There’s no two ways about it: Claire is a serial killer. She tries to keep her victim list confined to those she deems worthy of killing, but when worthiness generally correlates to how much her victim has personally annoyed her, it’s not hard to see that she’s not being at all altruistic with her murders. …
In a highly plausible near-future North America, the Farmer-Bowen family is struggling to survive in what remains of New York City. There was no singular precipitating event for the decline of a once thriving society, no apocalypse to identify as a turning point. While everyone has their theories as to why things have come to…
In a small dusty corner of southeast Texas, three generations of Evans women run the only funeral parlor in town. Unsurprisingly, this does not make them the most popular of the area’s inhabitants, particularly in 1999, with feminism still having a long way to go despite the movement’s continuing strides. A friendly hairdresser contracted to…
The death of Annie Shaw’s mother sends the middle-aged artist reeling. Mẹ had fled the Vietnam War and made a home for herself and young Annie in America. Their ongoing struggle for survival wound up acutely damaging the mental health of both, as Mẹ became a hoarder who emotionally manipulated her daughter in extreme ways.…
Elizabeth Smith has always been something of a loner. Despite having the perfect marriage and job and a seemingly perfect life in the affluent Harbor Town neighborhood of Memphis, Tennessee, she always feels a little dissociated from her neighbors. Gregarious Patricia Fitzgerald is perhaps her best and only friend in the area. So when Elizabeth…
It’s been a long time coming, but Emily Westhill is getting remarried! The loss of her beloved late husband, Alec, served to bond her with his parents, Tom and Cindy, so much that she and Tom opened up a donut shop together to help manage their grief. The older Westhills feel like a bonus set…
I am a sucker for a good postmodernist novel, and Scarlett Thomas’ The Sleepwalkers is just that best sort of brain candy for readers like myself. I should have known from the Contents page alone that this was going to be a book that dropkicked to the curb the well-worn tropes of privileged tourists uncovering…
I’ve been writing thrillers for years and let’s be honest—thrillers take place in a dark space. While there’s room for some levity and dark humor, it’s, well, dark. That’s part of the thrill, after all. Exploring things that go bump in the night and, for an author, making your reader’s heart race as they turn the…
The Tudor monarch mystery that I never knew I needed came to life in Karen E. Olson’s An Inconvenient Wife. Taking the classic history of King Henry VIII’s six wives and setting them in modern day, Olson creates a truly clever novel. She explores not only what these women may have been like today, but…
Young Will Schumacher considers himself lucky. Though poor and often hungry, he has steady work as a reporter for Seattle’s Daily Star, and a guaranteed one meal a day at the lodging house where he boards. That’s a lot more than most can say in 1933, with the whole country in the throes of the…
