Aardvark Book Club is a monthly book subscription box in which members choose up to 3 hardcover books each month from a selection of new releases or previous selections. Aardvark Book Club ships to both the U.S. and Canada and provides a platform to discuss books. To get your first book for $4, use the promo code READBETWEENTHESPINES.
The Hints
Book #1
Hint 1.1: Their set of chef’s knives. If there are seagulls on the island, they’ll be fine.
Hint 2.5: Together we could open a Michelin-starred restaurant. This year I want to move out of my place 😉 (I have 3 roommates). You should not go out with me if you’re a picky eater. How I fight the Sunday Scaries [photo of grill with bratwurst and hotdogs].
Connections: Slice, Season, Grill, Cure
Hint 4.2: The Menu, Chef’s Table, Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas, Sweeney Todd, Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, Ocean’s Eleven, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, Parasite, and Fresh
The Secret Dinner
Raphael Montes
Four childhood friends, eager for a taste of city life, swap rural Brazil for an apartment in Copacabana, Rio. But they have no idea of the fate that awaits them there. . . .
Dante, Piglet, Miguel, and Hugo are your average students trying to make ends meet with part-time jobs, excited about the bright futures at their fingertips. So when their rent skyrockets, they struggle to keep their new lives and big dreams afloat. They need to make money however they can. In order to keep their apartment, the friends adopt an unorthodox plan and are soon sucked into a dark world of secret dinner parties catering to the twisted fantasies of Rio’s elite.
Genre: Thriller
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Publisher: Celadon Books
Book #2
Hint 1.2: You best believe they’re bringing their best friend [who barks & bites].
Hint 2.2: My best friend [photo of Airedale Terrier]. What if I told you that my grandmother was famous. Together we could watch out fav movies! [photo with Cabin in the Sky].
Connections: Rolling, Cut, Action, Pictures
Hint 4.5: The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due, The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, Singing in the Rain, Nope, Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle, Darkology Rhae Lynn Barnes, Coldheart Canyon by Clive Baker, All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby, and The Cursed House by Del Sandeer
Mazywood
Tananarive Due
All the Sinners Bleed meets Erasure in this literary thriller from the award-winning author of The Reformatory following the grandson of a famous Black actress who returns to his grandmother’s cabin retreat in the California mountains only to encounter the legacy of her rage born in Old Hollywood.
When Johnny—a filmmaker and grandson of the famous Black actress Mazelle Washington—brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, he expects a quiet retreat. Instead, he uncovers a legacy of rage, secrets, and terror that has haunted his family for generations.
Set primarily in the present day, with haunting flashbacks to Hollywood’s Golden Age, Mazywood explores three generations while following Johnny as he pieces together the true story of his grandmother. As a young Black actress whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1940s, Mazelle brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel. But beneath her public appearance, she carried a secret she had kept and nurtured since she was a child, when a dark wish came true and changed the course of her life forever.
Now, fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny finds himself confronting the truth she buried—and the consequences she left behind. For a monster lurks outside Mazywood, hidden for generations, and Johnny brought his family to its hunting grounds.
Genre: Horror; Historical Fiction
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Publisher: Saga Press
Book #3
Hint 1.3: A burner phone with Grindr downloaded.
Hint 2.4: I geek out on the Bloomsbury set (especially Virginia Woolf!) Best late-night spot in town [photo of tea party]. My most controversial take is Hinge < Grindr.
Connections: Slay, Mother, Queen, Ate
Hint 4.3: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Disclaimer, Baby Reindeer, Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart, American Fiction, The List by Yomi Adegoke, Trainspotting, and Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang
Fruit Fly
Josh Silver
Go gay. Go sad. Go dark. A washed-up author will stop at nothing to claw her way back to relevancy—even if it means appropriating a young gay man’s tragic story.
Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.
Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for.
Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all.
But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story.
A razor-sharp satirical thriller, Fruit Fly will appeal to fans of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Yomi Adegoke’s The List.
Genre: Thriller; Satire
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Book #4
Hint 1.4: Nothing, they’re a hunter. They only need their instincts.
Hint 2.3: You should leave a comment if you’re an alpha. A random fact I love is that for wolves, peeing is like a form of poetry. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page about the local squirrel death cult.
Connections: Howl, Pack, Moon, Carnivore
Hint 4.2: The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams, Watership Down by Richard Adams, The Revenant, Isle of Dogs, The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan, Warriors by Erin Hunter, Planet of the Apes, Fifteen Dogs by Andrew Alexis, and The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Blacktail
Scott Hawkins
The long-awaited second novel from the author of the cult hit The Library at Mount Char, a one-of-a-kind dark fantasy in which a wolf sets out on an epic journey of revenge.
The wolf Blacktail is faithful to his Forest God, but in these times, faith is not enough. His world is besieged by men. Soon his territory will be overrun, and then there will be nowhere left to go. When his mate, a house dog, is killed, Blacktail rebels. He invades the house of her owners, seeking vengeance.
Blacktail’s fury catches the notice of an ancient and terrible feline witch, who makes an offer. What if Blacktail could end the human race responsible for the death of his family and for the destruction of the natural world, altogether? To do so, Blacktail must find and wake the Forest God. Only He might stand against the plague of men. Blacktail knows that his north woods are dwindling to nothing. He sees no other choice.
As Blacktail journeys farther from his wild home and deeper into the world of man, he encounters strangers—animal, mortal, and otherworldly—who, for their own reasons, want to help Blacktail rid the world of humans. Along the way, it becomes clear that he is more than just a wolf. The Forest God is sleeping, yes. But what will be the price of waking him?
Genre: Dark Fantasy; Horror
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Publisher: Crown Books
Book #5
Hint 1.5: They’re there to get paid and get out.
Hint 2.6: My therapist would say I am one of a kind. Try to guess this about me my favorite shade of blue. Unusual skills I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you.
Connections: Royal, Baby, Sky, Cyan
Hint 4.4: Murder Bot, Hardcore Henry, Scythe by Neal Shusterman, Monkey Man, Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman, Hitman, John Wick, Assassin’s Creed, and Blade Runner 2040
Scion
James Islington
John Wick meets Ghost in the Shell in this fast-paced cyberpunk thriller by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Will of the Many and The Strength of the Few.
My job, when you think about it, isn’t so different from a lot of people’s.
The more old-fashioned crowd do still get hung up on the “killing people” part of it, I guess, but that’s a them problem: it’s been perfectly legal to take out lifers for ages. Besides, once ultrawealthy morons realised they had a way to live forever—limited resources be damned—there was only ever going to be one genuinely practical deterrent.
So, sure, I have to deal with a ton of boring planning. Inconvenient hours. Some pretty awkward face-to-face interactions. And like most of us, I’m really only clocking in to try to crawl out from beneath my debts. But someone’s got to do it.
Luckily, my genetic compatibilities make me really, really good at doing it.
Still. This next job…I don’t know. It’s something I haven’t had to deal with in years. Kind of the opposite of my regular duties. Strange, that it got thrown my way.
I’m sure it’ll all go totally fine though.
Genre: Science Fiction
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Publisher: Saga Press
Book #6:
Hint 1.6: A new lead on a cold case and a soggy pack of Marlboro’s.
Hint 2.1: Don’t go out with me if you can’t handle my sketchy friends. How I get myself out of a funk [photo of Metallica cds]. Dating me is like working off a debt or an IOU.
Connections: Hazel, Doctor, Hunt, Craft
Hint 4.6: Sons of Anarchy, King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby, Salt Bones by , Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson, The Blair Witch Project, Green Room, Prisoners, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay, and Mare of Easttown
Crone
Keith Rosson
A haunting, fearsome story of a father searching for his missing daughter and finding darkness—both human and not—at every turn, from the “mind-blowingly good” (Stephen King) author of Coffin Moon and Fever House.
Eli Lamp is a broken man. An ex-detective, ex-addict, and long-grieving father whose daughter, Hannah, disappeared a decade before, Eli decimated his old life investigating her abduction and is now indebted to the Crooked Wheel, a local drug gang, as an enforcer. He lives in a rundown trailer at the edge of the woods, where he keeps Hannah’s room in pristine condition and tries to make it through one day at a time.
But when the son of the Crooked Wheel’s boss is found viciously murdered in a crime scene that doesn’t seem to add up, Eli receives a new order: Find out who the killer is and your debt to the Crooked Wheel is clear forever. You’re free.This pursuit brings him into the orbit of Avery Bryant, Hannah’s best friend and the last person to see her before she went missing. Soon, Eli and Avery are entwined in a hunt for answers that spans decades, stretches the realm of possibility, and brings churning to the surface a conspiracy linking not only these current tragedies but the buried sorrows of Eli’s past.
And though none of them dare say the word witch, at least not out loud, something lurks in the woods, bent-backed and black-eyed, clawed and vengeful, looming ever closer. . . .
Genre: Horror, Occult, & Supernatural
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Publisher: Random House
