Midnight Strikes

Midnight Strikes is Zeba Shahnaz's debut, a young adult fantasy that runs a murder investigation through a time loop. Anais attends the kingdom's glittering anniversary ball as an outsider, tolerated rather than welcomed. At midnight an explosion tears through the palace and kills everyone in its path, including her.

She wakes in her bedroom, hours before the ball, with no one else remembering and no one believing her warnings. It happens again. And again. Each loop gives her a little more of the picture: a court whose gilded surface hides restless nobles grabbing at power, commoners on the edge of revolt, and royals with their own designs on the throne.

As Anais works the puzzle she also uncovers what her kingdom's magic actually is and where it came from, and she finds that Leo, whose reputation is that of an idle wastrel, is not what the court takes him for. The book pairs a court-intrigue mystery with the grind and grief of living the same day to its violent end over and over.