In Adams's debut, teenage library worker Aleisha shares The Reading List she's found (all scrunched up) with a widower trying to relate to his book-obsessed granddaughter (75,000-copy first printing). Alderson's Sisters in Arms tells the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black battalion of the Women's Army Corps during World War II (150,000-copy first printing). Buxton's Feral Creatures reintroduces us to S.T., the fabulously cheeky crow who starred in the multi-best-booked Hollow Kingdom. Ferguson, the Duchess of York, tells the Victorian-era story of Lady Margaret Montagu Scott in Her Heart for a Compass (150,000-copy first printing). Second in a spin-off from Hearne's New York Times best-selling "Iron Druid Chronicles" series, Paper & Blood features wily Scottish detective Al MacBharrais. In Jio's latest, Seattle-based librarian Valentina Baker receives news sent With Love from London that she's inherited an apartment and bookshop from the mother who abandoned her. Wealthy newcomers wreak havoc to the point of horror in a lakeside rural town in Bram Stoker Award winner Jones's My Heart Is a Chainsaw (100,000-copy first printing). New York Times best-selling Kadrey wraps up his iconic "Sandman Slim" series with the Shoggot gang, led by King Bullet, overrunning a virus-undone Los Angeles (75,000-copy first printing). Debuter Lange's We Are the Brennans features almost-30 Sunday Brennan returning from Los Angeles to New York to explain to both family and ex-fiancé why she left them five years ago (100,000-copy first printing). Author of the LJ best-booked Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia returns with Velvet Was the Night, featuring a romance magazine-reading secretary in 1970s Mexico City obsessed with the disappearance of her beautiful next-door neighbor. Switching from big-hit dystopias, Mott sends his Black protagonist on one Hell of a Book tour in which he confronts police violence. In Pearce's Yours Cheerfully, first in a new series, advice columnist Emmeline Lake helps keep World War II London safe A(150,000-copy first printing). "Bridgerton" series author Quinn joins forces with her illustrator sister to create a graphic novel telling the story of Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron, first hinted at in the seventh book in the series (50,000-copy first printing). After a four-year renovation, Paris's glamorous Hotel Louis XVI reopens, with Steel allowing Complications to erupt.

Jade Daniels, a teen of Blackfeet and white descent, has always believed that her town, Proofrock, ID, was ripe for a slasher. As a dedicated horror fan, she knows the lore (local Lake Witch legend: check!) and the signs (unexplained mass elk deaths: check!). And she knows a final girl when she sees one, which is why she focuses on beautiful, kind Letha Mondragon when Letha's family moves to the new luxury development across the lake. Jade predicts that Proofrock's annual Fourth of July celebration is going to turn into a bloodbath, and it's her job to prepare Letha for her role—a job that Jade takes very seriously. Background tension in Jones's (The Only Good Indians) latest thrums from the start—tension between Indigenous people and white colonizers, between longtime residents and incomers, between haves and have-nots—even before the meticulously crafted horror plot unfolds. Readers will be thinking about Jade long after they hurtle toward the book's vivid, moving, gory end. Aspiring writers will especially appreciate the author's acknowledgements, in which Jones shares the many changes the story went through over the course of years before its publication. VERDICT This extraordinary novel is an essential purchase.—Stephanie Klose, Library Journal

Jones (The Only Good Indians) expertly mixes the frightening and the funny in this no-holds-barred homage to classic horror tropes written under the heady influence of splatter films. Its outsider heroine is Jade Daniels, an affectionately cheeky 17-year-old high schooler of Blackfoot descent, who finds escape from her dead-end life in rural Proofrock, Idaho, by gorging on a steady diet of slasher flicks. When a spate of bizarre deaths targeting the wealthy residents of Proofrock's newly developed Terra Nova community rocks the town, Jade recognizes all of the elements of her favorite films' formulae at play. Certain that the deaths presage a bloody slaughter, she tries—with little credulity from authorities—to warn the town of what is coming. Jones weaves an astonishing amount of slasher film lore into his novel, punctuating the text with short term papers written by Jade on the history and functions of the genre. Meanwhile, the tension builds to a graphic finale perfectly appropriate for the novel's cinematic scope. Horror fans won't need to have seen all of the films referenced to be blown away by this audacious extravaganza. Agent: B.J. Robbins, B.J. Robbins Literary. (Aug.)

Jade Daniels is an outcast in the quickly gentrifying Idaho lake town she's always called home. When a Dutch teenager is found dead, Jade takes morbid delight in the fact that this is surely the first victim in a horror film come to life. Everyone in town is a suspect, and beautiful new classmate Letha Mondragon is the perfect Final Girl—the genre's famous lone survivor. If Jade's obsession with slasher movies is the center of this novel, issues of class, power, and addiction are the spokes that connect the wheel. Content warnings include sexual abuse and suicide, as the protagonist lives in poverty with an abusive father and attempts to take her own life. Jade's family belongs to the Blackfeet tribe, and Jones (Blackfeet) authentically conveys feeling unwelcome in one's own home. Tropes from horror movies play a big role in the novel. The omniscient narration tracks Jade's obsession with these films, a hyper focus that frustrates the few reliable adults in her life as she struggles to communicate in any way other than through the lens of slasher movies. Readers can't help but root for her and implore other characters to heed her warnings, especially in the last third of the book, when the pace sharply quickens. VERDICT A horror novel not dissimilar to slasher movies. Recommended for mature teens.—Lindsay Jensen, Nashville Public Lib.