Oh my gosh! If you can’t find something to read in this list, you’re not trying hard enough. There are almost forty August releases for my Treasures in My Closet post. While the book jacket placement might be a little funky since I seem to be having problems with that, the titles are worth checking. If you have anything I missed, please let me know.

If you’re a fan of Laurien Berenson’s Melanie Travis Canine mysteries, you’ll want to check out Peg and Rose Solve a Murder. It’s the first spin-off featuring Melanie’s aunts, cantankerous Peg and soft-spoken Rose. They’ll put their differences aside to catch a killer, if they don’t throttle each other first. After forty years of bickering, the two try to start over, partnering up to join the local bridge club. But, when one of the club’s players is killed, the two sisters-in-law come under scrutiny because they’re the newest members. So, they decide to start some digging of their own. (Release date is Aug. 30.)

A Killing in Costumes marks Zac Bissonnette’s debut cozy mystery. Jay Allan and Cindy Cooper were soap opera stars in the late
’90s, a wholesome young husband-and-wife duo who combined musical talent with humor and charisma. When the truth about their sexual orientations came to light, their marriage and TV careers ended, but they remained friends. Now, they open Palm Springs’ chicest movie memorabilia store, Hooray for Hollywood, but no customers and dwindling finances spell trouble. It’s the answer to a prayer when a ninety-year-old diva wants to sell her valuable collection of costumes and props. But, they have to beat out the competition, a vice president from a mega-auction house. When he winds up dead, they become prime suspects in the murder. (Release date is Aug. 9.)

Krista Davis’ fourth cozy mystery with a color-it-yourself cover, A Colorful Scheme, finds Florrie Fox, the manager of Color Me Read Bookstore, attending her boss’ wedding to a well-known romance novelist. But when a guest turns up dead, all bests are off on the happily ever after. Florrie knows this is no color-by-numbers case, and she’ll have to sort out the complicated secrets among this creative crowd of suspects. (Release date is Aug. 30.)

Ramona Emerson’s blood-chilling debut, Shutter, is set in New Mexico’s Navajo Nation. It’s equal parts crime thriller, supernatural horror, and poignant portrayal of coming of age on the reservation. Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her excellent photography skills have cracked many cases—she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook. When Rita is sent to photograph the scene of a supposed suicide on a highway overpass, the furious, discombobulated ghost of the victim—who insists she was murdered—latches onto Rita, forcing her on a quest for revenge against her killers, and Rita finds herself in the crosshairs of one of Albuquerque’s most dangerous cartels. Written in sparkling, gruesome prose, Shutter is an explosive debut from one of crime fiction’s most powerful new voice. (Release date is Aug. 2.)

A family reunion leads to murder in Alice Feeney’s Daisy Darker. After years of avoiding each other, Daisy Darker’s entire family is assembling for Nana’s 80th birthday party in Nana’s crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island. Finally back together one last time, when the tide comes in, they will be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours. The family arrives, each of them harboring secrets. Then at the stroke of midnight, as a storm rages, Nana is found dead. And an hour later, the next family member follows… Trapped on an island where someone is killing them one by one, the Darkers must reckon with their present mystery as well as their past secrets, before the tide comes in and all is revealed. (Release date is Aug. 30.)

Peanut Butter Panic is Amanda Flower’s seventh Amish Candy Shop mystery. Thanksgiving is Bailey King’s busiest holiday weekend. This year promises to be even more hectic, since Bailey’s candy shop, Swissmen Sweets, is providing desserts for Harvest, Ohio’s first village-wide Thanksgiving celebration. Yet, even with a guest list close to seven hundred people—Amish and English alike—the event’s organizer, Margot Rawlings, is unfazed . . . until she discovers her mother, former judge Zara Bevan, will be in attendance. Zara’s reputation as a harsh critic is matched only by her infamy as a judge who has actively harmed the Amish community. So no one is prepared when Zara arrives with much younger boyfriend Blaze Smith and reveals their impending nuptials at dinner. That should have been the day’s biggest news, except shortly after the announcement, Blaze suffers an allergic reaction to something he’s eaten and dies on the spot. Now, Bailey’s desserts are prime suspects, along with Margot and nearly everyone who attended the meal. With such a cornucopia of possibilities, Bailey must dig in and get to the bottom of this murder. (Release date us Aug. 23.)

I’m eager to read Ashley Flowers’ debut, All Good People Here. Flowers is the host of the #1 true crime podcast “Crime Justice”.

What are your neighbors capable of when they think no one is watching? When big-city journalist Margot Davies returns to her hometown of Wakarusa, Indiana, she feels as if she’s walked into a time capsule. It’s exactly how she remembers – genial, stifled, secretive. Then news breaks about a missing girl from the next town over, and memories of the infamous and still unsolved murder of Margot’s childhood friend, January Jacobs, come flooding back. Margot vows to find the missing girl – and to solve January’s two-decades-old cold case once and for all. But why do the police and the townspeople all seem to be hiding something? Could January’s killer still be out there? And what will it cost to finally discover what truly happened that night twenty years ago? (Release date is Aug. 16.)

How about a spy novel, Alias Emma by Ava Glass? Nothing about Emma Makepeace is real. Not even her name. A newly minted secret agent, Emma’s barely graduated from basic training when she gets the call for her first major assignment. Eager to serve her country and prove her worth, she dives in headfirst. Emma must covertly travel across one of the world’s most watched cities to bring the reluctant—and handsome—son of Russian dissidents into protective custody, so long as the assassins from the Motherland don’t find him first. With London’s famous Ring of Steel hacked by the Russian government, the two must cross the city without being seen by the hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras that document every inch of the city’s streets, alleys, and gutters. Buses, subways, cars, and trains are out of the question. Traveling on foot, and operating without phones or bank cards that could reveal their location or identity, they have twelve hours to make it to safety. This will take all of Emma’s skills of disguise and subterfuge. But when Emma’s handler goes dark, there’s no one left to trust. And just one wrong move will get them both killed. (Release date is Aug. 2.)

Even as the 1920s start, the shadow of the Great War hangs over England in Anna Lee Huber’s A Certain Darkness. March 1920: Life has turned unsettlingly quiet for former British Intelligence agent Verity Kent and her husband, Sidney. But even that false calm is about to end. As threats remain, the French authorities soon request Sidney’s help with a suspect who claims to have proof of treason—shortly before she is assassinated. And Verity, too, is called to investigate a mystery. The murder of a Belgian lawyer aboard a train seems at first to be a simple case of revenge. But the victim was connected to British Intelligence, and possessed papers detailing the sinking of a gold-laden German ship during the war. As Verity and Sidney dig deeper, they discover their cases are intertwined—and a lethal adversary persists. (Release date is Aug. 30.)

What happens when a restaurateur loses her sense of smell? In Leslie Karst’s The Fragrance of Death, Sally Solari has a nose for trouble, but when her sense of smell goes missing after a sinus infection, it’s not just her career on the line. It could be her life. Sally intends to stay out of trouble. But then an old acquaintance is murdered at the annual Santa Cruz Artichoke Cook-Off, Sally’s powers of investigation are called into action once again. (Release date is Aug. 2.)

Crime reporter Geneva Chase’s latest case is embroiled in sex, blackmail, and murder in Thomas Kies’ fifth mystery, Whisper Room. Geneva encounters a deceptive cast of suspects who pull her into a high-speed chase into the Whisper Room, a dating app for only the most elite members of society―where affairs, blackmail, and murder are all on the menu. When wealthy men crave no-strings attached encounters, the Whisper Room promises to deliver. Escorts are turning up dead, and Geneva Chase is ready to dive into the exclusive dating ring and catch the killer. But then one of The Whisper Room’s escorts turns up murdered―and she looks a lot like the blond in the blackmail video. (Release date is Aug. 2.)

Casey Parks’ Diary of a Misfit is subtitled “A Memoir and a Mystery”. Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger’s past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life. When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks’s grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. “I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man,” and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks’s life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, the small-town country singer from grandmother’s youth, all the while confronting ghosts of her own. (Release date is Aug. 23.)

Mark Pryor, author of the Hugo Marston mysteries, launches a new historical mystery series with Die Around Sundown. Summer 1940: In German-occupied Paris, French Inspector Henri Lefort has been given just five days to solve the murder of a German major that took place in the Louvre Museum. Blocked from the crime scene but given a list of suspects, Henri encounters a group of artists, including Pablo Picasso, who know more than they’re willing to share. With the clock ticking, Henri must uncover a web of lies while overcoming impossible odds to save his own life and prove his loyalty to his country. Will he rise to the task or become another tragic story of a tragic time? (Release date is Aug. 16.)

I’m a big fan of Katharine Schellman’s Lily Adler mysteries. In the third in the series, Death at the Manor, Regency widow Lily Adler is looking forward to spending the autumn away from the social whirl of London. When she arrives in Hampshire with her friends, the Carroways, she doesn’t expect much more than a quiet country visit and the chance to spend time with her charming new acquaintance, Matthew Spencer. But something odd is afoot in the small country village. A ghost has taken up residence in the Belleford manor, a lady in grey who wanders the halls at night, weeping and wailing. Half the servants have left in terror, but the family seems delighted with the notoriety that their ghost provides. Intrigued by this spectral guest, Lily and her party immediately make plans to visit Belleford. They arrive at the manor the next morning ready to be entertained—only to find that tragedy has struck. The matriarch of the family has just been found killed in her bed. The dead woman’s family is convinced that the ghost is responsible. Lily is determined to learn the truth before another victim turns up—but could she be next in line for the Great Beyond? (Release date is Aug. 9.)

Dear Little Corpses in the tenth Josephine Tey mystery by Nicola Upson. September 1st, 1939. As the mass evacuation takes place across Britain, thousands of children leave London for the countryside, but when a little girl vanishes without a trace, the reality of separation becomes more urgent and more deadly for those who love her. In the chaos and uncertainty of war, Josephine struggles with the prospect of change. As a cloud of suspicion falls across the small Suffolk village she has come to love, the conflict becomes personal, and events take a dark and sinister turn. Blending a Golden Age mystery with the timeless fears of a child’s abduction, Dear Little Corpses is an atmospheric snapshot of England in the early days of war. (Released ate is Aug. 9.)

Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins returns with Properties of Thirst, a novel destined to be an American classic: a sweeping masterwork set during World War II about the meaning of family and the limitations of the American Dream. Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is here where he and his beloved wife Lou raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and it is here where Rocky has mourned Lou in the years since her death. As Sunny and Stryker reach the cusp of adulthood, the country teeters on the brink of war. Stryker decides to join the fight, deploying to Pearl Harbor not long before the bombs strike. Soon, Rocky and his family find themselves facing yet another incomprehensible tragedy. Rocky is determined to protect his remaining family and the land where they’ve loved and lost so much. But when the government decides to build a Japanese-American internment camp next to the ranch, Rocky realizes that the land faces even bigger threats than the LA watermen he’s battled for years. Complicating matters is the fact that the idealistic Department of the Interior man assigned to build the camp, who only begins to understand the horror of his task after it may be too late, becomes infatuated with Sunny and entangled with the Rhodes family. (Release date is Aug. 2.)

Don’t forget to check out these titles.

Amiry, Suad – Mother of Strangers (8/2)
Canadeo, Anne – Death on the Argyle (8/30)
Casale, Jana – How to Fall Out of Love Madly (8/2)
Finlay, T.L. – Girls Without Tears (8/9)
Fofana, Sidik –Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (8/16)
Gunty, Tess – The Rabbit Hutch (8/2)
Gurnah, Abdulrazak – Afterlives (8/23)
Johnson, Tyrell – The Lost Kings (8/2)
Kingsbury, Kate – In Too Steep (8/9)
Lambert, Charles – The Bone Flower (8/10)
McAvoy, J.J. – Aphrodite and the Duke (8/23)
Pollard, Clare – Delphi (8/2)
Reid, Jason – Rise of the Black Quarterback: What It Means for America (8/2)
Reid, Taylor Jenkins – Carrie Soto is Back (8/30)
Roby, Kimberla Lawson – Sister Friends Forever (8/9)
Rochon, Farrah – The Hookup Plan (8/2)
Sparks, Lily – Teen Killers in Love (8/9)
Webb, Debra – The Last Lie Told (8/1)
Wilton, Traci – Mrs. Morris and the Pot of Gold (8/23)
Winstead, Ashley – The Last Housewife (8/16)
Wiseman, Elen Marie – The Lost Girls of Willowbrook (8/30)