Classic Stacy Willingham– an extremely lucky FMC, a haunting setting, a slow build up and a twisty end.
Claire is disheartened when she misses out on a promotion to her best friend Ryan. She leaves NYC and her journalism career somewhat impulsively to return to her Southern small town to spend time with her mom. We learn early on that her older sister Natalie was killed years ago as a high school senior by her secret older boyfriend and that Claire carries guilt about this. Claire doesn’t have a lot of responsibilities and no health care, so she fortuitously goes to work at a grape farm 45 minutes away with no cell service or WiFi.
Ryan and Claire’s mom work as good plot devices to advance the plot and help Claire solve this mystery. The setting is great and well paced, I really enjoyed the setting, the side characters are creepy and the reveals are surprising. If you suspend disbelief at some of the “right place at the right time” moments and give in to the thriller, you will enjoy it.
Thanks to NetGalley and St Martin’s Press for the ARC. Book to be published August 26, 2025.
Amber Winslow has never met her grandmother, because she is- for some reason- secretly estranged from her mom. But Amber recently lost her career as an unlicensed (yet) private investigator and broke up with her boyfriend Bones. As a partner, Bones took credit for all of Amber’s ideas and called her a secretary.
So Amber heads to Arizona to a luxury retirement community to meet Jade McCallum, her grandmother and a successful true crime podcaster. Soon a man is dead and Jade is charged with the crime. Amber has to figure out who the murderer is before Jade is officially charged and also to find the deceased’s family heirloom, a 3 million dollar diamond.
This was a confusing and slow start for me, and I almost put it down several times. It seemed like it started in the middle of the character development, I had to check and make sure this wasn’t a part of a series that I didn’t read the first books. It is a standalone- but I would love to see more from Amber and Jade. The characterization and the story building came kind of slow for me. But I really loved the last 25% of the book for the plot and the redemption of the characters.
Dodi and Jake have great chemistry, she is intrigued by the temp and thinks he could even be a serial killer. People have been “falling” from the tops of office buildings for over a year… or are they being pushed?? Dolores (Dodi) likes to think about serial killers and if she could spot one.
“HR’s not having a good time unless you’re having a good time.”
With some fun commentary on working life and workplace culture, Serial Killer Games is not what I expected. My top two genres read are mystery and romance, so I thought I would love this. It is definitely more romance than mystery, although it has some elements. The pacing and dialogue are all banter and typical romcom tropes. None of the slow burn, strategically paced reveals and third act twists and turns you expect from a mystery.
“I hate white carrots.” “They’re parsnips.” “I hate them.” “That’s irrelevant.” “YOU’RE an elephant.”
Some of the dialogue is very cute and sweet, the ending tied everything up pretty nicely.
The way that the romance had dark and morbid background was slightly unsettling to me. I think some people would really enjoy it and even find it exactly the right kind of spicy/hot. But others would find it disturbing- so read a few reviews and the blurb to see if this is the book for you.
Thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing for the ARC. Book to be published 4/29/25.
A twisty, dark academia mystery with old secrets, accidents and scary chases. Reminds me of Parents Weekend by Alex Finley and School of Lies by Laura Ling Brown.
Beckett left Wyatt college years ago after a terrible nightmare and never saw her roommate and best friend again. Now her daughter has accepted a scholarship to attend the college. After a cryptic text, her daughter goes missing.
This is a typical Megan Miranda, fun and easily digestible if you want to fly through a fun mystery book. Nice and repetitive if you enjoy audiobooks or just need that for plot purposes. The twists and reveals might be a tad predictable, but they are well paced. I would have liked to learn more about Daphne, Beckett herself is relatable but honestly a bit dense.
Thank you to Simon Element and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Book to be published July 28, 2025.
This book is a phenomenal thriller with such deep, thought provoking questions about our society. If there was ever a “page turner,” it is this book. I absolutely could not put this down.
Jane lives in a shack in the woods with her kooky dad. He has raised her far apart from society, a Luddite of the most exceptional proportions. Jane, at 17, knows no one except her father, and has near no contact without the outside world. Set in the late 90’s, they only leave their Montana home periodically to sell a zine called Libertaire. Jane’s father tells her that her mother died in a car accident, which she had never questioned until now.
Hungry for the outside world, she sneaks episodes of the X-files and get access to the internet via a modem. In these early days of the internet, social media is arbitrary and sparse- but Dad wants her to learn HTML so he can publish his “manifesto.”
This is where the tires start to fall off, and learning who she is and that her father is more than just a tin foil hat extremist. I don’t want to give away any more of the plot, but know that once we leave the shack this entire story goes full throttle.
I think what sets this book apart from other suspense/thrillers is the theme of the complicated relationship we have with technology. Although it hurts just a little to call a book taking place in 1995 “historical” fiction, the time period when the world was hurtling towards connectivity with little regard for the implications truly doesn’t take that long to feel like a long time ago. In some ways, Jane’s “kooky” conspiracy dad is actually right about what he was warning the world about. And that’s what is so deeply moving about the greater theme— we know more than the characters about what is to come. We know he’s not totally wrong, even though in many ways, he is the villain of this story.
Also, the epilogue was so unexpected and wonderful. It doesn’t end with a bang, but with an echo.
Pub date was pushed from June 10 to June 3, so I am sure this is going to be a book club pick of some kind.
a best mystery/thriller of 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC. Book to be published 6/3/25
PS- that is THREE outstanding ARCs in a row for me after a dearth of mid picks. Reading so many good ones feels like an embarrassment of riches. I actually feel as though I am bragging to all my #bookstagram friends.
Story review- this was a cleverly constructed and well executed story. I loved the ending, especially about her father’s death, it was just beautifully written.
This is a story of a young 24 year old girl who drops out of the university of central Florida in order to work full time at Starbucks and solve murders online in Reddit. She becomes sort of famous because she is very good at it and is driven by her father’s memory. She joins an online team of true crime investigators. This really worked, they had great chemistry and all of them had interesting back stories.
In criticism I do think it was a little long, but other than that I liked the story.
Audiobook- while I did enjoy the narrator’s performance, I had a hard time with volume on this one. For the narrative/internal dialogue sections she spoke so quietly, almost whispering. Then when she would flip to dialogue it was so loud. I have never had this experience with an audiobook. Although I will say I listened on a highway drive so maybe it was just me. If you are going to listen on audio I would recommend you listen while cleaning or in an office.
Thank you to NetGalley and sourcebooks audio for the ALC. book to be published march 25, 2025.
An intriguing and creative debut novel with dueling timelines of “sad girls on campus” twenty years ago and another timeline of today.
Sadie has a baby and lives with her child’s father, Harrison. Harrison is recently widowed by Sadie’s former childhood friend, Nikki. So, Sadie and Nikki were estranged and never spoke for 20 years. Nikki dies, seemingly of suicide, and Sadie sits in the back at her funeral. 9 months later we skip and Sadie is living with her widow and has a baby with him.
If this seems weird and a bit unbelievable, you aren’t alone in that thought!
We side with Sadie and see things from her perspective. We don’t love Harrison, we aren’t sure about Caroline, who is Nikki and Harrison’s teen daughter.
Both mysteries are good, the past one is better, it is clever to be following two mysteries in different timelines because it gets away from the typical criticism of slow burn mysteries as that it can drag in the middle.
Why is it called Doll Parts? No idea! I do love the cover, though.
My favorite character was Nikki, the past segments are in her view point.
Lots of open ended things with no conclusion, but it works. I liked this and found i very readable, some of the minor characters didn’t have enough characterization so I didn’t know them as well. I did love the setting and the writing style.
A fresh new voice in women centered mystery/thrillers!
Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks/Landmark for the ARC. Book to be published August 26, 2025.
A dystopian landscape in which water has overtaken most of the planet, and a secluded island off the coast of Antarctica houses all varietals of seeds that will help the humans left on the planet survive, although most have been lost to fire or flood.
Enter Dominic and his children, teenagers Fen and Riff, who are Irish twins, and Orly, a younger precocious boy who has a big heart. Their mother died on the island. Enter Rowan, a woman in her 40s that nearly drowns and washes ashore. She is looking for her husband Hank.
It is difficult to categorize this book. Although it is definitely dystopian, it is not like most climate change books that I have read in that many are trying to persuade us to make better current choices to avoid the planet’s destruction. In this book, the fires and floods and destruction is pretty much a foregone conclusion and what I would call an “educated guess” of what could happen. Hank and Rowen discuss having children and she says that doing so would be selfish, and the best way they could reduce their carbon footprint is to not have kids. This gave me food for thought. It has been awhile since I worried about overpopulation but it is certainly something to consider.
This is, in places, pretty terrifying on a visceral level, because of battling the elements and animals. Both Dominic and his family as well as Rowan have secrets to hide. There is good characterization but the narrative definitely drags on from 25% – 60%. There is a lot of necessary world building and good build up, but the plot fell a bit flat. I did guess the ending but only very shortly before the reveal, there are just enough easter eggs.
I liked this book, but did not love it. I read it very quickly, not because I was engrossed but because I was ready for the conclusion. I can’t imagine picking it back up again.
Here is a book that makes me long for the more nuanced rating systems of other book-reading-reviewing-tracking apps.
This book is well crafted and written, very imaginative and cleverly aligned with the literature of F Scott Fitzgerald. Not only the stories of Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby, but also the lore of his life, his relationship with his wife Zelda, and thoughts that she was the author of his works.
What happens when you take a story and re-center it in the female perspective? This is very meta- it is multi-universal and there are layers upon layers of re-centering a story in a different perspective.
Here is the gist of it- this book is very well done. I hated the ending, the conclusion, I wanted to hurl the book against the wall. I hated the characters. They are really well characterized but I hated them so much. It is a brilliant book and I wish I never read it.
I have this pet peeve- when the title of a mystery/thriller has nothing to do with the book at all. Stop doing that! It’s lazy!
This is about a 3.25/5– there is a lot to like about it.
Synopsis- Rowen is a single mom to Natalie, a teenager. Natalie’s dad is out of the picture after going to prison years ago. She was sad when her new beau, Tim, dumped her out of the blue. She felt a bit bad still following his location on Find My Friends. When she decided to figure out what he was doing at her work, she was shocked to see he had just been killed. She has to figure out who did it before she is accused herself.
Multi-POV with Natalie, who wants to get to know her long lost dad.
Coralie- a young secretary who is being taken advantage of by her millionaire boss who comes from old money. We don’t know what time period she is in until the end.
What I liked- the setting of an old mansion in Portland, Maine Natalie and Rowen’s mom/daughter relationship An easy villain to hate (rich guy who feels entitled to sexual assault) A surprising ending Good, believe dialogue
What I didn’t Pacing in the middle was slow Some of the minor characters did not have a lot of character building and they were a bit flat A few interesting plot points that went nowhere
Overall, I liked this but didn’t love it. Would I read another book by the author? Yes definitely.
