Last year, I read both of Leslye Penelope’s existing books and attended a wonderful virtual author panel called Lost & Found Magic, hosted by Bookstore Romance Day and including other authors I love, like Stephanie Burgis, Olivia Waite, C.L. Polk, and Jessie Mihalik (and I couple I still haven’t – Kit Rocha and Eva Leigh.) That was where I learned that both Leslye Penelope and C.L. Polk had new books coming out this year. I’m still on the waitlist for The Feywild Job, but I’m so happy to be sharing Leslye Penelope’s new book with you today!

The Inevitable Undoing
of Zahara Douglass
by Leslye Penelope

Redhook, 2026

ISBN 9780316594691

Read from a library copy.

It’s December of 1999, and Zahara Douglass is living what looks like her dream come true – working as a ballerina, dancing the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy in a national troupe touring back in her southern California hometown. Though she tells the interviewers that she’s delighted to be there, it’s very hard to be home where she remembers the twin sister who vanished four years, and where not even their mother, remembers Annica. When Zahara finds the old ad with the license plate number of the car that Annica drove away in, she knows for sure that she didn’t imagine her sister. She enlists the help of a handsome young private detective, Theo, to help her track down the car and hopefully her sister.

Zahara’s story is interspersed with tales from two of her missing family members: transcripts of audio tape recordings made by her father, who died several years before Annica’s disappearance, and chat and encrypted diary entries from Annica’s computer before her disappearance. Their father tells of the strange occurances of his tour of duty in Vietnam, where all the men of his unit came back changed forever after a mystical encounter in the jungle. Annica tells her diary of her frustration both with the pain and frequent hospitalizations of her sickle cell anemia, as well as the emotional pain of watching her family suffer financially from it and knowing that she’s treated differently because of it. Meanwhile, she’s secretly entering hacking competitions, hoping to use her skills for good.

In the present of 1999, though, Zahara is prepared to give up everything she’s worked so hard for for the chance to see her sister again. Theo is able to find clues, even though the trail is long cold, but it’s far from easy, and the danger ratchets up the closer they get. The kindly radio personality who says he was in Vietnam with her father and who’s advocating for a return to a slower, low-tech time but who seems willing to sacrifice a lot for that to happen isn’t as comforting as he’s trying to be. Someone is clearly following Theo and Zahara – and Zahara can’t even trust Theo, as helpful as he seems, with charm just a little too powerful and secrets she can’t ask him to share. The farther they go, the clearer it is that something is building up to Y2K. Zahara must find Annica before then to have any hope of saving her… but she’s also been warned that doing so could end the world.

This is an exciting story – maybe with not quite the cliffhanger chapter endings of a thriller, but keeping the reader on edge nonetheless. It’s set clearly in 1999, with road trips filled with books on tape and people just starting to carry cell phones – nostaligic for me and probably reading like historical fiction for readers younger than me. This setting, so much more recent than The Monsters We Defy and Daughter of the Merciful Deep, obviously couldn’t have the exploration of long-lost Black culture as they did. That’s not really a problem so much as something that I loved in those books that wasn’t here. Still, I think that most readers have an easier time identifying with more contemporary fiction, and the characters and plot here are absorbing, with a lot to say about the ongoing effects of trauma and the impact of power for individuals as well as technology on society in general.