel is part horror, part thriller, and looks at the very real issue of missing Indigenous people in North America.

Bellefleur, a Lambda Award-winner, gifts us this perfect match romcom. Tansy isn’t one for reading romance novels, but finds herself embodying the fake dating trope when she tells her nosy family that she’s dating the cover model on a bestselling book. Naturally, she didn’t see crossing paths with Gemma van Dalen and being confronted with her lie. This is a romance, so obviously it works out, as Gemma has to marry in order to inherit from her family’s publishing company. The two announce a lie-based engagement so Tansy can get the needed money for her family’s bookstore after Gemma inherits. And they also start to see their pairing as more than an arrangement, but there’s still the issue of Gemma’s raggedy, scheming family.

Look at that cover! I’ve been super excited for this one for a hot minute. We follow Alejandra, who wears her usual roles of mother, wife, and adopted daughter, even as she slips into a familiar darkness. The same darkness that she learns plagued her biological mother. And her mother’s mother. Once she starts learning more of her biological family, she finds out that the women in her family were tied together through the years by tragedy, specifically tragedy brought on by the Mexican mythological La Llorona, or the weeping woman. The murderous apparition wants to cover Alejandra’s life in despair, but she, like the women before her, is not so easily conquered.

Notice how in the illustration, the femme points her face skyward, giving the impression that she’s being overtaken by the flowers? Yeah, well, 26-year-old Adelaide is overtaken by the love she has for the English Disney prince of a man, Rory Hughes, after she moves to London. Problem is, he’s not exactly returning her affections in an equal way, and once his well-known ex-girlfriend dies in a car accident, Adelaide descends into a depression filled with Rory’s grief and comparisons of herself to his former partner.