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Spines and Slaughter
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03 November 2026

Sometimes the demons of stories take on human faces.
When Poe Baxter and her friend Beattie travel to Lima, Peru, to hunt down a rare collection of Peruvian folktales, the two women find themselves mixed up in a game of deceit that echoes the legend of the chullachaqui. Soon, they're having trouble telling truth from lie, even when their lives are at stake.
Can Poe and Beattie discern what is real from what is myth before it's too late?
ACF Bookens loves a good mystery, a quaint bookshop, and a good cup of coffee. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she takes joy in the mountain views and the quiet back roads. She lives with her son and three rescue cats who are, of course, nocturnal. Aslan, the cat in her books, is based on her departed first cat by that name, who spent an inordinate amount of time digging up her houseplants.
In her books, Bookens addresses issues of justice and writes with intention to disrupt the white supremacy that says that "whiteness" is normal by making purposeful note of every character's ethnicity. She is weary of books that assume everyone is white unless the author says otherwise because being white is not the default of reality. Her hope is that readers enjoy escaping into her stories and are challenged, just a little, to make themselves better people and the world a better place from the reading.