I hope we all have time to read in July. There’s an inviting selection of books to be released then. Check out the ones in my collection.

A mystery of stolen antiquities marks the return of cook Kat Holloway in Jennifer Ashley’s mystery, Scandal Above Stairs. Priceless artwork has gone missing from a luxurious house, and Kat Holloway is called out of her kitchen to investigate thefts in the homes of Mayfair’s wealthiest families. As the thefts increase, Kat calls upon a friend who is set up in a pawnshop as a seedy receiver of stolen goods. But, it’s there that theft turns to murder. (Release date is July 3.)

V.M. Burns’ Travellin’ Shoes is set in an imaginary St. Joseph, Indiana. I loved the characters. Even though he’s on leave following a car accident, Detective RJ Franklin shows up at the site of a house fire. The murdered body of his church’s choir director is in the rubble. It’s only when he starts to investigate that he learns the choir director isn’t the man everyone thought he was. (Release date is July 1.)

The tenth Kate Burkholder mystery is A Gathering of Secrets by Linda Castillo. When an historic Amish barn burns down, Police Chief Kate Burkholder is called in. When they find the body of an eighteen-year-old Amish man, she knows the fire was no accident. But, the Amish community is shutting her out when she tries to investigate. Are the people refusing to cooperate because of religious tenets, or are they hiding secrets? (Release date is July 10.)

May Cobb’s Big Woods is a riveting debut thriller. When ten-year-old Lucy disappears in sleepy Longview, Texas, everyone braces for the worst. Other children who disappeared were found dead in the Big Woods. But, Lucy’s older sister, Leah, is convinced her sister isn’t dead. And, she’s going to face the fears of the satanic cults of the 1980s, if she has to, to find her sister. (Release date is July 8.)

Ellison Cooper’s debut thriller is Caged. FBI profiler Sayer Altair prefers research over actually catching killers. The body of a girl is found dead in a cage, left to starve to death with no clear motive. When the FBI begin their hunt for the killer, they discover that the victim may not have been the first. Sayer reluctantly takes the case, only to find clues that connect the case to her own past. (Release date is July 3.)

Killing It: An Education is Camas Davis’ memoir. When Davis, a magazine writer and editor, found herself unemployed and on her own, she decided she didn’t want to write about life. She wanted to live it. A friend told her about Kate Hill, an American woman living in Gascony, France, who ran a cooking school and took in strays in exchange for help. Her last credit card bought her a plane ticket. There, she met the Chapolard brothers, a family of Gascon pig farmers and butchers, who taught her about their way of life. When she returned to Portland, Oregon, she brought old world know-how to the food revolution. (Release date is July 24.)

Game Warden Mike Bowditch is back in Paul Doiron’s Stay Hidden. The beauty of beautiful, notoriously controversial journalist Ariel Evans is found near her home on Maquoit Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine. Was it a hunting accident – or murder? When an identical woman calling herself Ariel Evans steps off the ferry, the investigation is suddenly far more complicated. (Release date is July 3.)

A casual family outing to the Crystal Palace in London ends in a murder investigation in Carola Dunn’s latest Daisy Dalrymple mystery, The Corpse at the Crystal Palace. Daisy has taken children, cousins, the nanny and the nurserymaid. But, when Mrs. Gilpin, the nanny, goes to the ladies room, and fails to return, Daisy goes looking, and finds a dead woman in a nanny’s uniform. Everything goes from bad to worse, and Mrs. Gilpin ends up unconscious in a small lake. It’s a mystery that involves Daisy’s husband, Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher, and, of course, Daisy. (Release date is July 3.)

Hank Early follows up Heaven’s Crooked Finger with private investigator Earl Marcus’ next adventure, In the Valley of the Devil. He’s working in the North Georgia mountains when he stumbles into a mysterious cornfield where an old mountain legend appears to have awakened. Just as he begins to hear rumors of a killer who collects human skulls, his partner, Mary Hawkins, vanishes. (Release date is July 10.)

Daryl Wood Gerber’s second French Bistro Mystery is A Souffle of Suspicion. All of Nouvelle Vie’s businesses get a lift during Crush Week in the Napa Valley town. That includes Bistro and Maison Rousseau. But, Chef Camille’s sister Renee is managing the festival with an iron fist, and even her sister is upset. So when Renee turns up dead in the chef’s kitchen, Mimi’s first course of action is to find the killer. (Release date is July 10.)

Last Call is Paula Matter’s debut novel. Bartender Maggie Lewis can’t hold hr beer, her tongue, or a temper. When she’s set up for the murder of a Korean War veteran, she’s suspended from her job at a Florida VFW. And, since the local police haven’t arrested anyone for the last major crime in town – the murder of Maggie’s husband, she’s sure she’s going to have to clear her name, get her job back, and find the killer before she ends up serving life instead of drinks. (Release date is July 8.)

I’m a big fan of Louise Miller’s debut novel, The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living, so I’m looking forward to The Late Bloomer’s Club. (And, I love the cover.) It’s a story of two headstrong sisters in the small town of Guthrie. Nora, the owner of the Miss Guthrie Diner, is perfectly happy there. But, her life is shaken when she discovers she and her free-spirited younger sister are about to inherit the home of the town’s beloved cake lady. Kit, an aspiring, and broke, filmmaker, thinks her ship has come in, and they can sell the land to a big-box developer. And, the people of Guthrie aren’t afraid to drop off their opinions with their tips. (Release date is July 17.)

Naomi Novik, the bestselling author of Uprooted, now takes on the retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin story in Spinning Silver. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father isn’t a very good one. He’s left his family on the edge of poverty, until Miryem steps in to retrieve what is owed. She gains a reputation for being able to turn silver into gold. But, an ill-advised boast brings her to the attention of the cold creatures who haunt the wood, and the fate of a kingdom will be changed forever by the challenge she is issued. (Release date is July 10.)

In the third Lincoln & Speed mystery by Jonathan F. Putnam, Final Resting Place, a prominent Springfield politician is assassinated on the Fourth of July, and Lincoln and Speed take on the case when the man’s political rival is arrested. But, it’s an unsettling time for the young Abraham Lincoln as well. He’s receiving threats in the newspaper, and family members in town threaten Lincoln’s good name and his political future. (Release date is July 10.)

In A Tale of Two Murders, Heather Redmond introduces a young Charles Dickens as an amateur sleuth. He’s an ambitious journalist having dinner with his newspaper editor when they hear screams from the house next door. There they find a young woman dying. When Dickens learns another seventeen-year-old died exactly one year earlier, with similar symptoms, he begins to suspect murder. (Release date is July 31.)

Graham Reed’s debut mystery, The Chairman’s Toys, is a dark comedy. Jake Constable thinks he’s going straight, but the house sitter isn’t doing too well when he throws a party at a client’s house, and a body is found in the bathroom. Now, he has to deal with drug dealers, his ex-wife, and representatives of the Chinese government. (Release date is July 3.)

Even a cat lover can appreciate the adorable cover on David Rosenfelt’s new Andy Carpenter mystery, Rescued. Andy would rather spend his time working for his dog rescue organization than take on any more cases. He can’t help but get involved when a truck carrying over seventy rescue dogs turns up with a murdered driver. And, he’s reluctant to defend the man accused of murder. It’s his wife’s ex-fiance. (Release date is July 17.)

Kelly Flynn and her friends at Lambspun return in Maggie Sefton’s Dyeing Up Loose Ends. Kelly’s spending time talking about Jack, her preschooler, either at Pete’s Porch Cafe or Lambspun. At Pete’s, a friendly waitress named Julie tells Kelly about her progress as she tries to become an accountant like Kelly. But, Julie’s dreams end in her own death. Now, Kelly and her friends are trying to discover who hated Julie enough to kill her. (Release date is July 8.)

Did you find books you want to read in July? If not, maybe you’ll find some on this additional list. (I hope I didn’t miss any. As you can tell, there are towering piles of books around my house.)

Alger, Christina – The Banker’s Wife (July 3)
Ashworth, A.R. – Two Faced (July 10)
Atherton, Nancy – Aunt Dimity & the King’s Ransom (July 24)
Berry, Flynn – A Double Life (July 31)
Chen, Catherine J. – Mary B (July 24)
Contreras, Ingrid Rojas – Fruit of the Drunken Tree (July 31)
Davis, Lindsey – Pandora’s Boy (July 3)
Dawson, Delilah S. & Kevin Hearne – Kill the Farm Boy (July 17)
Delaney, JP – Believe Me (July 24)
Dorey-Stein, Beck – From the Corner of the Oval (July 10)
Freiman, Lexi – Inappropriation (July 24)
Friedland, Elyssa – The Intermission (July 3)
Gessen, Keith – A Terrible Country (July 10)
Gilbert, Victoria – Shelved Under Murder (July 10)
Guerrero, Jean – Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir (July 17)
Gulliksen, Geir – The Story of a Marriage (July 24)
Headley, Maria Dahvana – The Mere Wife (July 17)
Koutsakis, Pol – Baby Blue (July 10)
Lowrey, Annie – Give People Money (July 10)
Mazur, Grace Dane – The Garden Party (July 10)
Moshfegh, Ottessa – My Year of Rest and Relaxation (July 10)
Parker, Miriam – The Shortest Way Home (July 31)
Phillips, Adam Walker – The Big Con (July 17)
Ramsay, Frederick – Countdown (July 3)
Shifrin, Marina – 30 Before 30 (July 24)
Spann, Susan – Trial on Mount Koya (July 3)
Stage, Zoje – Baby Teeth (July 17)
Walsh, Rosie – Ghosted (July 24)