Spotlight: The Vampire and the Case of the Ghastly Golem by Heather G. Harris & Jilleen Dolbeare

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Publication Date: October 7th, 2026

Dead bodies are bad. Dead bodies that break the laws of magic are worse.

Finding a dead fox in someone’s garden isn’t normally a police matter. Finding a dead fox shifter who should have turned human the second he died? Yeah, that’s more my department.

Remmy has no wounds, no blood and no obvious cause of death. He’s simply dead, trapped forever in his fox form. Apparently there’s only one thing that can do that to a shifter: drain every last drop of magic from them.

Great. Because what Portlock really needed was another magical murderer.

I’ve got an eidetic memory, a badge and two extremely questionable sidekicks. One is a traumatised werewolf who prefers being a German Shepherd, and the other is an ever-growing lynx with a criminal disregard for personal property. Between us, surely we can crack one impossible murder.

Then some local teenagers report seeing a huge creature stalking through the woods, covered in branches and leaves with blazing red eyes.

And red eyes are always bad.

I’m starting to think our mysterious monster and our dead shifter might be connected, which means I need to find whatever is prowling Portlock before anyone else ends up magically drained.

Unfortunately, murder isn’t my only problem. Connor’s father, the Vampire King of the US and an all-round arsehole, has announced he’s coming to town. And he’s bringing the other vampire leaders with him.

So now I have a supernatural killer to catch, a creepy forest monster to find and the most powerful vampire in America heading straight for my home.

Portlock has survived murderous shifters, deadly conspiracies and more supernatural disasters than any tiny Alaskan town has a right to. Hopefully we can survive this too.

Preferably without anyone else turning up dead.

Dive into this fast-paced urban fantasy series if you love mystery, humour, found family, and a slow-burn romance.

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About Heather G. Harris

Heather is an urban fantasy writer and mum. She was born and raised near Windsor, which gave her the misguided impression that she was close to royalty in some way. She is not, though she once got a letter from Queen Elizabeth's lady-in-waiting.

Heather went to university in Liverpool, where she took up skydiving and met her future husband. When she’s not running around after her children, she’s plotting her next book and daydreaming about vampires, dragons and kick-ass heroines. 

Heather loves to travel and once spent a month in Thailand. Thai food remains a firm family favourite. It goes without saying that Heather is a book lover. She grew up reading the likes of Brian Jacques and Anne McCaffrey.

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About Jilleen Dolbeare

Jilleen Dolbeare is the author of the Splintered Magic Series—A PWF series about a woman finding her magic, and the Shadow Winged Chronicles, an urban fantasy series about a shape-shifting bush pilot in Alaska. 

She loves riding horses, warm ocean beaches, and long walks in the mountains, none of which she can do in the Arctic, so she writes. Her activities are riding her four-wheeler on cold ocean beaches (often frozen or covered with ice), and long walks to and from work when it’s 40 below in the dark. She does keep her stakes sharp for those vamps that show up during the 67 days of night.

Jilleen lives with her husband and two hungry cats in Barrow, Alaska where she also discovered her love and admiration of the Inupiaq people and their folklore.

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Spotlight: The Promise of the Gilded Flame by Jen L. Grey

Genre: Romantasy

Publication Date: Oct. 8th, 2026

The final battle has begun, and Fate wants more than our blood.

One moment, Kai was holding me beneath the stars.

The next, his castle exploded.

Now its heart is destroyed, its magic is gone, and the Night King is closer than ever to unleashing the New Night.

And Dusk won’t be the last court to fall.

Something inside me is changing too. Magic is answering me in ways I don’t understand, secrets are surfacing, and the bond between Kai and me has become impossible to ignore.

Especially when I can feel exactly how far he’d go to keep me.

Kai would burn every kingdom in this realm before letting anyone take me from him.

The problem is, he’d sacrifice himself just as quickly to save me.

He should know by now I’d never let him.

With the courts unraveling and the Night King closing in, we’re running out of time.

Because whatever Fate has been leading us toward, stopping the New Night may cost us the one thing neither of us is willing to lose.

Each other.

Read the explosive finale to The Fae Spark Trilogy for fated mates, a sassy Southern heroine, a vicious possessive king, touch-her-and-die devotion, deadly court magic, found family, and a love strong enough to defy Fate.

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About the Author

USA Today Bestselling Author

Reading has always been one of my favorite hobbies, even as a little girl. When I was a toddler, my parents would read stories to me over and over. I would hear them so often that I had the books memorized and could recite the story word by word.

My favorite genres are fantasy, paranormal, and contemporary romance. So of course that's what I'm inclined to write.

​I have a husband, two young daughters, and a mini Australian Shepherd. I've lived in Tennessee the majority of my life and love the state.

I'm extremely addicted to caffeine and enjoy drinking coffee and lattes.

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Spotlight: Look What You Made Me Do by Summer Atkinson

Publication date: September 15th 2026

Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Young Adult

How far would you go to break a cycle before it breaks you?

Margot is no stranger to suffering. Such darkness feels familiar when you have a violent drunk for a dad and a single mom working multiple jobs just to stay afloat. But Margot yearns for more than these bleak circumstances.

When she falls for the golden boy of her small New England town, she thinks he will be her escape. But she is unprepared for how ugly twisted love can become. Breaking free isn’t easy, but unconditional friendship and untainted love spark a defiant hope that cannot be dimmed.

As the line between love and abuse blurs, Margot must face the stories she’s told herself about who she is and who she is becoming.

Excerpt

I had forgotten how charming Old Port could be or had never noticed it amidst all my drama. Not the people, but the place itself. The centuries-worn stone walls that somehow still stood in the woods. The sound of the ocean in the distance. All the quiet comforts of a hometown and its nostalgic beauty that haunts you long after you’ve left.  

I watched from the sidelines as the people I once considered peers repeated the same old circular paths, not noticing the furrows they were making in the process. I’d been one of them once, and I wanted to warn them but couldn’t find the words. Not that they would have listened. 

There is something about those born on the coast. Those who grow up knowing the closest path to walk to the ocean and who do not know the feel of fresh air without the taste of salt that lingers in its wake. For them, summer is endless, if not in season, then in mentality. 

Every day contained possibility, promising to be the one that wouldn’t end. That would change everything. That would make up for the threat of winter hanging in the storm clouds on a humid afternoon. I heard it in the lingering laughter and casual conversation of Old Port’s residents and thought that this easy enjoyment of the ordinary was possible for me too. But I also saw how those same people became too entangled in their comfortable lives, familiar relationships, and unquestioned world views to be willing, or perhaps even able, to consider what might be possible beyond the sheltered confines of Old Port.

So even as I began to appreciate the pleasure of simple enjoyments, I also felt the stir of what was possible for me in life, and I didn’t want to be lulled into complacency.

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About the Author

Summer Atkinson grew up in Connecticut and now lives in beautiful Colorado with her husband, Jackson, their dog, Bilbo Waggins, and cats Mr. Whiskers and Mosey. She has a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and a master’s degree in public health, which she uses in her day job as a life science consultant. Her professional career has been particularly devoted to women’s health and reproductive justice. When not writing, she can often be found in the mountains, either hiking, backpacking, or snowboarding. Passionate about travel and the great outdoors, she catalogs her adventures on a travel blog and Instagram titled Out There Travels. Connect with Summer online via @summeratkinsonbooks on socials.

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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/71760933.Summer_Atkinson

Look What You Made Me Do Blitz

Spotlight: Looks Perfect by Jessica Siskin

What comes between a fashion icon’s perfect image and her genuine self? The perfect stranger—in a sharp and witty novel about identity, performance, and what it takes to make a true connection.

One million people follow Stella Lerner’s every move. And now the buzzy fashion designer is fulfilling her lifelong dream and taking her indie clothing brand global with the help of the industry’s biggest investor. Sounds perfect. Except offline, the optics aren’t so great.

Her relationship with her boyfriend, Alex, is crumbling just as the pressure to curate her image online only builds. Feeling trapped between the picture-perfect life she’s promised her followers and the messy reality she’s facing, Stella anonymously joins a new dating app. Blindr promises deep, private conversations, free from the burden of anyone’s expectations, especially her own. That’s when Stella connects with a stranger called Pineapple who’s intuitive, honest, and empathetic. Stella may be watched by millions, but this man, who’s never even laid eyes on her, makes her feel seen.

What starts as a diversion becomes a journey of radical transformation. As Stella’s search for authenticity intensifies, every chat with Pineapple takes her further down a path she never could’ve imagined.

Excerpt

EXCERPT from LOOKS PERFECT by Jessica Siskin, Text copyright © 2026 by Jessica Siskin, Published by Little A

Eight

Before Alex, I didn’t have a boyfriend for almost six years, and it was starting to feel like I never would. When I was a kid, I never really believed I would get married. My Barbie got married to Ken, and Aunt Becky got married to Uncle Jesse, and so did Princess Ariel (after abandoning her entire family, the only world she’d ever known, her lower body, and her literal voice for a guy she’d never even spoken to—but I’ll be the first to admit that Prince Eric turned out to be a catch and probably the second-hottest animated leading man after Dmitri in Anastasia). I knew that I was supposed to believe that getting married and having a family was what was going to happen to me. I had a nursery full of Cabbage Patch babies in my bedroom closet, three heart-shaped Polly Pocket–branded microcosms of domesticity, and a set of Quints dolls, palm-size baby quintuplets that were to be fed in tandem from five tiny, connected bottles, like a shotski. I knew I was meant to think it was inevitable I’d get married and have babies, but I just didn’t buy that I could ever be so lucky. I couldn’t even be satisfied with the stifling narrative I was being sold.

The first time I ever had a real boyfriend (after a beautiful backyard wedding to my neighbor Ricky Shapiro in kindergarten) was senior year of high school. His name was Brett Wertheimer, he was the president of Model Congress and the captain of the tennis team, and the whole time we were together, it felt like a fluke, like the universe had made a mistake by issuing me a relationship and I’d have to do everything in my power to hold on to him, my one and only chance at love in this lifetime.

While most couples in our class were breaking up before leaving for college, I convinced him we should stay together. We’d only be a couple of hours apart, me at NYU and him at UPenn in Philadelphia; an hour and a half on Amtrak barely qualified as long distance.

When he broke up with me roughly six weeks into the first semester of college while visiting over fall break, I literally could not compute what was happening.

“No,” I said, sitting next to him on the twin bed in my dorm room. “I do not consent.”

We’d had our life planned out: We’d move to the suburbs and be cool parents. I’d drive a Range Rover and never be late for school pickup; he’d work in finance in the city. Our kids, a boy and a girl (three years apart), would somehow look just like both of us and share only our good qualities. When he dumped me, the fully formed vision I had for my entire life disintegrated like that raccoon’s cotton candy once dipped in water in that viral video. It still hits way too close to home. I couldn’t understand how someone else could make such a pivotal, defining choice about my life.

He left me crying beneath my poster of Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christie Turlington clutching one another in the nude.

“It’s what’s best for both of us,” he managed, and then, “I’m sorry,” as he walked slowly backward out of my room, as if retreating respectfully from the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That’s when I learned that you don’t get to just create your life however you want; you can only do what you can with what’s available to you. I thought I had it all figured out, the car was driving on autopilot, destination: perfection. I just forgot that another person had access to the brakes.

And then came years and years of watching my friends date and get married. Sure, I dated people, but nothing felt meaningful. And everything was fine until, as if overnight, the music stopped in the communal game of musical chairs I didn’t know every Jewish young professional in Manhattan was playing, and everyone started to pair off until there was seemingly no one left. I was out.

Before all their engagements, I had a social life that all of my friends participated in, whether they were dating someone or not. Once everything changed, my coupled friends stopped going out as much, and my social calendar filled up with engagement parties and bridal showers and bachelorette weekends. My attitude around being single changed too—it went from being totally normal, almost the default in our mid-twenties, to feeling kind of sad and pitiable as we all approached thirty and I found myself picking at overcooked salmon at more singles tables than I could count.

Work was going so well, Stellar was blowing up, and I’d created this illusion on my Instagram that I didn’t need anything or anyone, but I was lonely, and the single-girl-in-the-city thing was getting old. So I got on the dating apps, and before long I was getting messages from guys who said they’d shown their matches to their sister or their best girlfriend or their coworker and they’re obsessed with me, which maybe should’ve felt good but made me feel pathetic, like I didn’t belong there. But there was nowhere else to go. After college and those early days in the city when everyone reconvenes, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to meet someone in real life. I read an article that said that 10 percent of couples meet at work, but I rarely came across straight men in my line of work.

The apps were a nightmare unless you’d never been on one, in which case they seemed like So Much Fun. My friends who were already coupled before apps ruined regular dating thought they were like DoorDash but for someone to eventually adopt a rescue dog and curate a wedding playlist with. But while the delivery service bestows overpriced sushi stuffed like jewels in their neat custom-cardboard boxes from SUGARFISH thirty to forty-five minutes after you press Order, dating apps aren’t built to deliver with efficiency. As a matter of fact, their entire business hinges on keeping people swiping for as long as possible.

And I get why apps seem so appealing to people who’ve never had to use them. I love to shop online. It’s getting easier and easier to find what I need when I need it. Just last week I was wearing my beige Nili Lotan boilersuit when it occurred to me that I’d love one in leopard print for the fall. It took about six minutes of focused googling, combining and replacing search terms like Chef René Redzepi selecting bespoke fungi and obscure seaweeds in his culinary lab in Copenhagen until I finally found something close enough to what I wanted. Though the background of the leopard print was tan and not cream, like I’d envisioned, and the spots were a little less graphic and more realistic than I’d hoped, I managed to cart the last size 2 on Farfetch.

That was the thing about dating: I’d curated my life in such a way that I could access pretty much anything I wanted whenever I wanted it. I summoned vegan bento boxes and chopped salads and kale collagen smoothies on Postmates or Caviar or UberEats, and if I wanted fresh stone crabs from Joe’s in Miami, they’d FedEx them to me on ice, or I could just hop down to South Beach for the weekend. Celeste was over for a contour spray tan whenever I felt less than glowy, and Caleb always squeezed me in for hair color if I felt like I needed a change, even if it was, like, two in the morning before the Michael Kors show and I decided I wanted to show up bleached blond (a mistake, but everyone posting about my hair nightmare pushed me over five hundred thousand, and I was back to my signature auburn by Monday). If I wanted to meet with a brand or I wanted a table at Carbone, Ace could drop my name or call in a favor and make that happen. I was at the point where I could access pretty much anything I wanted by sending a text. So you can imagine how frustrating it was that I couldn’t find someone to love who loved me back.

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About the Author

Jessica Siskin earned her MFA from the New School. She is the founder of Misterkrisp, a  popular Instagram-based food art business specializing in custom Rice Krispies Treats and social  media content. She is the author of Treat Yourself!, a cookbook featuring her inventive food art  and edible creations. Jessica lives in New York City. 

Spotlight: Fugitive Archives My Family and the American Myth of Belonging by Asale Angel-Ajani

Asale Angel-Ajani and her twin, the only Black children in a working-class white family, were shuffled between relatives, coming of age in a country that offered little refuge. Years later, Angel-Ajani dove into the archives, searching for an explanation for her family’s and her country’s contradictions, and for her own unshakeable anger.

What she found were records and stories of her ancestors enslaved and free, Indigenous and white, members of the KKK and Black fugitives of a justice system that was rarely just. How could so much love live alongside such hate and prejudice, within the same family? Forged by the violent systems that rewarded racial terror and segregation, Angel-Ajani’s ancestors built their lives together anyway, on the shaky foundation of love and cognitive dissonance.

Fugitive Archives reveals that we are not a country of strangers split into “us” and “them,” who merely need to get to know each other in order to empathize. We have always been deeply entangled. This story of one family’s grief, betrayal, and courage is a vital exploration of race and class, a map for survival and resistance, and a necessary reckoning—for only when we acknowledge the complex, messy truth of who we are as a country, can we shape a more just future.

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About the Author

Asale Angel-Ajani is a writer and anthropologist. She and her twin grew up as the only Black children in a working-class white family. In Fugitive Archives: My Family and the American Myth of Belonging, she takes up her family's records after her grandmother's death and finds ancestors enslaved and free, Indigenous and white, including Klan members and Black fugitives from the justice system. The book argues that Americans are not strangers split into "us" and "them." We have always been entangled. She is also the author of the novel A Country You Can Leave, a New York Times recommended book and Amazon Editors' Pick, and the nonfiction book Strange Trade. Her work has been featured on CNN, NPR, and in Ms. Magazine. She holds a PhD from Stanford, was a Hutchins Family Fellow at Harvard, and has received support from the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations.

Spotlight: Keeping Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies by Rachel Wahl

An inside look into real-life conversations across ideological, racial, and institutional lines

What does it take for a progressive student and a conservative peer to view each other with respect? Can trust form between a police officer and a community member after years of tension and mistrust? At a time when political polarization seems insurmountable, Rachel Wahl offers a rare glimpse into what happens when people with opposing views sit down and talk— not with the goal to debate or “prove” their political point but with the goal to understand the life experiences, hopes, fears, and ideas that drive their disagreements. Drawing on in-depth empirical research with college students, police officers, and community members, this groundbreaking book takes readers inside real-life conversations across ideological, racial, and institutional lines.

Wahl draws on political theory to examine two cases: structured dialogue between students and a series of forums held between officers and community members. Rather than idealizing dialogue, Keeping Our Enemies Closer reveals its complexity—where it succeeds, where it falters, and how it can reshape not just minds, but institutions. Through gripping narratives and rigorous analysis, this book challenges assumptions and offers a new framework for thinking about communication in fractured times. An essential read for educators, activists, and policymakers, Keeping Our Enemies Closer has much to offer anyone seeking to understand how connection is forged—or frayed—in twenty-first-century America.

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About the Author

Rachel Wahl is a professor in the Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Policy at the University of Virginia's School of Education and Human Development, a Faculty Fellow at UVA's Karsh Institute of Democracy, and director of its Good Life Political Project. Her work examines how people handle political disagreement in polarized democracies. Her new book, Keeping Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies (University of Pennsylvania Press), draws on years of research in settings from police-community forums to college campuses. It asks why political conversation has become so difficult and what dialogue can realistically do for democratic life. She is also the author of Just Violence: Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police (Stanford University Press, 2017).