Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Time to Burn by Ellery Lloyd, which releases on August 4th 2026.

Mercurial tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank has perfected commercial time travel, though it is tightly regulated and so expensive that it’s open only to the very wealthiest.

His company, Tempus Tours, has so far been approved for just one route: a journey back to London in 1941, to the days of the Blitz, allowing the super-rich to experience the awesome sights and sounds of the aerial bombardment of the capital during World War II. It’s a slick operation—routes across the wartime city are meticulously plotted, guides are extensively trained, and rules for the time tourists are strictly enforced.

To immortalize his achievement, Frank enlists award-winning filmmaker Phoebe Hunt to create a fly-on-the-wall documentary. On her first day shadowing Inigo, she is set to witness the return of a billionaire property developer and his family from their trip to the past. But instead of their awe-filled return, she captures the group arriving bloodied and traumatized, with one of their number missing.

Not only that, but Phoebe recognizes the missing woman, and knows not only that she’s not who she claims to be but that she has every reason to harbor a grudge against her. And as events begin to unravel in the present day, it seems increasingly clear that she had sinister motives for returning to the past—and that people close to Phoebe are in danger.

Phoebe must race to untangle the truth—before past and the future are rewritten.

With this inventive, propulsive and genre-bending page turner, the bestselling author of The Club and The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby once again delivers an enthralling tale of legacy and wealth, history and technology with a gripping mystery at its core.

EXCERPT

Tom Walker checked his watch. It was eight forty-five p.m. The restaurant was beginning to fill up now. At the bar, a man in a dinner jacket was pulling out a tall stool for his glamorous date in her blush satin evening dress. On the stage, an older man in shirtsleeves was arranging chairs for the band. At the next table, two men in uniform were making desultory conversation, evidently waiting for someone else to join them. Tom made brief eye contact with a woman in furs being shown across the room and looked away. Pretty much everyone was smoking.

Almost on tiptoes, his arms crossed behind his back, a very young waiter with sharply parted red hair and a freckled face was eagerly monitoring the room for a signal, a gesture. The doors to the kitchen swung on their hinges, back and forth, back and forth. Champagne corks popped. Voices rose and fell. At the far end of the bar, a member of the band blew a one-handed flurry of notes on his trumpet for a small circle of admirers, then struck a pose. As new arrivals made their way downstairs, they checked their reflections in the mirrors that lined the walls, straightening up, adjusting their expressions.

It was Saturday night.

They were in the Café de Paris, located underneath the Rialto on Coventry Street, just off Leicester Square, accessed down a long flight of stairs between the entrances to the cinema and the Lyons Tea House next door. Said to have been modeled on the ballroom of the Titanic, it was billed as the safest and liveliest nightspot in London, twenty feet underground.

There were five people at Tom’s table, two other men, two women, all of them here, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, for a lavish seventy-fifth birthday celebration. They had finished their starters and were awaiting their main courses. He had suggested they not wait to order their desserts or linger for coffee. In less than an hour’s time the table at which they were all sitting would no longer exist. In less than an hour’s time a considerable proportion of the people in this restaurant would be dead. Already, in the streets above them, the air raid sirens had started to wail.

The date was 8 March 1941. Right in the middle of the Blitz.

At precisely nine forty, just as the band—Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and his West Indian Orchestra—started up their second number, a pair of 110-pound bombs would come crashing through the ceiling above them. The first would fail to explode, spilling its contents across the dance floor. The second would detonate directly in front of the stage—about two feet from where Tom was now sitting—killing Ken Johnson and his saxophonist, as well as the café’s headwaiter and at least thirty-three others. Dozens more would be seriously injured. Almost miraculously, all the cabaret dancers—currently flitting around the room in a riot of feathers and sequins—would escape unharmed. One of the hardest things to process, on your first trip back in time, was that all of this was real. That this was no VR simulation. All these people who had been dead for decades were as alive as you were now.

That someone born in 1920 was all of a sudden younger than you.

This was the third trip to the past on which Tom had served as a guide for Tempus Tours. The first had been a picnic on the South Downs in August 1940, an anniversary gift from a recently retired hedge fund CEO’s wife to her history-buff husband, the Battle of Britain thundering on overhead, Tom pointing out which puff of white smoke, which plume of spiraling black, was what. The second had been a trip to 8 May 1945, with a gang of Silicon Valley billionaires, to experience the celebrations marking the end of the war in Europe, to witness Churchill waving to the crowds from a balcony in Whitehall, to observe him pulling that famous double V sign, to mingle on Piccadilly with the joyous throng.

Tonight was going to be very different. Tonight—at the client’s insistence—was to offer a whole new level of spectacle and, along with it, risk.

All through their meal, the woman on Tom’s left—Sasha Lavrova, the wife of Luke Allen, the son of tonight’s host, birthday boy Harry Allen—had been quiet, withdrawn even. Several times Tom had spotted Sasha—an elegant brunette dressed in a flowing black gown, a brightly embroidered silk stole around her shoulders—staring thoughtfully at the group of Canadians in blue air force uniforms sitting with their female companions at the next table over. All of them in high spirits, ordering bottle after bottle of champagne, laughing and talking at once. Not one could have been older than twenty-five. “What would happen,” Sasha finally asked Tom, “if we warned them?”

He smiled, patiently. Despite the weeks of training everyone had to go through, the lectures on the ethics and physics of time travel, the reams of legal documents they had all signed, the waivers ensuring Tempus couldn’t be sued in case of injury or psychological harm, on every trip so far someone had asked him a version of the same question: Was it possible to rewrite history?

Yes, was the simple answer. Nothing about the past unfolding around them was fixed, and nothing about the future that would follow was preordained. Nor was there anything magical about time travel itself—the basic mechanics of it were not even really all that complicated, once you understood them.

Of course what most people really wanted to know, when they asked that question, was not whether changing the past was possible but what the consequences would be. That was trickier to answer.

One thing that would happen, Tom reflected, was that Tempus Tours would be shut down and fined into oblivion. If the company or one of its guides was found guilty of failing to observe the Regulation of Time Travel Act, or of not ensuring their customers understood the law, there would be extensive jail time for everyone involved.

It was also rather harder to change the course of history than most people assumed.

Whenever, during the course of training, someone asked why Tempus did not use its technology to kill Hitler or prevent the Kennedy assassination, the obvious response was: How? It was a time machine that Tempus operated, transporting guests from a single central London location. It was not a teleporter.

Tom was conscious he had still not answered Sasha’s question.

“The first problem,” he said, “is how you are going to get them to believe you. If you march over there and announce you’re a time traveler with a message from the future, or a stranger who’s had a chilling premonition, how seriously are they likely to take you? Also, listen.” He paused, raising his hand a little to stop Sasha from replying. “Do you hear that?”

Sasha cocked her head. Faintly but distinctly, even over the hubbub of the room, muffled thumps could be heard.

“Those are bombs out there. Thirty thousand incendiary devices will land on this city before dawn. So many people will be injured that in two hours’ time, Charing Cross Hospital is going to run out of field dressings. So when you warn those people they aren’t safe here, even if you do manage to persuade them of that, where do you think they’ll go? Out onto the streets, in the blackout?”

“You’re saying it’s not even worth trying to save them?” Sasha asked.

“What I am saying is that they’re already dead. Even if they do survive tonight, when we return to the present none of the other people in this room will be alive. We’re amongst ghosts.”

At the other side of the table, Harry was bickering with Beatrice— his much younger, much posher girlfriend—about whether or not tonight was actually his birthday. “The eighth of March,” Harry kept saying, irritation audible in his gravelly voice. “That’s my birthday. That’s always been my birthday. Why do you think I’m paying a fortune for this jaunt if it’s not my fucking birthday?”

Blonde, skinny, brittle, and clearly not averse to an argument, Beatrice was standing her ground.

“A birthday,” she was saying, her accent clipped, her enunciation precise, “commemorates, each year, the day of your birth.”

“Exactly,” said Harry emphatically, stabbing the table with a triumphant finger.

“My point being,” she continued, equally emphatically, “that you aren’t going to be born for nearly a decade, so this is not technically your birthday at all.”

Harry’s son, Luke, visibly bored, a little puffy-eyed, his bow tie starting to come loose on his starched white collar, drained his glass of champagne and tapped the top of it for a refill from the waiter.

Tom checked his wristwatch. “We need to go,” he said.

Luke yawned and straightened up in his seat. Sasha touched his upper arm and leaned in to whisper something in his ear. Harry folded up his napkin and chucked it on the table. Beatrice glanced at him, then nervously across at the stairs.

“And you’re absolutely certain this is safe?” she demanded, a catch in her voice. Throughout the preparation process, Beatrice had made it clear this trip had not been her idea, that she was only doing it to keep Harry happy and because he’d insisted. Previously, Tom had assumed she’d rather they had spent the money on a party or a holiday. Only now did it dawn upon him how scared she was, beneath that spiky facade.

“It’s just like we talked about during the briefings,” Tom reminded her, in as soothing a tone as he could muster given the urgency of the situation. “Nothing is ever one hundred percent safe, but if we stick exactly to the schedule the risk is negligible. As you know, Tempus’s team of archivists has been preparing our route for months. Consulting the local civil defense incident register. Checking street-by-street, through the London County Council bomb damage maps, reading the Fire Brigade’s situation reports. Cross-referencing these with the eye-witness accounts of civilians, ambulance drivers, firemen, from the Imperial War Museum archives. Taking what information they can from hospital admission records, about who got hurt, how, and where. Plotting our itinerary down to the smallest detail. If you stand where you are meant to stand, and move when you are supposed to move, and listen carefully when I give you instructions, none of this is any more dangerous than crossing the road on any given day. Considerably less so, in fact.”

“Oh, come on,” said Luke, perhaps enjoying Beatrice’s alarm a little. Smirking slightly, he turned in his chair to face Tom. “I’m sure that’s what they tell you to say, but how can that possibly be true, given everything going on up there?”

“In the sense that when you cross the road, under normal circumstances, you have no idea what is going to come speeding around the corner. Tonight, in contrast, because all of this is a matter of historical record, you do. We know exactly what time each of the bombs that will fall on our path back to King William Street is going to land, and precisely what damage it will do. We know what kind of bombs they are, their type and weight. We know which will explode and which will fail to. We know which buildings are going to be damaged and how. We know, at least for the particular parts of central London we’ll be crossing, every recorded location where injuries and fatalities will occur. A lot of hard work, by a lot of very clever people, has gone into this trip.”

Tom paused, for effect. “Which is how we at Tempus Tours are able to offer you front-row tickets to the greatest and deadliest firework display there has ever been.”

He had already signaled to the waiter for the bill.

On the far side of the room, looking a little unsettled by the chaos outside, brushing something—was it rain or plaster dust?—from the shoulders of his coat, Ken “Snakehips” Johnson had arrived and was making his way down the grand staircase. There was a stir in the crowd as people noticed him. Johnson passed the headwaiter and said something to him. Both men checked their watches. Perhaps the exchange had been about the time the band was meant to start, who was here and who was yet to arrive. There was a fresh sense of expectation in the room, a different energy. Already people were taking their places around the edges of the dance floor, men with their hands rested lightly on their partners’ waists, women practicing brief sequences of steps.

Someone crossed the stage to adjust a mic stand. The crowd mistook him for one of the band, and for a moment, the room fell almost silent. In that lull, the thump of an explosion sounded, much louder and closer than any before. Someone laughed, nervously. Conversations resumed.

It was nine twenty. Now it really was time to go.

“Stay close,” said Tom, as they ascended to the street. About halfway up the stairs something went off nearby, and he flinched despite himself. He turned to address them all.

“Right. This is it,” he said as he led them out onto Coventry Street. He turned on his torch, its bulb shrouded in a paper cap, as per blackout rules.

“We’re heading east. It’ll be dark and uneven underfoot, so keep close to me and be careful where you’re stepping. Watch for debris. Remain mindful of the edge of the pavement. You’re going to see flames on the horizon and black smoke in the sky, and you will hear the German bombers. It’s a clear night, not much wind, perfect bombing weather. Buckingham Palace has already been hit, Westminster Abbey, St. James’s Palace, Waterloo Station. The glow visible on the skyline to the east is the Glico Petroleum Works in West Ham, which was hit about ten minutes ago and will be burning for days. Which is helpful for us because that’s the direction we need to be heading in. It’s going to be about an hour’s brisk walk. The aperture opens at midnight, and only for a brief window, so we all need to be in position by then. Is everyone clear?”

Tom flashed up the torch’s beam briefly to illuminate each of his group’s faces. One by one they nodded. Only Harry Allen looked uncomplicatedly excited for what was about to happen. Beatrice, her face set in a grimace, kept glancing nervously upwards. Sasha was holding hands with Luke, tightly. They all wrapped their coats—specially tailored, period appropriate—around themselves. Tom turned up his collar.

“Everybody ready?” Tom asked. They all nodded again.

It was one of those odd little etiquette things, on a trip like this, the way as a guide you pretended not to know much about your guests, never quite acknowledging but also never quite forgetting how wealthy, how influential, they were.

Harry, the East End lad done spectacularly good, the self-made property mogul, the birthday boy (even if it was indeed a good few years until he’d actually be born, in a small terraced house in Poplar, a few miles east of here).

His girlfriend, Beatrice, who at thirty-eight was just six years older than his only son. The granddaughter of Albert Downing, one of the city’s great postwar developers, a man who at this very moment was somewhere out there hatching plans to buy up bomb sites on the cheap, plans that would reshape London’s skyline, laying the groundwork for his own property fortune. The fortune that in a few decades’ time would be sending her to the sort of boarding school that had its own lake and stables. Of all the party, Tom had found her hardest to warm to. Tapping away at her phone, yawning, she had made it very clear how uninterested she was in any of the history lessons the group had been given (Sasha and Harry had been the keenest students; Luke for the most part had at least stayed awake).

Things that had been clearly explained multiple times, Beatrice would suddenly rankle at, as if they had just been sprung on her. Providing a 1941-appropriate outfit she’d actually wear was a nightmare. Despite being told repeatedly that they should all remain as inconspicuous as possible, tonight she had taken one look at her potted shrimp starter and sent it back. Only an irritated intervention by Harry had prevented her, when her steak arrived rarer than ordered, from calling the waiter back to complain again. Nerves may have explained some of her behavior, but Tom was not convinced they excused all of it.

Then there was Luke, Harry’s son, constant tabloid fodder due to his many trips to rehab, his multiple failed business ventures (a tequila bar in Mayfair, a tequila brand, a tequila-flavored vape), his high-profile broken engagements (to a glamour model, a fitness influencer, a very upmarket estate agent).

His wife, Sasha, the daughter of a Belarusian oligarch.

They were an almost comically attractive couple. Sasha with her cheekbones, full lips, her large green eyes. Luke with that mop of white-blond hair, slicked back tonight, the dimpled chin, the gym-pumped torso, the seemingly permanent slight pout.

It was Luke—who had turned up for the trip this morning thoroughly hungover, whose eyes when he took off his shades had resembled a pair of bloodshot pickled eggs—who had explained to Tom why this particular trip appealed to Harry. His father had always been a history nut, the Second World War a lifelong obsession. He was the kind of dad who insists you sit with him at eight years old and watch the whole of The World at War. Who reads eight-hundred-page books about the siege of Stalingrad on holiday. On his fortieth, Harry had paid for himself to go up in a real Spitfire. For his fiftieth, Luke told Tom, Harry had dragged his ex-wife and son around northern France on a weeklong tour of Second World War battlefields. In a way, thought Tom, what was a trip like this one but that same impulse, taken to its logical extreme?

Tempus hadn’t chosen this era as their first tour destination by accident. If they weren’t allowed to offer trips back to the Roman Empire—even a man as persuasive as founder Inigo Frank knew the government regulator could only be pushed so far—World War II was a smart second-best. There was something about war—this war especially, with its clear-cut good guys to root for and bad guys to hate— that obsessed people who could afford a trip like this. Mainly powerful men willing to pay a fortune just to feel something. Anything.

As they passed the doorman of the Café de Paris, they bobbed their heads and thanked him. Then they stepped out into the night.

“Oh my God,” Beatrice said, a new note of terror in her voice. “What are we doing?”

Tom had spent years reading about the Blitz. He had studied history at university, this period for his PhD. As an aviation buff, he knew how to distinguish the sound of different German bomber engines—a Heinkel from a Junkers from a Dornier. He had heard in old newsreel footage the stutter of antiaircraft fire, watched their crews aiming, straining to make out their target, as searchlights criss-crossed the underlit clouds. Nothing had prepared him for the sheer volume of this, though.

Organ-shaking. Nerve-juddering. Eyeball-quivering.

Each explosion—sharply painful to the eardrums—following on so closely from the one before that it was impossible to finish a thought. Like your very thoughts had been scrambled in your skull, every organ in your body jumbled around beneath your skin. The explosions almost preferable to the sound that returned every time they faded, the relentless inescapable drone of engines overhead, bomber after bomber after bomber.

Tom took a deep breath, then another. These people were relying on him. He took two steps further down the street and stumbled over something. A moment later, the sky lit up and he could see what it was. A split sandbag, lying in the middle of the pavement. Overhead a fantastic chandelier of falling incendiaries. In all directions the horizon ablaze, the heavens a mass of roiling smoke.

“Jesus Christ,” said Harry, the delight audible in his voice. “It looks like the fucking sky is on fire.”

A searchlight paused mid-sweep, and Tom could make out the shape of a plane, hung in silhouette against the clouds. Across the sky, arcs of antiaircraft fire rose from several positions, trying to catch the bomber—too slow, too late. Now the empty street was brightly lit, every shadow sharp-edged as noon, then suddenly darkness again.

Everywhere, from all directions at once, rose the sound of sirens. It was as if the whole city was a wounded animal, howling.

Tom had to admit, London was putting on one hell of a show.

At the end of the road a car was attempting a three-point turn, the driver’s face pale and panicked, the wheels of the car jouncing over scattered debris on the surface of the road. Something landed a few streets away and even the car windows seemed to shiver.

Tom forced himself to focus. East: That was where they should be heading. Up Long Acre, past Covent Garden, past Lincoln’s Inn Fields, down Chancery Lane. The impulse he somehow could not shake, that his brain seemed unable to resist, was to keep scanning the skyline for familiar tall London landmarks—Centre Point, the BT Tower—not yet built. Every time the night lit up, the shock at the jumble of church towers he did not recognize, the dark gaps where familiar buildings would one day stand, was the same. The streets deserted apart from the silhouettes of those furiously intent on their allotted tasks: aiming a plume of water in an arc up two stories into the smoldering hole in a roof, or frantically clearing a path down the middle of a brick-strewn road for an ambulance to pass.

By the light of a blazing tobacconist’s shop, Tom checked his watch. The Café de Paris had already been hit. He wondered what had happened to that table of fresh-faced Canadians, trying not to picture the dance floor, by now a jumble of scattered limbs, or imagine the medical crews, comforting the injured and dying.

Don’t think about it, he told himself. Focus. Tempus would open the aperture, the rift in time allowing them passage back to the twenty-first century, at midnight. Six hundred and seventeen seconds—just over ten minutes—was how long it could remain safely open for.

They were right on time, exactly on schedule.

Then it all went wrong.

TIME TO BURN. Copyright © 2026 by Ellery Lloyd Ltd. Reprinted here with permission from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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Our new novel, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, unravels the mystery of fictional painting Self Portrait as Sphinx, painted by runaway heiress artist Juliette, and a series of deaths and disappearances over the course of a century.

In 1938, Juliette Willoughby runs away to Paris, leaving her grand country house, her stifling aristocratic family, and their terrible buried secrets to be with her older, married artist lover Oskar. Joining his circle of Surrealist artists in Paris, she is inspired to paint her masterpiece, which is displayed for just one night before it is destroyed in a studio fire that also kills Juliette and Oskar.

In 1990s Cambridge, two art history students uncover evidence suggesting the blaze may not have been an accident and that the painting may still exist. In present-day Dubai, an art dealer is accused of the brutal murder of his oldest friend and the last surviving member of the Willoughby clan, immediately after selling the rediscovered Self Portrait as Sphinx for £42 million – and the secret to what links all of this may be hidden in the painting.

We read many brilliant artist biographies in our research but also came across some amazing novels which also have a woman artist at their heart. These are our favourites…

Disobedient by Elizabeth Fremantle

One of the best-known women artists, Artemisia Gentileschi, the daughter of respected artist Orazio Gentileschi, is at the heart of this biographical novel. Set in 1611 Rome, it follows her pain and struggles (including the sexual assault by and subsequent trial of her tutor Agostino Tassi) as she rails against the constraints set by a rigid and patriarchal society. A harrowing read, but one which captures her extraordinary spirit and resilience.

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train author is back in September with a claustrophobic novel about art, ambition and legacy. A Scottish tidal island, accessible by causeway for only twelve hours each day, is inhabited by artist Vanessa Chapman, whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared after visiting her there twenty years ago. After her death, a strange discovery—a fragment of human bone in one of her sculptures—intimately connects three people from Chapman’s past, unveiling a tangled web of secrets and lies.

The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro (2012)

Inspired by the real-life Isabella Stewart Gardner heist in which 13 major works by titans of art were stolen, Shapiro’s fictional protagonist, Claire Roth, an artist and forger, is commissioned to copy one of the works looted in the robbery. The novel leads us through the underbelly of the Boston art world, uncovering nefarious plots and intricate deceptions and questioning the fallibility of attribution and authenticity.

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

This incredible Reese-pick novel is directly inspired by the life of Ana Mendieta, a Havana-born, New York-based sculptor, painter, and performance artist who died in 1985 at the age of 36 after falling from an apartment window in suspicious circumstances. Gonzalez asks important questions about who gets remembered, collected, and written about, and why. Her protagonist, rising star of the art world Anita de Monte, is found dead and the tragedy is briefly the talk of the art world, until just as swiftly, it isn’t. Decades later, Raquel, a third-year art history student, stumbles upon her story, which has eerie parallels with her own life.

The Last Painting of Sara De Vos by Dominic Smith (2016)

This historical novel brings to life two periods of the past in a gripping tale of a fictional female painter in seventeenth-century Holland and the theft of her only surviving painting from a private collector in 1950s New York. When its owner commissions a young art student to forge a replacement for it, a complex plot unfurls over decades and time zones in a meditation on the relationship between art and authenticity.

The post Five Novels About Women Artists appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

With new releases from Josh Malerman, Lucy Foley, Nicola Yoon, Claudia Gray, Kristy Woodson Harvey, and many more, there are plenty of new June 2024 book releases to get excited about this month!

Read on to discover a few picks hitting shelves this month from rich historicals to thrillers, and tell us in the comments below if you’re looking forward to any!

Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman

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A chilling horror novel about a haunting told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,” from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

Anna Bright Is Hiding Something by Susie Orman Schnall

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The Dropout meets Inventing Anna in this cinematic and page-turning summer read! A ripped-from-the-headlines story set in the glossy offices of Silicon Valley startups and NYC new media, Anna Bright Is Hiding Something explores our fascination with female founders breaking barriers—and sometimes behaving badly in the process.

Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart

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In this clever, surprising, page-turner, the world’s most lethal assassin gives up the violent life only to find himself under siege by mysterious assailants. It’s a kill-or-be-killed situation, but the first option is off the table. What’s a reformed hit man to do?

In A Dark Mirror by Kat Davis

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A decade-old crime unites its devoted fans in a haunting novel about delusions in the dark and the dangerous games children play.

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley

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Secrets. Lies. Murder. Let the festivities begin… The deliciously twisty new locked room murder mystery from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Guest List and The Paris Apartment

Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton

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A modern-day writer and a Harlem Renaissance artist are connected by a painting with a deadly secret in this gripping dual-timeline gothic thriller. 

Husbands & Lovers by Beatriz Williams

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Two women—separated by decades and continents, and united by an exotic family heirloom—reclaim secrets and lost loves in this sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wives.

One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon

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A hotly-anticipated and endlessly provocative new thriller of race and privilege set in an all-Black gated community from #1 New York Times best-selling author Nicola Yoon

The Last Twelve Miles by Erika Robuck

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From the glamorous world of D.C. Intelligence to the sultry shores of the Straits of Florida, The Last Twelve Miles is based on the true story of two women masterminds trying to outwit each other in a dangerous and fascinating high stakes game.

All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker

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From the New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End comes a soaring thriller and an epic love story that “hits like a sledgehammer . . . an absolutely must-read novel” (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl).

The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bourgh by Claudia Gray

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The third book in the Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mystery series, which finds the amateur sleuths facing their most daunting challenge yet: preventing the murder of the imperious Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

The Curious Secrets of Yesterday by Namrata Patel

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A woman’s ambitions clash with familial expectations in a captivating novel about generational secrets and self-discovery by the bestselling author of The Candid Life of Meena Dave.

The Secret Keeper of Main Street by Trisha R. Thomas

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Acclaimed author Trisha R. Thomas delivers a masterful new tale of scandal and intuition. In 1950s oil-rich Oklahoma, Bailey Dowery, a dressmaker with the gift of “second sight,” reluctantly reveals the true loves and intentions of her socialite clients, making her a silent witness to a shocking crime.

Bear by Julia Phillips

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A mesmerizing novel of two sisters whose lives are upended by an unexpected visitor—a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods, by the celebrated, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth.

The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby by Ellery Lloyd

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The gripping follow up to the “smart, stylish, and savage” (People) New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick The Club—a twisty mystery involving a cursed wealthy family and a Surrealist painting which holds the key to three suspicious deaths over the course of a century.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

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A bold, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartwarming story about one young woman’s attempt to navigate adulthood, new motherhood, and her meager bank account in our increasingly online world—from the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of The Knockout Queen.

How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley

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A senior citizens’ center and a daycare collide with hilarious results in the new ensemble comedy from New York Times-bestselling author Clare Pooley.

The Pecan Children by Quinn Connor

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For fans of The Midnight Library and Demon Copperhead comes a breathtaking story of magical realism about two sisters, deeply tied to their small Southern town, fighting to break free of the darkness swallowing the land―and its endless cycle of pecan harvests―whole.

A Happier Life by Kristy Woodson Harvey

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A tender and touching novel about a young woman who discovers the family she has always longed for when she spends a life-changing summer in North Carolina.

The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron

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This epic, dazzling tale based on true events illuminates a woman of color’s rise to power as one of the few purported female pirate captains to sail the Caribbean, and the forbidden love story that will shape the course of history.

What June books are you looking forward to? Tell us in the comments below!

The post 20 New Fiction Books To Pick Up In June 2024 appeared first on The Nerd Daily.