The 2026 Sacramento Summer Reading Guide
Stephen King once wrote, “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” So whether you're venturing to a faraway beach vacation this summer or simply looking to escape to your favorite reading nook, we've conjured up a list of 10 magical new books—all published by homegrown authors in 2026—that will inspire, thrill and transport you.
Illustration by Matt K. Shrugg
Illusion Of Truth
By James L’etoile
Courtesy of Oceanview Publishing
Publication Date: Jan. 6
“I grew up in prison,” author James L’Etoile likes to say. The Cameron Park author’s father was a correctional lieutenant, and as a boy raised in prison housing, L’Etoile learned to shoot pool and play blues guitar from inmates whom he came to see as whole human beings. He went on to graduate from Sacramento State and spent nearly 30 years working in the prison system himself, as an associate warden, hostage negotiator, probation officer and more.
L’Etoile’s 11th novel, Illusion of Truth, is the third in a series featuring Sacramento Police Department detective Emily Hunter. L’Etoile knows the law enforcement landscape like the back of his hand, and it’s a steady, even hand at that. He details the post-Stephon Clark tensions between cops, citizens and politicians in a way that feels as ripped from the headlines as any Law & Order episode (Emily Hunter gives serious Olivia Benson vibes) and fans of this kind of hard-boiled procedural will feel right at home in L’Etoile’s world. As a bonus for locals, you’ll come away from this read feeling like you’ve really had a peek “under the hood” at Sacramento’s finest. The novel opens just as the minefield of city politics surrounding the call to “defund the police” becomes a literal minefield, with the emergence of a mystery bomber targeting cops. Hunter’s love interest is among the injured, so the stakes are high as she investigates, and the tension crackles like a police radio. L’Etoile’s knowledge of what makes both cops and criminals tick, his sense of their humanity, and his masterful sense of pacing make this a gripping and harrowing book—one you should definitely not crack open until you can afford an all-night binge read, lest you end up clocking in for work as tired as Emily Hunter is by the end of this ripping yarn. You’ve been warned.
This Hair Belongs
By JaNay Brown-Wood
Courtesy of Astra Books For Young Readers
Publication Date: Jan. 13
JaNay Brown-Wood’s This Hair Belongs has a beautiful message for children whose hair grows “from curved follicles beneath deep layers of melanin-kissed skin.” She exhorts readers (aged 4 to 8) to take pride in the regal texture and astonishing cultural history of Black hair. The jewel-toned illustrations by Erin K. Robinson glow off the page, but it’s the spare, incandescent prose, brimming with triumph and pride, that makes the reader’s heart swell. Brown-Wood’s gentle repetitions have the incantatory power of an uplifting spiritual song: “This hair belongs under the sea, in outer space, in shires and realms and woods and kingdoms.” Like Goodnight Moon, the words beg to be read aloud, over and over again, and no parent would mind reading them night after night.
Brown-Wood, who lives in Fair Oaks, has developed her persuasive powers to educate and enlighten thanks to a master’s in child development from Sacramento State and a doctorate in education from UC Davis. Today, she’s the celebrated author of over 30 children’s books. As Brown-Wood writes, “This hair is magic.” And so is this book.
Courtesy of Astra Books for Young Readers
Carnival Fantástico
By Angela Montoya
Courtesy of Joy Revolution
Publication Date: Feb. 3
A young-adult “romantasy” sprinkled with Latin magical-realist fairy dust, Lincoln author Angela Montoya’s third novel, Carnival Fantástico, is a sparkly, surreal confection with an ooey-gooey center. The author, who grew up in Auburn, is the granddaughter of former Sacramento poet laureate José Montoya, so she wields her well-pedigreed pen with generational confidence.
Think Water for Elephants meets Like Water for Chocolate, with a plot twist worthy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Esmerelda is a scrappy thief and con artist with a wounded past, working as a fraudulent fortune-teller for a traveling circus—the Carnival Fantástico—where nothing is quite as it seems. Approaching her 19th birthday, she is in hiding from the law and separated from her former beloved, Ignacio, whose malevolent warlord father imprisoned her and sent Ignacio off to war after discovering their forbidden romance. Inevitably reunited, the pair have wounds to salve, sparks to rekindle, and a magical mystery to solve, all while dodging the warlord’s henchmen, a charismatic ringmaster and a hall of mirrors occupied by a soul-devouring Aztec-inspired god. There is enough earnest yearning here to sate the eager fans of Montoya’s previous romantansies, which involved pirates and witches (Sinner’s Isle) and Latinx vampires (A Cruel Thirst). In real life, Montoya, who lives on a farm in the foothills with a partner, two children and a menagerie of pets, is the spitting image of the raven-haired Esmerelda, and lives what sounds like an enchanted happily-ever-after of her own.
Trust No One
By James Rollins
Courtesy of James Rollins and William Morrow
Publication Date: Feb. 24
New York Times best-selling author James Rollins’ latest novel, Trust No One, is an ecclesiastical thriller destined to enthrall fans of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Rollins’ heavily researched tomes have the same mystical aura as Brown’s, but there’s an extra dash of John le Carré-style spycraft and Indiana Jones-esque derring-do thrown in. Rollins delights in creating a sense of plausibility, and most of his novels have endnotes delineating the scientific basis for the supernatural phenomena he details.
In this stand-alone novel, a secret alchemical text by Comte de Saint-Germain (an actual 18th-century figure) said to contain the formula for eternal life is passed urgently into the hands of Sharyn Karr, a grad student of Magic and Occult Sciences at the University of Exeter (a real major at a real school), by a professor who is promptly murdered. Sharyn and a colorful cast of sidekicks are soon on the run, one action sequence after another unfolding in settings like the Tower of London and the Italian Alps. Rollins, a longtime Sacramentan who now lives near Lake Tahoe, comes by his scientific background in a most unusual way: Let’s just say that if you took your pup to a Sacramento veterinarian named James Paul Czajkowski in the 1990s, the good doctor was writing novels in his spare time under the pen name James Rollins. Meanwhile, Rollins’ loyal congregation of fans is eagerly anticipating the television adaptation of his best-selling Sigma Force series (18 titles and counting), in development by Amazon MGM Studios and Leo DiCaprio’s production company.
Robbie Mcneil’s Hit List
By Brianna Heath
Design by Matt Roeser, hand lettering by Erin Fitzsimmons, courtesy of Sourcebooks
Publication Date: March 24
Brianna Heath’s debut novel evokes pulp fiction master Lawrence Block, whose twinkly, lighthearted Burglar series made crime fun—his Burglar in the Closet was made into a 1987 comedy with Whoopi Goldberg. Robbie McNeil’s Hit List is a murder mystery from the perspective of a contract killer unlike any other you’ve read about. The title character is an aromantic, neurodivergent lesbian millennial combat veteran who lives with her queer, platonic soulmate, Dee, above their struggling karaoke bar, which they fund by carrying out contract killings—when they aren’t also feverishly putting on a musical.
Heath describes herself as queer and neurodivergent, although that may be where her resemblance to her heroine ends; by day Heath, who lives in Rosemont, is a program manager at UC Davis’ MIND Institute, working on projects related to teens and autism. Heath’s writing has that slightly jaded touch of noir cynicism, leavened with a sly sense of humor, with some laugh-out-loud moments, like the one where Robbie catches herself fussing over littering while she’s lying in wait to kill someone. As for Robbie’s musical “hit list”? It’s actually on Spotify (just search for “Robbie’s Killer Karaoke Hits”) featuring some of the songs mentioned in the book. And it’s killer.
Meet Me In Italy
By Brenda Novak
Courtesy of Brenda Novak and Mira Books
Publication Date: April 7
Auburn author Brenda Novak’s breezy love stories are as easy to quaff as the limoncello spritzes her characters keep ordering up in her newest book—a sun-drenched idyll titled Meet Me in Italy, set on the Amalfi Coast. Charlotte is a “sports romance” novelist whose NBA star husband of four years suddenly asks for a divorce, sending her reeling, perhaps into the arms of her childhood best friend’s twin brother. The will-they-or-won’t-they plot is of course half the fun, but there are many other cliff hangers in store in this sunny, funny beach read. This is a romance novel, so there are twins, orphans, family secrets, fateful misunderstandings, and paparazzi moments galore. Come for the travelogue of picturesque settings, but stay for the wildly lovable characters—an ensemble that would make any fan of Ted Lasso smile.
Novak wrote this book, her 83rd, after falling for the Amalfi Coast during her daughter’s 2024 destination wedding in the region, and her affinity for this special place suff uses every page with a loving glow. You could read Meet Me in Italy on the beach at Folsom Lake or by your backyard pool and let the words on the page whisk you away to the Mediterranean seashore, no passport required.
READ MORE: Love Language – Brenda Novak in the run-up to the release of her landmark 75th book
What Came West
By Josh Weil
Courtesy of Doubleday
Publication Date: June 2
Life in the Sierra at the start of the Gold Rush really was one battle after another. Silas Hall, the protagonist of Josh Weil’s second novel and fourth work of fiction, What Came West, survives a neurodivergent childhood at the mercy of bullies, only to father a child in his one and only sexual encounter—an episode recounted with as much kaleidoscopic anxiety and terror as the violence between men to come. Unable to sustain fatherhood, Silas flees west from Pennsylvania, becoming a hermit in the Sierra, until the discovery of gold brings men and trouble to his fragile world.
The landscape in this novel is as vivid a character as any of the humans, and Silas’ love for this land is so palpably tender that the reader feels his anguish when the terrain is cruelly ravished by the greedy newcomers. Still, for all the blood and guts, this is a sensitive, literary Western, more Cormac McCarthy than Taylor Sheridan. Weil, who lives in Nevada City, won the 2018 California Book Award for his story collection, The Age of Perpetual Light. Here’s hoping it will be one novel after another from this promising author.
Whisper Creek
By Allison Brennan
Courtesy of Minotaur Books
Publication Date: June 23
With more than 50 novels in print and a dozen series ranging from romantic suspense to forensics-heavy, serial-killer procedurals featuring Clarice Starling-style FBI profilers, New York Times best-selling author Allison Brennan has covered it all. After moving to Elk Grove from the Bay Area in 1989, this prolific author worked as a legislative consultant at the State Capitol before turning to full-time writing in 2005.
Her latest outing, Whisper Creek, is a stand-alone thriller in which widowed Texas ranch owner Ellen, her four children and her salty, shotgun-toting grandmother-in-law Penny are thrown into double jeopardy—fighting both a looming weather event and Verdacorp, a villainous agribusiness using harsh tactics to pressure local landowners like her to sell. By setting her mystery/thriller in the midst of a Texas storm (and remember, everything’s bigger in Texas—especially storms), Brennan keeps the atmosphere as dramatic as the action. She’s putting her own spin on cli-fi, or climate fiction, with a knack for squeezing drama out of the elements. Brennan’s prose is so cleanly cinematic that the book in your hand dissolves, much like the writing of her favorite author, master of the California thriller Robert Crais.
Burnside
By Devyn Defoe
Courtesy of Devyn Defoe and Astra House
Publication Date: Aug. 4
Devyn Defoe’s debut novel, Burnside, has been described by its publisher as Lynchian for its dark absurdity, but literary Sacramentans will recognize it as an exercise in Vollmannia—because Defoe’s prose is as sumptuous as the early work of another author in our summer reading guide, William T. Vollmann. After her roommate is attacked and injured by an unhoused chaos agent named Burnside, Defoe’s unnamed narrator (a young woman who works at a used bookshop, like Defoe herself), enters into an underbellied Sacramento inhabited by anguished drifters and lost souls. This is the Sacramento of Dorothea Puente, the grandmotherly serial killer who buried bodies in the backyard of her boardinghouse on F Street, and descendants of the Donner Party cannibals. It’s a place where your friends’ bodies wash up on the trash-strewn bank of the American River, and hungover hostesses vomit in alleys behind farm-to-fork restaurants.
The world Defoe describes is vanishingly dark, yet the luminosity of her voice bathes every scene in an incandescent glow so intense it becomes elegiac, cathartic even. And while her first novel won’t be published until August, Defoe already has some serious literary world cred. She was a Wallace Stegner fellow in Stanford’s creative writing program (recently, the program attracted nearly 1,400 applicants for 10 spots), and Pulitzer finalist Chang-Rae Lee blurbed Burnside as “the coolest weird fever dream you’ll ever have while awake” that “may well prove a signature chronicle of our American end times.” If you want an autographed copy, you should go buy it at Southside Park’s Beers Books, because Defoe still works there.
A Table For Fortune
By William T. Vollmann
Courtesy of Arcade Publishing
Publication Date: Aug. 25
Sacramentan William T. Vollmann won the National Book Award in 2005 for Europe Central, a dazzlingly broad 832-page historical novel. But that book has nothing on A Table for Fortune, the four-volume, 3,400-page novel that is set to be published on Aug. 25 and makes Tolstoy’s War and Peace look like a short story.
Nominally a family saga spanning the 1960s to just before the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, it concerns a shadowy CIA operative, Elliot, and his estranged son, Matthew, who is repulsed by his father’s involvement in torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Matthew is an accidental wise man much like the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and longs to spiritually balance the history books, so to speak, by ritualistically and symbolically unliving his father’s life—striving to live “without government” by dwelling in our society’s ungoverned interstitial spaces, whether that be under a bridge or on an island in the Delta. It’s a piercing portrait of our current moment and how we got here, a rare artifact that could easily be loved by readers on both sides of the political aisle. Vollmann combines Tom Clancy’s exhaustive, compulsively fascinating research into the minutiae of how government works with the rip-roaring readability of James Michener, all without sacrificing his prize-winning literary dignity.
For Sacramento readers especially, Matthew’s adventures bring many familiar local beats, like when Matthew hops off a freight train near the Blue Diamond almond factory or beds down with the unhoused along the banks of the American River—all things Vollmann himself has done (and written about) in his day. Don’t let the length put you off; this is an entertaining read. If you had the attention span to binge all six seasons of Better Call Saul, you got this.
READ MORE: The Curious Case of William T. Vollmann
