Jasmine Littleton is pretty sure that if she doesn’t figure out a way to escape her life in Wisconsin, her boyfriend Glenn is going to kill her. He had seemed wonderful at first, showering her with affection and attention, but he’d slowly taken over her life, curtailing her independence and physically harming her when she…
At the end of this surprisingly deep interrogation of one woman’s adult life and how it’s skidded off the rails so far from where she’d once envisioned it, I burst into tears then contacted my childhood best friend to tell her that I love her. Like myself and B, Laura Phillips and her best friend…
May, Kelsey and Lauren have been friends for over two decades now, drifting in and out of touch before a series of personal scandals cemented their bond for good. While May and Kelsey have been best friends since they were kids, Lauren had been the head counselor at the music camp they’d attended each summer.…
ONE Friday, June 16, 1989 I walk into the pharmacy on Union Street for two things: my photographs and a pregnancy test. As I stand at the counter I feel lightheaded and thirsty. Nerves, I suppose. Or the heat. There was a piece on the radio this morning about a hosepipe ban and water rationing,…
The con artist known as Lynch is almost at the end of his rope when he literally stumbles into a young woman in the lobby of a London airport hotel. The black-clad heiress stares at him with a horror incommensurate with their collision. Turns out that Lynch, to the surprise of them both, is the…
What a treat for fans of thrillers that showcase women who are frighteningly competent lethal weapons. If you’ve enjoyed Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age and/or Cindy Dees’s Second Shot, A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage is right up your alley. Like the quartet of female assassins in Killers of a Certain Age, Hazel…
Columbia Jones is living every writer’s dream. An acclaimed author of blockbuster bestsellers, she’s wrapping up the tour for her latest novel in Denver, Colorado, while surrounded by adoring fans. When one figure in the audience of her book talk abruptly stands up to leave, however, she falters and faints. Later, she and her people…
Dick Raynes is a mild-mannered chemist who is, frankly, kind of a loser. His ex-wife still runs roughshod over his life and his two children don’t respect him. But he’s still loved and needed by Dee, the younger sister who he practically raised, and her son Jesse, especially after the child rapist Dee helped put…
New York Times bestselling author Jean Hanff Korelitz is a writer whose works are acclaimed as much for their literary merits as their canny adherence to the conventions of the crime story—a welcome example of transcendence beyond the long-running (and tiresome) debate over what constitutes “mainstream” vs. “genre” fiction. Her meta-masterpiece, The Plot (2021), bridged…
This searing debut mystery novel pulls no punches as it examines life in pre-COVID India. While her main narrative centers on the murder of a young girl in the small village of Teetarpur, author Nilanjana Roy deftly moves the action back and forth in both time and place, from the quiet of the foothills of…
