Fresh On Our Shelves

A struggling writer living in Manhattan’s famously haunted Dakota Building gets an unexpected creative—and romantic—jolt when she meets two ghostly children and their alluring, aloof mother. As friendship with the family turns into something more, she begins writing about them and finds herself imagining a future she never expected. But building a life with a ghost means choosing between her ambitions as a novelist and finding a way to free the family from the building that has held them for years.

Genre: Paranormal Romance / Contemporary Fantasy

Borrow Happily Ever Afterlife by Emma R. Alban

In 1906, a wealthy, reclusive woman travels from Scotland to Singapore seeking help for a terrifying curse that causes her to lose consciousness and awaken in strange places, sometimes with blood on her hands. A family of gifted mediums—and the formidable Miss Leda Cassidy—try to untangle the mysterious magic surrounding her, only to find that her past is unexpectedly entwined with Leda’s own. Breaking the curse will mean confronting buried memories and a fearsome jungle spirit known as the Bungadarah.

Genre: Historical Fantasy / Supernatural Mystery / Horror

Borrow The Enigmatic Madam by Meihan Boey

Haunted by ghosts wherever he lives and desperate to escape both society and his painful past, Jamie Newcross decides an advanced self-driving car might provide the safe, isolated refuge he needs. Instead, he awakens to find the vehicle hurtling down a dark road with blood on its damaged hood—and no way to stop it or get out. As the car makes increasingly disturbing choices on his behalf, Jamie is forced to confront the tragedy he has tried to bury and his own growing complicity in what happens next.

Genre: Science Fiction / Psychological Horror / Thriller

Borrow Driven by Andrew Piper writing as Mason Coile

After losing his university deferment in 1967, a young UCLA student receives his draft notice and decides to flee the United States rather than fight in Vietnam. He takes a job delivering a new Jaguar across the country, setting out for the East Coast with a suitcase, a supply of amphetamines, and plenty of uncertainty about the life he is leaving behind. Along the way, he visits his troubled parents, estranged brother, and twin sister, turning his cross-country escape into a complicated farewell to both his family and his country.

Genre: Historical Fiction / Literary Fiction / Road Novel

Borrow Dodge City by Patrick deWitt

Born a conjoined twin and the sole survivor of a childhood separation surgery, Asa grows up haunted by visions of the twin they lost and questions about the life they might have shared. As Asa embraces their non-binary, gender-fluid identity and rises to fame as a musician, they face both public hostility and the complicated realities of living outside conventional expectations. Glimpses of alternate universes—including ones where their twin Angelo survived—follow Asa through a life shaped by music, identity, loss, and the search for belonging.

Genre: Literary Fiction / Speculative Fiction / Coming-Of-Age

Borrow At the Freak Show by Candas Jane Dorsey

Literary Special Ops agent Thursday Next knows she has reached her eighth and final adventure—and so do the enemies determined to make sure her story never reaches its ending. With Martians escaping from fiction, extremists invading a beloved children’s-book world, a gateway to Hell opening at a Shakespeare theme park, and mysterious agents seeking access to discarded literary ideas, both the real world and BookWorld are in peril. Thursday must draw on every narrative trick she knows—and a little help from her friends and readers—to foil the plot and bring her wildly unpredictable story to a fitting conclusion.

Genre: Comic Fantasy / Literary Fantasy / Science Fiction

Borrow Dark Reading Matter: The Last Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde

Two forbidden romances unfold in this paired dark fantasy. In the first, art history graduate student and reluctant forger Vero Mercer is recruited by secretive professor Viktor Ashworth to reproduce a mysterious ancient manuscript, drawing her into a dangerous scheme—and an attraction she can’t ignore. In the second, Lilit of Nineveh, a 5,000-year-old revenant sworn to protect mortals, risks breaking her own rules for compassionate ER doctor Roman Martin when an unknown enemy begins hunting her and puts him in danger.

Genre: Dark Fantasy Romance / Paranormal Romance / Dark Academia

Borrow Bound and Unbound: A Paranormal Novella Duology by Ali Hazelwood

Kaia signs up for a five-day rafting adventure through an isolated stretch of wilderness, only to learn that the same river was the site of a notorious mass murder seven years earlier. When supplies disappear, a raft flips, and other unsettling incidents begin echoing the earlier crime, the trip starts to look less like bad luck and more like a deadly reenactment. Trapped among strangers with 84 miles of whitewater between them and civilization, Kaia must figure out who is lying—and who may be planning to finish what began at Camas Creek.

Genre: Thriller / Suspense / Adventure Fiction

Borrow The Last to Drown by Noelle W. Ihli

Connie is nervous about spending the weekend with her boyfriend’s wealthy, notoriously snobbish family at their secluded summer home, but their unexpectedly warm welcome soon puts her at ease. Her boyfriend, however, is baffled by how completely his parents seem to have changed. When Connie hears what sounds like cries for help coming from the basement and ventures downstairs, she uncovers something far more sinister than an awkward family gathering.

Genre: Horror / Psychological Horror / Suspense

Borrow Morsels by Abe Moss

Private investigators Brendan Holmes, Margaret Marple, and Auguste Poe retreat to a remote lodge in upstate New York after an attacker bombs their city headquarters. Their attempt to lie low ends when a body is pulled from a frozen lake carrying a note that explicitly implicates Holmes, putting the trio under suspicion and back in the public eye. As their elusive enemy tightens the screws, the detectives receive a chilling ultimatum: stop solving crimes and start committing them.

Genre: Mystery / Crime Fiction / Thriller

Borrow The Girl in the Lake by James Patterson

In 1990s Hyderabad, teenagers Arjun, Ruhee, and Ganesh form an intense friendship over one transformative summer, finding refuge from their troubled families in an abandoned neighborhood home they call the Red House. Their growing bonds of love and friendship are shattered when an act of violence there changes all three lives. A decade later, Ruhee’s return to Hyderabad gives Arjun a chance to confront his first love, the truth he has avoided, and a painful secret still binding them together.

Genre: Literary Fiction / Coming-Of-Age / Historical Fiction

Borrow All Our Evenings by Ruthvika Rao

When a wealthy British drug lord uses a network of corrupt police officers to keep himself untouchable, MI5 officer Jonas Merrick is brought in to stop his plans for a massive heroin shipment. He recruits soon-to-be former Flying Squad officer Kenny “Chopper” Harris to get close to the drug lord’s daughter and heir, Julie, who secretly longs to escape her father’s brutal world. As Chopper offers Julie a way out in exchange for betraying her family, the two form an unexpected bond and enter a dangerous game of deception where one wrong move could prove deadly.

Genre: Crime thriller / Espionage fiction / Suspense

Borrow The Irregular by Gerald Seymour