Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley is a debut novel and groundbreaking YA thriller about a Native teen who must root out the corruption in her community. I ugly cried my way through the ending of this book at 5:30 a.m. after reading all night, which I hope is enough of a recommendation for readers who…
Twenty-four years ago, two eleven-year-old girls disappeared in the small town of Repentance, Arkansas. Mary Grace Dobbs remembers that year very well—she was a sixth-grader herself, a classmate of the missing girls. I was coming up on the anniversary of my parents’ death when the girls began disappearing. That summer twenty-four years ago, right…
It’s hard to believe that this highwire act of tight plotting, alternating perspectives, and shifting timelines is a debut novel, but Alex Finlay’s Every Last Fear is a remarkable addition to the thriller genre, juggling all its many plot points so deftly that it kept me guessing whodunnit and why till the very end. Matt…
Technology, and social media in particular, is interwoven into our daily lives in large and small ways we might not even think about anymore. Assuming you’re not reading this on your phone right now, you probably have your phone handy and I’d wager that you’ve checked at least one social media site today—and have probably…
CHAPTER 7 SARAH KELLER Agent Keller slid the key into the door of the small ranch-style house, moths circling the porch light above her. Readington, New Jersey, wasn’t a fancy neighborhood, which was just as well. That would’ve been cost prohibitive, given her FBI salary. But it was safe, filled with working-class families and young…
Odessa Dean is still getting used to life in New York City after spending her first quarter-century or so in the sleepy Louisiana town of Piney Island. Her aunt needed a cat-sitter while jaunting off to Europe for three months, so Odessa happily took the opportunity to see the big city, rent-free. Aunt Melanie tried…
There’s something about dark narratives about dysfunctional families that pulls readers in. It probably stems from a sense of empathy mixed with familiarity. However, some stories take dysfunction into places so dark and dangerous that readers aren’t pulled in; they’re brutally dragged. Abigail Dean’s Girl A belongs to this second group. A crushing tale that…
The Push by Ashley Audrain is a debut novel and a tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for but everything she feared. College sweethearts Blythe and Fox Connor have a charmed life and romance. With…
The Lady Upstairs by Halley Sutton is a dark debut thriller and modern-day noir that tells the story of a woman who makes a living taking down terrible men and the final con she must pull for her freedom. Jo is a professional blackmailer. She studies, entraps, and extorts the richest and most powerful men…
The Girl in the Mirror by Rose Carlyle is a chilling, twisty suspense novel and a seductive debut thriller about greed, lust, secrets, and deadly lies involving identical twin sisters. Cases of mistaken identity and murderous doppelgängers are a dime a dozen in the crime genre, but Rose Carlyle has written something truly fresh and…
