As a voracious reader, I’ve never felt bound to any one genre of publishing, though crime fiction certainly has primacy in my heart. Books that understand this and defy the limitations of genre have especial appeal to me. Books that do this while also being about books – and while being wildly entertaining – thus…
Salma and Bilal are your typical British couple looking to move off the estate and into a quiet suburban neighborhood. She’s a geography teacher and he’s a restaurateur, though the pandemic has made it really hard to keep a business afloat in the latter industry. When they first view the house in Blenheim while looking…
Jesse Q. Sutanto contains multitudes! Her cozy Bay Area mystery, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice For Murderers, is one of my favorite books of this year for its large-hearted generosity. Her latest release, I’m Not Done With You Yet, is almost the exact tonal opposite: a psychological thriller involving damaged women doing terrible, murderous things. Both…
Finn is on the run, hunted by the FBI for horrific war crimes he didn’t commit, reeling from his best friend’s death, and trying to prove his innocence while staying completely off the grid. He is determined to bring the guilty to justice. The excitement never rachets down: Blind Fear is a book that demands…
I’ve known an unfortunately non-zero number of couples in toxic relationships, but reading Samantha Downing’s scintillating new novel is probably the closest I’ll ever get to figuring out why a couple who are clearly bad for each other decide to stay together. The worst (or perhaps best?) part of this book is how I was…
Margo Finch has left her old life in the rearview mirror. Once a nurse who cared deeply for her patients, she’s now a library assistant – not that anyone can tell the difference between her and the town of Carlyle’s actual librarians. Working in a library is significantly different from her old job, and different…
Kira Foster is a hot mess. Now in her late thirties, she’s never really gotten over the death of her mother Sadie over two decades earlier. Sadie Foster was vibrant, artistic, and very much different from the Stepford Wives who populated her East Texas community. Most of her fellow housewives thought nothing of devoting their…
What turns a hobby into something all-consuming? For the Parker family, joining Rancho Santa Fe Equestrian did just that. In Eliza Jane Brazier’s newest novel, Girls and Their Horses, the stables of Rancho Santa Fe, California become the catalyst for an obsession that ends in murder. The Parker family moves to California for a new…
It’s a sure sign that I’m completely immersed and entertained by a novel that when I learn of a sequel on the horizon—as Michelle Gagnon slyly mentions in the very last sentence of her Afterword here—I gasp loudly and dramatically in ecstatic anticipation. This was the best punctuation mark to a book I simply could…
In summer 2019 I read an article about Project Iceworm, an American military base built under the ice in Greenland in the 1960s. Let me rephrase that with a little more context: In summer 2019 my wife and I had just separated, and I’d moved into a house nearby that belonged to my mother-in-law to…
