Hilary Faktor’s Pretty Bird is a thriller about a woman who escaped from an artist’s cult as a child, but her past comes back to haunt her as an adult. Maeve has a good job and family (husband, daughter and son). Her world unravels when she and her husband see […]
Leah Rochelle’s Oenone describes the adventure of a sculpture of Oenone (of Greek mythology fame) that Aphrodite brings to life in the modern world. Oenone is searching for a reincarnation of her husband, Paris. This summary may have The Mummy vibes, but this book is not a horror offering. Instead, […]
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia tops a lot of reader’s “best horror lists.” It not only figures on many “best” lists for its year, but it also lands on many best of the 2020s decade. In the 1950s, Noemí Taboada travels to an old English estate, High Place, in Mexico. […]
Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s novel, Brother Wolf, is the second in a series I’m dubbing “The Father Edmund Collection.” Fr. Edmund Thomas Gilroy, though a secondary character in both novels, plays a pivotal part in instructing and combating the forces of evil threatening the Church and the world. In A Bloody […]
(The Athena Club Book 3) The Athena Club is comprised of Mary Jekyll and Diana Hyde (daughters of the infamous Henry Jekyll), Catherine Moreau (a puma made human by Dr. Moreau), Beatrice Rappaccini (a poisonous lady from a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story), Justine Frankenstein (the created bride of the monster), […]
Describing Unlikely Animals is like describing a color—it’s not easy. A prodigal daughter, Emma Starling, returns home to a small town in New Hampshire. Her father is ill, and her presence may extend her padre’s life. Emma has a secret she knows she must confess to her family. However, her […]
Murder at the Agency is a debut novel by Kylie Forsythe, a cozy mystery about a new employee at an advertising agency who finds one of her coworkers dead. Cassie Blayne is unemployed and looking for work. While pitching her ideas to a friend, an owner of an advertising agency […]
H. L. Burke’s third book in her Superhero Rehabilitation series is Reborn. In this sequence of books, superheroes (called sables) fight supervillains as expected, but the novel treats its heroic characters as adults in adult situations. The sables work for a larger organization called DOSA, which sponsors a program to […]
I became aware of Marisha Pessl’s Night Film from an article suggesting interesting settings in thriller books. The concept of a reclusive film director, his avant-garde offerings, and a potential murder in his family was exciting and interesting. The lengthy page count kept me away for a while, but I […]
E. M. Lund’s The Urbex Trip explores the idea of a group of twenty-somethings encountering something haunted while enjoying an URBan EXploration. Urban exploration is the concept of visiting and documenting (usually with images) a human-constructed, abandoned building. In the book’s case, eight people travel to a decades-abandoned luxury resort […]