Book Reviews

by Freida McFadden

Every day I clean the Winchesters' beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor.. I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew's handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it's hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina's life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband.. I only try on one of Nina's pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it's like. But she soon finds out... and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it's far too late.. But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don't know who I really am.. They don't know what I'm capable of . . .

by Colleen Hoover

Lowen Asleigh, yaşadığı finansal krizin ardından evini kaybetmek üzere olan bir yazardır. Büyük bir umutsuzluk içinde olduğu sırada beklenmedik bir teklif alır. Geçirdiği kaza sebebiyle kitap yazamayacak durumdaki ünlü yazar Verity Crawford'ın çoksatan serisini tamamlayacak ve karşılığında Verity'nin eşi Jeremy'den hayatını tamamen değiştirecek yüklü miktarda bir ödeme alacaktır.. Lowen kendini kısa süre içinde Verity'nin gözlerden uzak evinde bulur. Göl kıyısındaki bu muhteşem malikanede onun seriye dair tuttuğu notlarını okuyacak ve serinin devamını yazacaktır. Ne var ki Lowen bilinci yerinde olmayan Verity'nin notları arasında onun acımasız bir dürüstlükle yazdığı otobiyografisini de bulur. Gerilim türünde bir başyapıt sayılabilecek bu otobiyografide iki kızını da kaybeden Verity kızlarının gerçekte nasıl öldüğünü anlatmıştır. Lowen okudukça dehşete kapıldığı bu taslağı, Verity'nin her şeyden habersiz eşine göstermekle yok etmek arasında bir seçim yapmak zorundadır.. Colleen Hoover içgüdülerimize, bilinçaltımıza ve gerçeğe meydan okuyor.

by Todd Ritter

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of USA Today's Best Books of 2020. “A haunted house story—with a twist….[Sager] does not hold back”(Rolling Stone) in this chilling thriller from the author of Final Girls and Survive the Night.. Every house has a story to tell and a secret to share.. Twenty-five years ago, Maggie Holt and her parents moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. Three weeks later they fled in the dead of night, an ordeal her father recounted in a memoir called House of Horrors. His story of supernatural happenings and malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.. Maggie was too young to remember any of the horrific events that supposedly took place, and as an adult she doesn’t believe a word of her father’s claims. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When she inherits Baneberry Hall after his death and returns to renovate the place and sell it, her homecoming is anything but warm. The locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous, and human characters with starring roles in House of Horrors are waiting in the shadows.. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself—a place where unsettling whispers of the past lurk around every corner. And as Maggie starts to experience strange occurrences ripped from the pages of her father’s book, the truth she uncovers about the house’s dark history will challenge everything she believes.

by Sarah Pearse

Half hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Long plagued by troubling rumors, the former abandoned sanatorium has since been renovated into a five-star minimalist hotel.. An imposing, isolated getaway spot high up in the Swiss Alps is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But Elin's taken time off from her job as a detective, so when her estranged brother, Isaac, and his fiancée, Laure, invite her to celebrate their engagement at the hotel, Elin really has no reason not to accept.. Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge--there's something about the hotel that makes her nervous. And when they wake the following morning to discover Laure is missing, Elin must trust her instincts if they hope to find her. With the storm closing off all access to the hotel, the longer Laure stays missing, the more the remaining guests start to panic.. Elin is under pressure to find Laure, but no one has realized yet that another woman has gone missing. And she's the only one who could have warned them just how much danger they are all in...

by Jennifer McMahon

Alison agrees to take in the mother who abused her as a child after hearing she only has weeks left to live. What should be a final act of reluctant grace turns into something far stranger and more dangerous, as Jennifer McMahon threads family trauma, possession horror, and wintery dread into one unsettling package.

by A. M. Walker

Emily is preparing for her wedding while quietly circling murder, and Rooted in Silence leans all the way into that contradiction. A. M. Walker builds the story as a dark, descriptive slow burn full of unease, polished surfaces, and the feeling that beauty is hiding something venomous.

by Elizam Rose

Mila Taylor has built her reputation on solving cold cases, but the murder of a bookstore owner with no obvious suspect forces her into a new investigation tangled up with her own family history. Elizam Rose delivers a compact crime thriller that moves quickly without skimping on twists.

by Riley Sager

"Two truths and a lie. The girls played it all the time in their cabin at Camp Nightingale. Vivian, Natalie, Allison, and first-time camper Emma Davis, the youngest of the group. But the games ended the night Emma sleepily watched the others sneak out of the cabin into the darkness. The last she--or anyone--saw of them was Vivian closing the cabin door behind her, hushing Emma with a finger pressed to her lips. Now a rising star in the New York art scene, Emma turns her past into paintings--massive canvases filled with dark leaves and gnarled branches that cover ghostly shapes in white dresses. When the paintings catch the attention of Francesca Harris-White, the wealthy owner of Camp Nightingale, she implores Emma to return to the newly reopened camp as a painting instructor. Seeing an opportunity to find out what really happened to her friends all those years ago, Emma agrees. Familiar faces, unchanged cabins, and the same dark lake haunt Nightingale, even though the camp is opening its doors for the first time since the disappearances. Emma is even assigned to the same cabin she slept in as a teenager, but soon discovers a security camera--the only one on the property--pointed directly at its door. Then cryptic clues that Vivian left behind about the camp's twisted origins begin surfacing. As she digs deeper, Emma finds herself sorting through lies from the past while facing mysterious threats in the present. And the closer she gets to the truth about Camp Nightingale and what really happened to those girls, the more she realizes that closure could come at a deadly price"--

by Reid the Faceless Detective

One haunted detective, four dead women, and a case that refuses to stay professional. Liar leans into crime-noir grit, tragic characters, and multiple points of view to build a thriller that gets darker as it gets more personal.

by Tana French

When he was twelve years old, Adam Ryan went playing in the woods one sunny day with his two best friends. He never saw them again. Their bodies were never found, and Adam himself was discovered with his back pressed against an oak tree and his shoes filled with blood. He had no memory of what had happened. Twenty years later Adam - now using his middle name of Rob - is a detective with the Dublin police force. His colleagues don't know about his past. He works as a team with Cassie Maddox, a smart, tough cookie; they are best friends as well as partners. When the body of a young girl is found at the site of an archaeological dig, Rob and Cassie get the case. And when they reach the crime scene, Rob realises it is the exact site of his childhood trauma. They also find a hairclip that he recognises as having belonged to his friend. Could there be a connection between that old, unsolved crime and this?

by Alice Feeney

Daisy Darker was born with a broken heart. Now after years of avoiding each other, Daisy Darker’s entire family is assembling for Nana’s 80th birthday party in her crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island. The family arrives, each of them harboring secrets. When the tide comes in, they will be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours.. But at the stroke of midnight, as a storm rages, Nana is found dead. And an hour later, the next family member follows…. Trapped on an island where someone is killing them one by one, the Darkers must reckon with their present mystery as well as their past secrets, before the tide goes out and all is revealed.

by James E. Michels

Under The Paint mixes domestic crime tension with a heavier dose of spice than a traditional thriller. It follows a trio of characters moving toward collision, balancing relationship heat with the pull of wanting to know exactly how everything ends.

by Tana French

Still traumatised by her brush with a psychopath, Detective Cassie Maddox transfers out of the Murder squad and starts a relationship with fellow detective Sam O’Neill. When he calls her to the scene of his new case, she is shocked to find that the murdered girl is her double. What’s more, her ID shows she is Lexie Madison – the identity Cassie used, years ago, as an undercover detective. With no leads, no suspects and no clues to Lexie’s real identity, Cassie’s old boss spots the opportunity of a lifetime: send Cassie undercover in her place, to tempt the killer out of hiding to finish the job.

by Alice Feeney

Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can't move. She can't speak. She can't open her eyes. Though she can hear everyone around her, no one knows because she's in a coma. But she doesn't remember what happened. And she has a sneaking suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, the narratives build and collide for an ending that leaves readers speechless. This novel delves into the blurred gap between who we are and who we'd like to be.

by Alice Feeney

The million-copy bestselling Queen of Twists Alice Feeney returns with a gripping and deliciously dark thriller about marriage. . . . . . and revenge.. Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.. Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.. A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible — a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.. Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.

by Amy Tintera

After Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer. Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married a dream guy with a big ring and an even bigger new home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all, and if you believe the rumors, especially popular with the men in town. It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life.. But now the phenomenally huge hit true crime podcast "Listen for the Lie," and its too-good looking host Ben Owens, have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder for the show’s second season. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one that did it.. The truth is out there, if we just listen.

by Stuart Turton

Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let's begin. Imagine the movie Groundhog Day as a riveting page-turner of a murder mystery. Evelyn Hardcastle will die every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins anew, Aiden wakes up in a deteriorating manor house, as a different person, and must work out who he is and how he relates to everyone else at the party commemorating the long ago death of a child. If he can't solve the murder that occurs at the party, he is doomed to continue the loop every eight days. The most inventive debut of the year twists together a mystery of such unexpected creativity it will leave readers guessing until the very last page.