After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus. A flying demon feeding on human energies. A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down. And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw. The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates. She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

“Murder Bimbo is Gone Girl for the Luigi Mangione era, and Rebecca Novack is one of our funniest and most acerbic new writers.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X An exhilarating and provocative debut perfect for fans of My Sister the Serial Killer, Yellowface, and Killing Eve—the origin story of sex worker turned assassin turned unlikely folk hero, Murder Bimbo, as told by the Bimbo herself (and then revised, uncensored, and reconsidered).A thirty-two-year-old sex worker is shocked when she’s approached by undercover government agents to aid them in a top-secret plot to assassinate a politician known as “Meat Neck.” But once the deed is done, she realizes what made her the perfect She’s 100% disposable. Holed up in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, she now has only two days, her wits, and a laptop to save her own life. Her best bet is to reach out to the wildly popular feminist investigative podcast Justice for Bimbos. In a hastily typed series of emails, the newly minted “Murder Bimbo” explains how she was recruited and then trained by a cabal of code-named US agents to take out Meat Neck. Then she starts a new series of emails. This time, they’re addressed to her ex, and the facts line up a little differently… Constructed in three increasingly unhinged acts, each a more subversive, twisted version of the story than the last, Murder Bimbo can be read as a gloriously bold literary thriller, a satirical megalomaniac’s manifesto, or a raucous send-up of the political insanity we all live inside every day. Either way, it’s a dead-serious announcement of an electric new voice in American literature.

Shannon Chakraborty, the bestselling author of The City of Brass, spins a new trilogy of magic and mayhem on the high seas in this tale of pirates and sorcerers, forbidden artifacts and ancient mysteries, in one woman’s determined quest to seize a final chance at glory—and write her own legend. Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural. But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse: retrieve her comrade’s kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum. The chance to have one last adventure with her crew, do right by an old friend, and win a fortune that will secure her family’s future forever? It seems like such an obvious choice that it must be God’s will. Yet the deeper Amina dives, the more it becomes alarmingly clear there’s more to this job, and the girl’s disappearance, than she was led to believe. For there’s always risk in wanting to become a legend, to seize one last chance at glory, to savor just a bit more power…and the price might be your very soul.