Gizmo's Reviews

#Review - You Know Why by J.T. Ellison #Mystery #Thriller

2026-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Standalone
Format: 428 pages, Kindle Edition
Release Date: August 25, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Genre: Mystery, Thriller

It’s the holidays, and photographer Brooklyn Locke is bound for Italy with her husband, Trey, and their two children. But when Trey vanishes from the airport, missing their connecting flight, their impromptu vacation—and life as she knows it—begins to unravel.

Desperate to find her husband, Brooklyn accepts help from a stranger on the same flight, Eden Barrow. But Eden soon makes a shocking claim. She is the sister of Trey’s first wife, and ten years ago he was the main suspect in her murder.

Struggling to comprehend these accusations, fate delivers one more a violent accident that leaves Brooklyn fighting for her life. With nowhere else to turn, Brooklyn leans on Eden for support. But each kindness feels too rehearsed, feeding her doubts about Eden’s motives and Trey’s true past.

Brooklyn has her own dark history she’d rather forget and confronts an unsettling possibility. Her life is not what it seems, and the truth is a trap—laid by someone waiting for the perfect time to strike.

You Know Why by J.T. Ellison is a domestic suspense psychological thriller that starts with a single, ordinary rupture and then keeps peeling until almost nothing about the family at the center of the story can be trusted. It is twisty, propulsive, and frequently stressful in the way a good airport-nightmare thriller should be. In its second half, it's also overstuffed. Main Characters include: Brooklyn Locke, Eden Barrow, Detective Theresa Lee, and Trey Locke.

The official setup is clean and immediately effective. Photographer Brooklyn Locke, her husband Trey, and their two children are heading to Italy for a last-minute holiday trip when Trey vanishes during a connection and misses the next flight. A stranger on the same itinerary, Eden Barrow, offers help—and then drops a bomb. She says she is the sister of Trey’s first wife, and that ten years earlier Trey was the prime suspect in that woman’s murder. A violent accident then leaves Brooklyn fighting for her life and increasingly dependent on the one person she has every reason not to trust. Brooklyn, of course, has secrets of her own.

Ellison opens a decade earlier, on a Christmas-night murder in Georgia that is staged against the most aggressively cozy holiday details imaginable: snow, a lighted tree, a pie in the oven, carols on a phone. That contrast is the book’s governing idea. The present-day plot then runs on dual (and sometimes more) points of view, short chapters, and a steady drip of withheld information. The reader often knows slightly more than Brooklyn does, which is both the engine of the suspense and the source of the book’s most common reader complaint: you will want to shake her.

The characters are built for suspicion rather than warmth. Brooklyn is a mother in freefall whose protectiveness of her children is the most emotionally grounded thing in the novel. Trey is the classic Ellison husband: charming, incomplete, and suddenly unreadable. Eden is the book’s most interesting creation—helpful in a way that feels rehearsed, grieving in a way that curdles into something possessive. Sisterhood is a recurring structural motif: Eden and the dead Chloe; Brooklyn and her twin, Margot. Ellison has said she is less interested in likability than in whether a character remains understandable and, at least sometimes, forgivable. That shows. Almost no one here is clean.

This book is about identity as a performance and marriage as a negotiated fiction. How much of a spouse do you actually know? How much of yourself have you edited out in order to keep a life intact? Holiday travel, airports, and the false intimacy of strangers in transit give those questions a physical setting. The novel also wants to be more than a “who did I marry?” story. It folds in a cold-case murder, shifting loyalties, and the aftereffects of trauma (including a traumatic brain injury that becomes both a plot device and a source of narrative unreliability). When those layers lock together, the book has the snap of a well-made trap. When they pile up, it starts to feel like three thrillers sharing one spine.

If you liked The Last Thing He Told Me, Gone Girl, or Ellison’s own It’s One of Us and A Very Bad Thing, this will likely hit the same nerve: marriage as a crime scene, identity as a moving target, a stranger who knows too much. Think of it as domestic noir with a travel-thriller chassis and a cold-case engine bolted on. It is not her leanest book, and it is not her most emotionally devastating. For long stretches, it is extremely hard to put down and ends on a mind-blowing finale.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble

#Review - Immortal Rose by Alexandra Bracken #Fantasy #Romance

2026-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Immortal Rose # 1
Format: 496 pages, Hardcover
Release Date: August 18, 2026
Publisher: Avon
Source: Publisher
Genre: Fantasy, Romance

Members of the ancient House Rosebourne have a strange gift born of a fairy ancestor: the ability to infuse fragrance with magic capable of manipulating mind, body, and emotion.

When a shocking murder leaves the kingdom of Albion vulnerable to a coup, royal spymaster Hugh Thornton seeks the one person who can help: Viola Lockhart, the last living Rosebourne and secret heir to a fraught legacy.

Livid at the silver-eyed aristocrat who had her thrown in jail to force her compliance, Viola nevertheless comes to an agreement with him. In exchange for crafting Immortal Rose, the singular perfume capable of saving Albion, illegitimate Viola can seize the life—and fortune—that should have been hers.

As Hugh and Viola race to find the perfume’s lost fairy ingredient, hidden deep in Albion’s dark underbelly, neither can deny the scorching attraction building between them—especially as the attempts on Viola’s life grow increasingly brazen.

But a terrible truth lurks in the heart notes of their kingdom—and while every bargain has a cost, Immortal Rose may demand more than Hugh and Viola can ever pay.

Immortal Rose is the first installment in author Alexandra Bracken's Immortal Rose duology. Immortal Rose is Alexandra Bracken’s adult debut and a Regency-inspired romantasy built around perfume magic, class resentment, political conspiracy, and a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers pairing that actually earns its heat. The story alternates between Viola Lockwood and Hugh Thornton. In the kingdom of Albion, the last descendants of the fairies—the fairyborn—can work magic through scent.

Members of House Rosebourne inherited the rare gift of infusing perfume so that it can alter mind, body, and emotion. That gift is both coveted and criminalized, depending on who is using it. Viola Lockwood is the illegitimate last Rosebourne. She has spent years scraping by in the illegal Midnight Market, hiding a lineage that could either restore her fortune or send her back to Fairgate Prison.

After a shocking act of violence leaves the king poisoned and the realm ripe for a coup, royal spymaster Hugh Thornton has her arrested specifically so he can force a bargain: craft Immortal Rose, the one perfume that might save Albion, and she can claim the name, fortune, and life that were denied her. They go looking for a lost fairy ingredient in the city’s underbelly. Attraction arrives whether they want it or not. So do assassination attempts, secrets, and the kind of political rot that perfume cannot cover.

The magic system is the book’s best idea. Scent-as-power is not just window dressing. Bracken treats fragrance the way a good historical novelist treats etiquette or a good fantasy writer treats bloodlines: as status, contraband, intimacy, and weapon. Top notes, heart notes, and base notes become plot mechanics. The result is unusually tactile. You can almost smell the rooms. Viola is a stronger heroine than many current romantasy leads. She is not a bratty chosen one. She is practical, proud, already tired, and unwilling to be grateful for a gilded cage.

Hugh is the yearner: silver-eyed, morally compromised, professionally secretive, and increasingly undone by a woman he first treated as an asset. He falls first and harder. The banter and the careful noticing of each other are the book’s emotional engine. Also, I would pay attention to the secondary characters, especially in Hugh's house. They are all important, as are Oliver, Reedy, and Eleanor. Found-family side characters and the class critique give the story more bite than a pure ballroom romance.

The rich can buy fairy relics. The poor get jailed for making the same kind of magic. Viola’s anger about that hypocrisy is one of the book’s most adult notes. This is not a standalone, despite some early marketing that made it feel like one. It ends on a genuine cliffhanger—abrupt, high-stakes, jaw-dropping, and infuriating depending on your tolerance for unfinished duologies. Do not start this if you refuse incomplete series. Read it if you want slow-burn historical romantasy with a new magic hook, a competent heroine, a down-bad spymaster, and a world that smells expensive and dangerous at the same time. Wait for the second book if cliffhangers ruin you.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Until She Dies by Kendra Elliot #Thriller #Suspense

2026-09-15T12:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Noelle Marshall # 3
Format: 328 pages, Kindle Edition
Release Date: September 8, 2026
Publisher: Montlake Publishing
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

Detective Noelle Marshall and FBI Agent Max Rhodes unearth bodies and secrets as they become targets of a serial killer in a chilling novel of suspense by a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

When a search dog locates a mass burial ground in the Oregon forest, Detective Noelle Marshall is plunged into a hunt for a killer who’s hiding in plain sight. The key to her case lies in a decades-old secret: a lone survivor who escaped and is still out there, living in fear. The murderer is a phantom who left behind a collection of victims with nothing in common but their final resting place.

As pressure mounts to identify the bodies and find the killer, the investigation draws in FBI Agent Max Rhodes—Noelle’s partner in work and in life. They’ve hunted monsters before, but this one has spent years preparing for this moment, and he craves revenge. As the search narrows and the clock tightens, Noelle and Max must confront a predator who knows the terrain—and their weaknesses—better than they do.

Until She Dies is the third installment in author Kendra Elliot's Noelle Marshall series. It is a Pacific Northwest police procedural with romantic-suspense elements, a serial-killer investigation, and the emotional continuity that defines Elliot’s connected Oregon universe. Elliot is known for the Bone Secrets, Callahan & McLane, Mercy Kilpatrick, and Columbia River series. Noelle Marshall first appeared in the Columbia River books; fans asked for her own story, and this series delivers it while remaining set in the same Deschutes County world.

Secondary characters from earlier books (including Mercy Kilpatrick, Truman Daly, and Rowan Wolff) can appear, so longtime readers will feel the continuity even if each novel works as a case-driven thriller. A search dog uncovers a mass burial site in the Oregon forest. Detective Noelle Marshall of the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office takes the lead. The victims share almost nothing except their graves. The investigation points toward a killer who has operated for years, hidden in plain sight, and a decades-old secret: one person escaped and has been living in fear ever since.

FBI Agent Max Rhodes—Noelle’s partner both professionally and personally—joins the case. Pressure mounts as bodies are identified and the killer’s pattern becomes clearer. This predator has spent years preparing, knows the terrain, and specifically targets the investigators. The hunt turns personal. Noelle Marshall remains the series’ emotional center. She is a competent detective still carrying the trauma of her politician husband’s murder years earlier (the subject of Her First Mistake) and the secrets she kept about that night.

By book three, she has built a life and a partnership with Max, but the new case tests both her professional judgment and the fragile trust she has constructed with the FBI and her own family. Max Rhodes functions as both investigative counterpart and romantic anchor. Elliot typically writes these pairings as grounded rather than overheated: two professionals who respect each other’s competence while the case forces them into greater vulnerability. Readers who follow the series will see the relationship evolve under pressure rather than reset.

Supporting characters like Ollie, Emma, and the Oregon law-enforcement community give the book its procedural texture. Elliot’s strength has always been making the team feel like people who have history with one another, not just plot devices. Investigations proceed through interviews, forensics, search-and-rescue work, and the slow identification of remains. Tension builds as facts accumulate and the sense grows that the killer is watching. You can start here, but you will miss emotional context around Noelle’s marriage, the earlier murder case, and how she and Max reached their current partnership.

The first two books—Her First Mistake (2025) and No One Knew (January 2026)—are the better entry points. The subject matter is dark: serial murder, hidden graves, a survivor living in prolonged fear, and investigators who become prey. Readers who want lighter romantic suspense or a guaranteed uplifting ending may find the tone heavier than expected. If you already like Noelle and Max, this installment continues their story while giving them a large, threatening case. If you are new to Elliot, start with Her First Mistake or one of the Mercy Kilpatrick/Columbia River books to see whether her blend of investigation, trauma, and relationship work clicks for you.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble |

#Review - The Secrets We Hide by Karin Slaughter #Thriller #Suspense

2026-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: North Falls # 2
Format: 416 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: August 11, 2026
Publisher: William Morrow
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

Welcome to North Falls. A small town with big secrets…

1601 Iris Drive looks like any other house on the quiet, residential street. But rumors are rampant about the Vickery family and what goes on behind closed doors.

When gunshots ring out, Sheriff Emmy Clifton and her sister, ex-federal agent Jude Archer, discover a devastating crime scene. Allison Vickery has been murdered in her own kitchen, and her teenage daughter is bleeding upstairs, left for dead.

Everyone thinks they know what happened. But secrets are buried everywhere in this small town.

And it’s up to Emmy Clifton to uncover the truth…

The Secrets We Hide is the second installment in author Karin Slaughter's North Falls series. The Secrets We Hide is a dense, emotionally loaded small-town thriller that proves Karin Slaughter’s new North Falls series has staying power. It is not her leanest book, and it is not her most shocking, but it is one of her most character-driven recent novels: a story about what a community agrees not to see, and what two sisters still cannot say to each other. It is the second North Falls novel, following We Are All Guilty Here (2025).

The plot can be followed as a standalone, but the family history, especially the charged relationship between Sheriff Emmy Clifton and her long-absent sister Jude Archer, lands much harder if you have read book one. The story picks up only weeks later. Emmy is still raw from her father’s death in the line of duty and is burying her mother when gunshots pull her, Jude, and Emmy’s deputy son Cole off the funeral circuit and into a house on Iris Drive. What they find looks, at first, like the crime everyone in North Falls already expected.

Allison Vickery, a former detective turned private investigator, is dead in her kitchen. Her teenage daughter Mandy has been shot and left for dead upstairs. Upon entry, Jude is wounded by an unknown shooter. The Vickery household has been the subject of local rumor for years. The obvious suspect is the abusive husband Allison was trying to leave. Slaughter lets that assumption sit just long enough to make the town’s certainty feel like part of the crime.

From there the book becomes less a locked-room puzzle than a peeling of layers: money hidden in an attic, a shaky alibi, old police work that may have been buried on purpose, a drug pipeline, respected local families, and a decades-old murder trial that did not stay settled. The case is complicated. The relationship is better. Emmy is a newly minted sheriff trying to fill her father’s chair while grieving both parents, raising her adult son who is a Deputy, and running for election in a county that still treats the Cliftons as both royalty and public property.

Emmy is competent, loyal, and often overwhelmed by the angst she gets from her own people. Jude is the sharper instrument. A retired FBI profiler who fled North Falls forty years earlier (as the author covers), she brings federal coldness, professional arrogance, and a secret she still isn't ready to share with her sister. The combustible relationship between Emmy and Jude comes to a head as Emmy resents Jude’s disappearing act, and both circle the same house because neither can trust the other or work the case alone. Slaughter has always been good at damaged families.

Here the damage is specific and Southern in the way she does best: loyalty as a trap, gossip as infrastructure, motherhood as both vocation and cover. Slaughter still writes investigation as accumulation rather than fireworks. Clues arrive through interviews, grudges, half-remembered trials, and the social map of a town where half the county seems related. The opening is immediate and grim. The middle thickens. The last act snaps. Read this if you like crime fiction in which the detective work and the family reckoning are the same job. It will satisfy readers who come to Slaughter for damaged women, Southern claustrophobia, and the idea that the worst secrets are the ones a town has already decided not to discuss.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Daughter of Mine by Megan Miranda #Thriller #Suspense

2026-09-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Standalone
Format: 368 pages, Hardcover
Release Date: April 9, 2024
Publisher: Scribner

Source: Library
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

Her father was the town detective. Her mother its most notorious criminal. Now the secrets of Mirror Lake are coming to the surface…and changing everything.

When Hazel Sharp, daughter of Mirror Lake’s longtime local detective, unexpectedly inherits her childhood home, she’s warily drawn back to the town—and people—she left behind almost a decade earlier. But Hazel’s not the only relic of the past to return: a drought has descended on the region, and as the water level in the lake drops, long-hidden secrets begin to emerge…including evidence that may help finally explain the mystery of her mother’s disappearance.

Daughter of Mine is Megan Miranda at her strongest: small-town claustrophobia, a family that has lived too long with convenient stories, and a landscape that finally refuses to keep those stories underwater. Hazel Sharp left Mirror Lake, North Carolina, almost a decade ago. She built a renovation business in Charlotte and tried to put distance between herself and the town that never quite accepted her. Then her stepfather, Detective Perry Holt—the local cop everyone trusted—dies and leaves her the lakeside house. Not her half-brothers Gage and Caden. Just her.

At the same time, a drought drops Mirror Lake's water level. A rusted car surfaces. Then another. And the old question that has followed Hazel since she was fourteen comes back with it: what really happened when her mother, Libby, vanished after draining accounts and walking out of the Holt house? The note Libby left—“Daughter of Mine”—has been Hazel’s private inheritance for years. The lake is about to make it public. Miranda structures the book in four parts—Father, Mother, Daughter, Sons—which is more than a gimmick. Each section shifts the emotional center of gravity as Hazel is forced to look at the same family from a different angle.

Mirror Lake is not a postcard small town. It is a closed system where “everyone knows” is both comfort and threat. Drought is the perfect engine: heat, receding water, things that were supposed to stay buried becoming visible. The house itself behaves like a character—lights, notes, crawl spaces, the sense that Perry is still giving instructions from the other side of the grave. The real subject is not a single corpse in a lake. It is loyalty among people who share a last name and a lot of silence. Gage and Caden are cops like their father. Childhood friend Jamie is now married into the family.

Neighbor and old flame Nico has his own reasons to stay quiet. Uncle Roy has layers. Hazel is the outsider who was raised inside the house and still doesn’t fully belong. Miranda is sharp about how a town that worships a dead detective will punish the daughter of the woman they decided was a thief. Hazel, as narrator, is not a super-sleuth. She renovates houses for a living and is suddenly asked to renovate the story of her own life. Her isolation feels earned. She wants the truth more than she wants peace, which is both her strength and the reason the book keeps tightening.

Daughter of Mine is not Miranda’s wildest book, but it may be one of her most controlled. The drought is a strong metaphor that never quite becomes a lecture. Hazel is a better protagonist than many thriller heroines because her stubbornness has a history. The town feels lived-in and slightly poisoned. The twists are plentiful; the best of them are about who people chose to protect, not just who they chose to bury. If you want a tightly coiled, humid, family-first mystery that treats the past as something that can still flood the present, this is a solid, often excellent entry in Miranda’s catalog—and a fair argument for the people who keep calling it one of her best.

CHAPTER 1

62 Days without Rain

Wednesday, May 15

5:30 p.m.

Precipitation: Zero

They raised the car from the lake on the same day as my father’s memorial, two unrelated but equally newsworthy events: Something lost. Something found.

My father had been gone for over three weeks, and in the days since, I’d found myself measuring time differently. A recalibration. A new reality.

I listened to the weather reports each morning on the radio in Charlotte—sixty-two days without rain—and thought, instead, Twenty-three days without him.

It seemed like half the town had come out for the celebration of life—crowding the deck of his favorite restaurant, raising a glass (or two, or three) to the portrait of Detective Perry Holt—while the other half was gathered around an inlet on the opposite side of Mirror Lake, watching as the salvage company hooked a crane to the car that had been spotted below the surface a few days earlier.

All I could think was: Of course this is happening now.

I’d always suspected that my father alone had held things together by sheer force of will—not only in our family but in the entire town. And without his careful gaze, his steady oversight, everything had shifted off-kilter.

Even for this, he had left us his guidance. A cremation instead of a burial. A party instead of a funeral. Food covered by the department. Drinks on him.

But the discovery of the car was big news in a small town, and no one had seemed sure what to do, with the outside world watching. It had made headlines all the way in Charlotte, even: the water level of Mirror Lake had dropped to the lowest it had been in decades, and a fisherman had practically run up on top of the sunken vehicle.

There was no evidence of a crash—no bent metal or crushed vegetation at the curve of road above the inlet—so the rumor spreading through the crowd was that the old rusted sedan must’ve been there for years, before the addition of the new guardrail. Apparently, a dive crew had been out to inspect the car the day it was found, but saw nothing inside.

And yet, it had the air of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on: a sign of things emerging, changing.

A warning, that things were beginning here too.

There was something in the air, keeping everyone on edge: a buzzing of insects in the muddy puddles beneath the deck; the setting sun glaring sharply off the surface of the water, so we had to squint just to look at one another; leaves, dry and brittle and churned up in the wind, falling to earth at the wrong time of year.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

There were supposed to be stories on the mic set up beside the bar, for anyone who felt moved to speak. We were supposed to find solace in the liquor, and the laughter—a release, an acceptance. Perry Holt was gone too soon, and it wasn’t fair, but my god, what a life he had lived.

So many people here attributed their lives to him. Whether he’d pulled them out of danger, or pushed them toward the help he knew they needed—today, we were supposed to remember it all. But now news of the car was splitting everyone’s attention and sense of responsibility and propriety.

For every comment of He was such a good man, a good leader, a good role model booming from the sound system, there was a quieter whisper carried in the crowd around me.

It’s coming up.

No license plate. No VIN.

Stolen and dumped, probably.

While the youngest Murphy girl—now a few years out of high school—told the story of how my father found her drifting in the middle of the lake as a kid, her tube cut loose from the dock, I heard the group to my side taking bets on what they’d find inside the trunk.

A body. Stolen goods. A gun.

I turned to stare, hoping to shame them into silence, but they were looking toward the entrance instead, where a group of uniformed officers had gathered in the doorway.

It didn’t help that a lot of the people here were presently or formerly connected to law enforcement, either by profession or family ties. Or that men and women in uniform kept rotating in, alternating between paying their respects and relaying updates to my brothers.

Both of whom had suddenly disappeared again.

I didn’t blame them.

I was pretty sure I’d find them on the long sliver of deck at the side of the building—the only reprieve from the crowd.

I saw Caden first, pacing back and forth, all frenetic energy. He paused periodically to hold his phone out over the water, trying to catch a signal. Any other day, he’d be out there himself. He’d been the very first on scene; the call about the car came in while he was working his normal shift on lake patrol.

Gage, meanwhile, remained perfectly still, arms resting on the wooden railing as he stared out at the water. From a distance, he looked so much like our father it stopped my heart: sharp nose, prominent jaw, dark cropped hair. Heavy slanted eyebrows that gave everything he said an air of gravity.

I slid up beside him, mirroring his posture. How many years had I mimicked him, idolized him, revered him as the hero of my youth? He let me follow him around far longer than most older brothers might, and I relished his praise: Hazel can climb that tree; and Hazel will jump from that bridge; and Hazel can beat you in a race.

All I’d had to do was show up, and prove him right. Now I tried to mirror not only his position but his emotions. Find the balance. Rise to the moment. Like our father, Gage was always the responsible one—and now he found himself in a new role not only in the department but in our family. Maybe that was the curse of being the oldest.

“Are we hiding out?” I asked, as Caden’s footsteps retreated down the deck.

Gage tilted his head to the side, squinting. “We’re hiding out.”

Then I could feel Caden’s footsteps getting closer again—a metronome, keeping time.

He stopped pacing behind us. “Mel’s trying to send pictures. They’re not coming through.” I could see the pent-up energy in his stance, though his expression remained calm, controlled. The things he could hide under his cherub-shaped face, even at twenty-seven, with the dimpled cheek, and his brown hair swooped to the side, like he was still on the cusp of adulthood.

“What’s going on out there?” I asked.

If anyone would be able to distinguish the facts from the rumors, it was my brothers—both of them had proudly followed our father onto the force. Though Gage would probably be the only one to tell me. Caden and I got along best when I remembered to bite my tongue, and he remembered to ignore me. Today, we were both mostly doing our part.

Gage was tall and lean-muscled, where Caden was more broad-shouldered and stocky. The only discernible features they shared were the color of their deep blue eyes and the low tenor of their voices. The Holt voice, my dad had called it, though his had turned more gravelly as he aged.

“Probably some insurance scam,” Gage said, dark eyebrows knitted together. “The guardrail was installed fifteen years ago. The car must’ve been there for a while.”

I knew that stretch of road, right before the narrow, single-lane bridge. “It’s easy to lose control there,” I said. I remembered the warning myself, from when I was learning to drive. My father’s echo: Careful. Slow it down, Hazel.

It had always been a dangerous bend, especially in the night.

The township of Mirror Lake didn’t believe in streetlights or painted center lines or regular pothole maintenance, it seemed. It did believe in respecting the natural geography that had existed before, which was why the roads forked sharply, banked unevenly, rose steeply. The side roads were generally only wide enough for one vehicle at a time. Growing up here, we had learned to be both cautious and aggressive, to maneuver through tight spaces, to step on the gas before someone else did first.

So driving was a dangerous activity, especially for someone from out of town.

I imagined someone speeding around the bend, unfamiliar with the dark mountain curves, the dark mountain roads, tires losing traction—how quickly something could sink below the surface, unnoticed.

“There was no one inside the car, Hazel,” Gage answered. “They checked.”

“Could’ve escaped,” I said. I closed my eyes and saw it: someone clawing their way out of the vehicle as it sank. Their head finally emerging above water—that first, primal gasp.

“Yeah, well, no one called it in, if so. And the plates were removed. Seems more likely it was dumped there on purpose. It’s a convenient spot.” Gage was logical, pragmatic, levelheaded. All things that made him a good detective now. It was always so easy to believe him.

It made sense: here was a place no one would go looking.

Caden glanced up briefly from his phone. “I can’t believe it’s been there that long. I used to jump from that spot in high school.”

Gage rubbed the side of his chin. “Me too,” he said.

I shuddered. We had all jumped off the rocks at the edge of that curve, when the summer sun got too hot, and we were desperate for something to happen, despite the warnings from the adults. I could still feel the cold shock of that pocket of water, always in the shade no matter the time of day, the feetfirst plunge, and how the bottom seemed so endlessly far away.

How close had we come? How many of us had brushed up against a strip of metal and thought boulder or branch. How many of us had imagined something else instead?

“Jesus,” Caden said, holding his cell closer to his face. He stopped breathing for a moment, his only tell. And then his eyes narrowed. “Someone really needs to help with the crowd control over there.”

I tried to peer over his shoulder at the screen, but he was already on his way. He quickly rounded the corner back toward the guests.

Apparently by someone, he meant himself. I couldn’t believe he was leaving like this.

“Seriously?” I began. “Dad would—”

“Dad would be out there himself,” Gage cut in, squinting at the water, the surrounding mountains reflecting off the hazy surface. “And you know it.”

I did. Over the years, I’d watched our father leave the dinner table for a break-in; a birthday party for an overdose; a soccer game for a high-speed chase. He made no excuses or apologies. We all understood that his responsibilities stretched beyond the boundaries of our family.

“You should head home too, Hazel,” Gage said, turning back to face me. “This is only going to get worse. Everyone knows you’ve got a long trip back.”

Two hours, really. But Charlotte might as well have been a diffe-rent world from Mirror Lake. I was a different person out there, without the anchor of history.

“You sure?” I asked. “I feel like I should stay to help clean up….”

But Gage shook his head, releasing me. “Drive safe,” he said, like my father would do. “And, Hazel?” He looked at me with wide-open eyes, a wide-open expression. “Don’t be a stranger, okay? He wouldn’t want that.”

I forced a small smile, even as a wave of panic gripped me from nowhere. I felt, then, the finality of this moment; I wasn’t ready.

“You should be so lucky,” I said before turning away, eyes burning.

Even as I joked, I wondered what would next bring me back. Thanksgiving? My niece’s birthday in the summer, maybe, if Caden invited me? I felt untethered, ungrounded. All the emotions I’d fought to contain today suddenly fighting for the surface.

I kept my head down, weaving through the crowd, a study in evasion. Eyes forward, stride confident, hoping no one stopped me. It didn’t help matters that I was the only one in black amid a sea of khakis and floral. Or that I looked like I was dressed for a business meeting—tailored A-line dress, blazer, stacked heels—while the rest of the guests had arrived in what I could only call Lake Casual.

I grabbed the bag I’d stowed behind the counter and slipped into the restroom. I wanted to change before the drive home—I had plans to swing by our latest renovation project on the way, which was still an active construction site. I needed to focus on something else, to let my work consume me again.

The bathroom was down a dimly lit, wood-paneled hall, and my vision was still adjusting to the change as I pushed through the door and nearly collided with the person on the way out.

“Oh.” A hand on my shoulder, to brace herself. A whiff of coconut. A curtain of hair.

Even in the dark, I would know: Jamie.

She slowly removed her hand from the front of my shoulder, then ran it through the ends of her long, honey-colored hair, an old nervous habit. “Hazel,” she said, locking eyes with mine. Her voice was like something sharp and piercing, straight to the heart. Maybe it was because my guard was already down, or my nerves too exposed, or because I was already hovering so close to the edge. Her attention shifted to the bag in my hands. “Are you leaving?”

“Yeah. Just changing first.” I gestured to my outfit. “No one told me the dress code.” Jamie wore a spring floral dress and beige sandals.

A twitch of her lip—an almost smile. A portal to another time, before her gaze slid away again. She stepped to the side, closer to the exit.

And then, because I didn’t know where to go from here: “Is Skyler around?” My six-year-old niece was always a welcome distraction.

“She’s outside with some of the department kids.” She cleared her throat. “Are you coming back this weekend?”

“For what?” I asked.

She frowned, peering at the door. “Caden said they’re cleaning out the house. I thought you knew.”

This was what happened when you were the only one who left home. I had to hear about things secondhand, default to my brothers’ preferences, concede to their decisions.

I shook my head, grief giving way to anger—a familiar and welcome slide. “When?” I asked, louder than necessary.

“Sunday.”

I did my best not to look surprised. Maybe Gage forgot to tell me in the chaos of the day.

Sometimes Jamie mentioned things in a way that sounded offhand but seemed almost intentional instead. As if she was still trying to bridge the gap between me and Caden.

Or maybe I was being too generous, blinded by nostalgia and the years of friendship that had once sustained us.

Back when we were in high school, Jamie used to say I had an A-plus asshole radar—warning her of the boys who would let us down; the teacher who would not give second chances; the classmates who would take particular pleasure in our missteps. But I felt my instincts went to something deeper than that, like I could see what was underneath—less action, more intention.

Unfortunately, it never rubbed off on Jamie, considering she married my brother Caden.

“Thanks,” I called as she opened the door. “I’ll be there.”

After changing, I thought about going out to find Gage, tell him I’d be back Sunday—but there was currently a straight shot to the exit, the sun was setting, and this celebration was quickly becoming something else.

I had started to get that subtle, creeping feeling—like the walls were closing in, and I needed to escape. A reminder of why I’d left in the first place.

Stay too long, and you became exactly what Mirror Lake decided you would be.

Out front, the department kids were playing a game of hide-and-seek in the trees. One of their mothers leaned against the wooden railing, keeping tabs on them, like mine had once done. I caught a flash of Skyler’s blond hair rushing past, and saw, instead, a group of us racing through these woods, a generation before.

I kept moving.

How quickly the past could grasp on to you here, and pull.

The dirt parking lot was overflowing, and several vehicles were combing the area, looking for free space. I raised a hand to the nearest car as I walked to my SUV, gestured I was heading out. I had gotten the last viable spot at the edge of the lot, half my car fully in the woods, tucked under the branches of a large oak.

The driver’s side window lowered as the bright blue car slowly pulled up behind mine.

“Hi,” he said. A familiar voice, a familiar face.

I froze, shoulders tensing.

Last I saw Nico Pritchard, he was driving away in a different car, and doing his best not to make eye contact.

I paused, one hand on my car door. “Hi,” I repeated.

“Sorry I’m late, I got held up,” he said. And then, when I didn’t respond: “Been a while, Hazel.”

Two years and two months, but who was counting?

“Yeah, guess it has,” I said, like I hadn’t just done the math. “Lucky timing on the parking spot, though.”

He drummed his long fingers on the steering wheel, as if debating his next words. “Seems like I keep just missing you,” he said.

I nodded. We’d been just missing each other for over two years, at holidays and family visits and birthday parties; I just wasn’t sure which of us was the more active player.

It was a feat, considering he was Gage’s oldest friend, and he still owned the house on the same inlet as my dad, bordering our property.

The pattern of evasion was broken only with the message he’d sent me the night my father had died: Hazel, I’m so sorry.

He’d been away on vacation when it happened. Even then we’d missed each other.

There was a time that Nico was anywhere Gage went, and was nearly as much a part of my childhood. Our fathers had been partners on the force—a different type of family, I supposed.

“Well,” I said, “good to finally run into you.”

It was, and it wasn’t.

For years growing up, I had been singularly focused on Nico Pritchard. Attuned to the careful way he did everything, from baiting a fishing line to saying my name. The way he pronounced each syllable carefully, not letting the second half get swallowed up, like everyone else. The innocent look of his wide brown eyes, like he was always trying to take everything in, quietly and carefully, to file away for later. The shape of his down-turned mouth, so that his sudden smile was both a surprise and a game changer.

My infatuation was obvious in a way that bordered on embarrassing. As we grew older, the fact that it had been reciprocated by him was not nearly as evident.

“Sorry it has to be under these circumstances,” he said. Even his words were carefully chosen. He’d managed to apologize twice in as many minutes.

“Me too,” I said. I opened my car door, before it was too late.

“Hazel, hold on,” he said.

I held on, hand tightening on the top of the door.

To my horror, Nico stepped out of his idling car: long, tailored pants; white button-down, tucked in; a silver watch that I knew had once belonged to his father; a flush along the top of his high cheekbones.

It didn’t matter how much time had passed, or how badly we’d left things the last time—whenever I saw him, I pictured him at fifteen on our swim platform; at seventeen, leaning against my bedroom door; at twenty-one, home from college, eyes slowly scanning the room, before landing on me.

“I wanted to call,” he continued, taking a step closer. “I’ve been meaning to. I just didn’t know—”

“Nico,” I said, cutting him off. “I’m sorry, but I really do need to go.”

I needed to leave before he did something terrible—like resting a hand on my shoulder; placing a thumb under my chin.

I slid into the driver’s seat, did my best at smiling. “If you can’t find Gage, he’s hiding out around the corner of the deck.”

I started the car and didn’t look back. I had learned long ago that this was the only way to truly leave.

Since Mirror Highway was a loop, there were technically two ways out of town. Going to the right would be faster, but turning left would take me by the scene of the salvaged car.

Sorry, Dad. It was human instinct. I wanted to see it too.

There was a slowdown before the curve, a line of cars steadily crawling forward, inch by inch. Most of the traffic seemed to be due to the line of emergency vehicles along the side of the road, and the fact that only one lane could move at a time. I could just make out a man in the distance, directing traffic past the site.

When I finally approached, I realized that it was Caden in the road, guiding us on. He was still in his khaki pants and light-blue polo. There was mud on the side of his pant leg, like he’d been pressed up against the car, checking inside. Curiosity, before crowd control.

I paused for a beat, like all the rest before me, taking in the scene beside the lake.

The guardrail had been removed and now lay curved and crooked against the trees.

The old vehicle rested at a slight angle on the side of the road, tires flattened, rubber disintegrating. I felt myself holding my breath, like I did whenever driving past a graveyard.

The car was coated in a layer of mud, like something alive, sliding off the surface, dripping onto the asphalt. I couldn’t tell the color underneath anymore, but the body was boxy and long, like something a grandparent would drive. The windows were either down or broken, and the inside was piled high with mud and grime. The trunk had been pried open, and it remained that way, like the mouth of an animal.

Goose bumps rose across my arms, the back of my neck. The car seemed like it had become something else under the surface. Something more visceral. A part of the landscape, swallowed up by it, pulsating with the place it had just been.

Caden’s face didn’t change as he waved me past.

But when I glanced in the rearview mirror, he had turned in my direction, watching me drive away.

My phone chimed once I had exited the town, on the weaving road toward the main highway that would bring me back to Charlotte. I thought it was probably Keira or Luke—my business partners and closest friends—checking in, updating me on the day’s progress. Making sure I was doing okay.

I peered down at the phone, and saw a message from my uncle: Did you leave?

I ignored it, but then my phone rang, the name ROY HOLT on the display. Since I’d left Mirror Lake, he’d rarely reached out. But in the years before, he’d sometimes step in for my father when work called him away.

I answered on speaker. “Hello?” I said. A question, more than a greeting.

At first his voice was choppy, as if he was still in a dead zone himself. “Hazel?” he said, like he’d just repeated himself. “Are you still here?”

“No, I’m on the road already. I have a project I have to check in on.”

If he was calling with a lecture, I wasn’t interested. Though he’d often seemed proud that I’d set off on my own—building a business, charting my own course—he’d always had a closer relationship with my brothers. Caden left already too, was what I wanted to say.

“I was hoping to catch you before you left.” A beat of silence, as he searched for what to say next. “I’m the executor of the estate, Hazel,” he said, voice low, as if he was trying to find someplace quiet to have this conversation.

It made sense, since he was the only lawyer in the family. He’d begun his career as a prosecutor—he and my dad used to tell stories of the old days, when the cases would pass directly from one Holt to the next. He’d since settled into family law, so of course my father would entrust this part to him. I braced myself for whatever he was about to say.

“Look,” he began, voice even lower. “There’s something in the will you should know about.”

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott #Fiction #Fantasy #Epic

2026-09-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: The Witch Road # 1
Format: 437 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: June 10, 2025
Publisher: Tor Books
Source: Library
Genre: Epic Fantasy

An epic tale of class, rank, and power from one of the finest writers of epic fantasy.

Status is hereditary, class is bestowed, trust must be earned.

When an arrogant prince (and his equally arrogant entourage) gets stuck in Orledder Halt as part of brutal political intrigue, competent and sunny deputy courier Elen—once a child slave meant to shield noblemen from the poisonous Pall—is assigned to guide him through the hills to reach his destination.

When she warns him not to enter the haunted Spires, the prince doesn’t heed her advice, and the man who emerges from the towers isn’t the same man who entered.

The journey that follows is fraught with danger. Can a group taught to ignore and despise the lower classes survive with a mere deputy courier as their guide?

The Witch Roads is the latest epic novel by fan favorite, Kate Elliott.

The Witch Roads is the first installment in author Kate Elliott's The Witch Road duology. It is a walking novel: a deputy courier, a possessed prince, a rigid empire, and a fungal apocalypse that never quite becomes the whole story. Elen is a deputy courier in the Tranquil Empire, walking a monthly circuit of villages from Orledder Halt and watching the roads for Spore. Centuries earlier, the Pall tore through the land: a mist that carries Spore, which mutates and kills whatever it touches.

The imperial roads—older than the empire, called witch roads by people who know better than to ask too many questions—repel it. Status is hereditary. Class is bestowed. Trust is scarce. Elen is competent, sunny, and not what she appears. She was once a child slave, an “atoner” sent ahead of noble parties to die if the Pall rose. She escaped with her sister Aoving and Aoving’s child, Kem, now a seventeen-year-old approaching the empire’s deadline to declare a legal path or have one assigned.

Then a prince-warden named Gevulin arrives, blocked by a landslide and political sabotage, and Elen is the only person who can take his arrogant retinue over the hills. She warns him away from the haunted Spires. He does not listen. The man who comes out is not the same man who went in. Elen has to keep the party alive, keep the haunt’s possession secret, manage Kem’s sudden new status in the prince’s retinue, and stay ahead of a past that is already catching up. The haunt has a mission of its own.

Elen has a secret of her own. The empire has a history it does not admit. The journey is how all three start talking to each other. Elliott builds a stratified, mildly Sinicized imperial bureaucracy sitting on top of something much older: guardian statues, pre-imperial storms, roads that work because of buried things the official story will not name. Spore is body horror with policy attached. Outbreaks are not just monsters; they are events that force people to decide who gets saved.

Courier work becomes a way to see how an empire actually functions at the edge: tokens, etiquette, career declarations at seventeen, the difference between a Halt and the wild. Elen is a working adult heroine, not a chosen teenager, and the book is better for it. Her competence is not superpower competence; it is the competence of someone who has walked the same roads for years and knows which warnings nobles will ignore.

The relationship between Elen and the haunt-in-the-prince is the book’s slow burn, and it is more interesting than a conventional court romance because it is built on shared knowledge and unequal power. A large middle stretch is travel: walking, camping, managing servants, managing etiquette, managing the fact that the prince is no longer the prince. If you hate cliffhangers, wait and read both. If you like Elliott’s fat-fantasy mode—Crown of Stars, Crossroads, the later Sun Chronicles—you already know the contract.

Elliott’s themes are the ones she has been playing for decades: class, empire, found family, the cost of surviving systems that were never built for you. Here they are unusually concentrated. The book is not cozy, despite the walking. Childhood slavery, sexual exploitation in Elen’s past, spore mutation, and the casual contempt of aristocrats for the people who keep them alive are all on the page. The tone mixes bawdy humor with genuine dread, which is harder than it looks.

1ON ORDINARY LANES AND BEHIND UNPROTECTED WALLS

ONE HUNDRED AND thirty years after the Pall tore deadly rifts through the Tranquil Empire, it is still prudent to avoid walking abroad at night. Even people holding official tokens that permit them to travel on the safety of the imperial roads will halt before the sun sets. These tokens allow them to lodge at an imperial hostel protected by a split in the road. But many people—most people—have no choice but to walk about their lives on ordinary lanes and sleep behind unprotected walls.

The Shield of Peace and Prosperity so forcefully promised by the empire’s founders has, it turns out, only ever sheltered some, not all. This is exactly what the holy venerables of the Heart Temple predicted at the dawn of the empire, to no avail.

Three hundred years ago, these temple theurgists and custodians wrote uncompromising tracts condemning imperial ambition. They spoke out in village plazas and city markets. They warned against the consolidation of power into the hands of a single military clan.

In answer, the newly appointed imperial censors burned their pamphlets as treasonous. The imperial sentinels accused the venerables of sorcery and burned them as witches. The imperial engineers sealed their bones into the great roads that link together the growing empire and facilitate the swift movement of its armies.

After the rising of the Spore-laden Pall in the reign of the ill-fated Azalea Emperor, it was soon discovered that the imperial roads repelled the Pall and its deadly Spore. The imperial archivists sent out official dispatches proclaiming that it was the harmonious and honorable magic wielded by the reconstituted imperial theurgists, in cooperation with the imperial wardens, that protected the roads against the Pall’s malign influence.

Yet a tradition persists among the common people that the interred bones of the old venerables were infused with a holy power and it is the relics of those condemned as “witches” that have kept the roads safe. Even after all this time, the murdered venerables are said to still watch over the humble and the weak, the menial and the forgotten. Or so it is whispered, where the authorities cannot hear.

A passage censored from The Official’s Handbook of the Empire as compiled by Luviara, theurgist, working at the behest of the Inner Chamber of the Heart Temple

2THE DEPUTY COURIER

It was early autumn, warm enough in the late afternoon that Elen and her nephew had taken off their long jackets, rolled them up, and tied them atop their packs. They tramped through the rugged Moonrise Hills on a path she knew well because every month for the last ten years she had walked the same route. She was a circuit courier for the local intendant, delivering messages, decrees, news, personal letters, contracts, warrants, and a copy of the imperial gazette to highland villages and hamlets that could only be reached on foot or by griffin scout. Griffins were out of reach for a humble deputy courier, but Elen had two good feet and was grateful for them.

“What are you smiling about?” grumbled Kem with the graceless bad temper of a cranky adolescent. “I have a blister. You said these boots would be broken in by the end of the circuit. And I’m hungry. How soon will we get home?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” He shaded his eyes and peered toward the setting sun as it spread a golden glow along the ridgeline that marked the edge of the hills. A knob of rock rising from the ridge was the best-known landmark, easy to spot. “There’s the lookout! We can’t be more than three hours from home.”

She didn’t need to check her official’s pocket watch to judge the sky. Birds were gathering, flocking toward roosting spots. “It’ll be dark in an hour.”

“Twilight lasts a while beyond that. It wouldn’t be so far to home, just another hour or two past the lookout. The trail is wide and chalky, so it’s easy to see. It’s almost full moon, so there’ll be enough light.”

“No.”

“But—”

“No.”

His voice got tighter and grouchier. “For one thing, Palls don’t rise during the week of the full moon.”

“A Pall is not what I’m worried about.”

“Joef told me there’s been no sighting of Spore in ten years, not anywhere near Orledder Halt or in this region of the hills.”

“All the more reason to assume it could happen at any time.”

“But—”

“How many nos do you need? I haven’t forgotten when you were two years old. I can say no all day and night long and not break a sweat.” She grinned.

“Ugh. Why are you always so cheerful?”

“It’s a passage spell.”

“A passage spell? I’ve never heard of that.” His tone blended skepticism and curiosity.

“The grumpier you are, the more cheerful I become. It passes your grumpy energy across to me and I transform it into bright flowers and sunny days.” She laughed at his eye-rolling.

“You’re awful,” he said as he fought not to smile. But then his shoulders sagged.

“What is it?” she asked, gently now.

“I know you got permission to bring me on the full circuit to give me a taste of courier duty. I know I have to make a decision. I know I have to Declare for something. But … half the month you walk your assigned circuit, and half the month you work in Map Hall at the Residence. Doesn’t it get to be a grind, every month leaving at the new moon and returning at the full moon, walking at the same pace on the same path, seeing the same people over and over every year?”

“Having shelter, food, and a worthy purpose is never a grind. It might seem tedious to you, but I’d rather have had fewer shocks in my early life and more uneventful days like we’ve been fortunate to have, living in the Halt.”

His right hand strayed to touch the faded green ribbon that tied back his long, glossy hair. The ribbon had been his mother’s. She, too, had had unusually beautiful hair of a dark reddish-gold quite unlike the black hair most common in the empire. Although, she’d been more vain of it than Kem ever was.

The sting of losing Aoving would never fade and never heal. Never ever, thought Elen fiercely. But they had escaped, and had many good years before the accident. That they’d had so many good years considering where they’d started was a miracle worth cherishing every single day she woke up missing her sister. And she had the keeping of this wonderful if sometimes grumpy child, a responsibility that mattered more than anything in the world.

“I tell you what, Captain No. You have to make up your own mind whether you want to Declare as a courier. Or whatever profession you are eligible for. But today, I can give you a little taste of the unexpected and the slightly risky. We’ll camp at Three Spires.”

He cast her a shocked look, then a second and a third, like his head was stuck on a chain of disbelief he kept pulling. She wanted to laugh but knew when to stop. The ribbon touch had been a sure sign he was getting heart-tired, so she’d follow his lead. But he was still a youth, eager to hear about the most frightfully appalling things.

“Joef says Three Spires is haunted by the shade of a wicked sorcerer-king who wielded a hideous power that leached the life right out of anything the sorcerer touched,” he said, sounding gleeful.

She chuckled. “Joef has a most amazing storehouse of tales and rumors.”

“His aunt is the intendant’s archivist.”

“And the local gossip, with a finger in every bowl of porridge. Nourishing, but to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s safe to shelter in the Spires overnight as long as we follow the rules. What are the rules?”

He reeled it off by rote, barely listening to himself. “‘Don’t get distracted or sloppy. No shortcuts. Stick to the routine. Stay calm.’ Isn’t that all just the same thing?”

“Is it?”

He sighed dramatically. He was brimful of sighs these days, the closer he got to the decision he’d have to make. “Declaration Week starts tomorrow! How do I decide? I can’t be a midwife like Mama, even though I know she wanted that for me. And I’m glad you had me come along on a full circuit. But I don’t want to be a courier. I’m sorry.”

“My blessed child, my hope for you is that you can be safe, not that you do what you think I want you to do. You like to work with your hands. You could apprentice to an artisan, like … I don’t know … old Seladwin would be a good person to learn from and work with. You’d never lack for customers. She needs someone to take over her shop since she has no heirs.”

“I’m not going to apprentice to the cobbler! I don’t want to make shoes all my life.”

“Well-made boots are a gift of human ingenuity and skill. Never forget it.”

He glanced at his boots, the first footgear he had ever possessed that hadn’t been handed down to him. A pair of new boots was a traditional gift for a youth as they Declared for a profession and thus the path and status they would follow throughout their life. “You told me so, didn’t you? That I should wear my old boots and break these in afterward. I really do have a blister.”

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Bring Her Home by David Bell #Thriller #Suspense

2026-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Standalone
Format: 434 pages, Paperback
Release Date: July 11, 2017
Publisher: Berkley
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

Just a year and a half after the tragic death of his wife, Bill Price’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Summer, and her best friend, Haley, disappear. Days later, the girls are found in a city park. Haley is dead at the scene, while Summer is left beaten beyond recognition and clinging to life.

As Bill holds vigil over Summer’s bandaged body, the only sound the unconscious girl can make is one cryptic and chilling word: No. And the more time Bill spends with Summer, the more he wonders what happened to her. Or if the injured girl in the hospital bed is really his daughter at all.

When troubling new questions about Summer’s life surface, Bill is not prepared for the aftershocks. He’ll soon discover that both the living and the dead have secrets. And that searching for the truth will tear open old wounds that pierce straight to the heart of his family...

David Bell’s Bring Her Home is a suburban domestic thriller set in Kentucky built on a father’s worst-case sequence: first a wife’s accidental death, then a teenage daughter who vanishes with her best friend, then two girls found beaten in a city park, one dead and one unrecognizable. It is not a police procedural so much as a grief novel wearing a mystery’s clothes. That is both its strength and its limitation. Bill Price is still raw from losing his wife eighteen months earlier when 15-year-old Summer and her friend Haley Rodgers disappear.

Days later, they are found in a park. Haley is dead. The surviving girl is so badly injured that identification is provisional, and the only word she can form is a chilling “No.” Bill keeps vigil, then starts asking questions that no parent wants answered: What was Summer doing that night? Who were the boys around her? How much of her life did he never see? The jacket’s central hook—whether the girl in the hospital bed is even his daughter—is not a late twist so much as the engine of the book.

Secrets keep arriving, and each one forces Bill into more desperate, sometimes reckless, behavior. Bell, a USA Today bestselling suspense writer and English professor, is good at the texture of ordinary panic. The hospital rooms, the well-meaning neighbors, the high-school gossip, the parents who immediately look for someone to blame: all of it feels lived-in. Bell also has a better ear for teenage girls than many writers in this lane.

Summer is not only a victim-shaped hole in the plot; the book is interested in how smart, secretive, and self-protective a 15-year-old can be, and in how adults rewrite that secrecy as either innocence or fault. The mystery itself is constructed as a pileup. Suspicion lands early on a cluster of boys and a squalid high-school “contest.” A third victim appears, suggesting a pattern. Family history—Bill’s marriage, his sister-in-law Paige, the way the household functioned after the wife’s death—keeps leaking into the present investigation.

The book is most effective when it stays with parental self-reproach—the questions not asked, the conversations postponed, the suburban assumption that you know the child in the next room. It is less effective when it asks those themes to support one more identity switch, one more confession, one more late reveal. Content-wise, this is a dark, violent story about assaulted teenage girls, a coma, a death, sexual coercion among minors, and a father coming unglued.

It is adult suspense, not YA, even though its victims are high-schoolers. Readers sensitive to violence against girls, parental grief, and the “who is this child really?” identity plot should know that those elements are the point, not background. If you like Lisa Jewell or early Harlan Coben in their domestic-nightmare mode, this will scratch the itch. If you want a lean, surprising crime novel, the middle stretch may try your patience.

Bring Her Home

Part I

Chapter One

Bill Price stepped into the whirling chaos of the emergency room.

To the left, he saw a woman holding a red-faced, crying baby. The child’s eyes were pools of tears, its mouth contorted into a wailing “O.” The mother made calming shushing noises, but the baby didn’t seem to hear them. Ahead of Bill, a teenage girl with a nose ring and a neck tattoo tried to calm a man holding a bloody rag against his shaven head. The man appeared agitated, waving his free hand around as though orating to a crowd.

Bill looked to his right. He saw a small crowd gathered but no one he recognized.

He felt overwhelmed. Alone.

A nurse sat behind the admitting desk. She held a metal clipboard and wore half-moon glasses perched on the end of her nose. The glasses aged her, made her look ten years older than she probably was.

Bill approached her, a knot of tension growing in his chest.

“Excuse me,” Bill said.

“Just a minute.” The woman turned and stood up, walking away from Bill and going through a door behind her.

“Hello?” Bill said, his voice low.

He tapped his finger on the Formica desk.

She’s here. Somewhere. She’s here.

Should I just go find her?

“Hey,” he said, his voice louder.

But the nurse didn’t return. And no one else came out of the room to help him.

It felt like one of those dreams, the kind he’d been having too often lately. In the dreams, he’d open his mouth to scream but could make no sound. And the very act of trying to force words out made his throat feel as if he’d swallowed broken glass.

Bill looked around, hoping to see a familiar face. He saw only misery. The people in the room—the bleeders and the criers and the scared—were all his companions in misery.

She is here. She too is one of them. . . .

The admitting nurse appeared again. She still carried the clipboard. She went out of her way not to make eye contact with Bill. She focused on the desktop, coming over and reaching for a piece of paper.

“Excuse me,” Bill said. “I’m here because—”

“One second, hon,” she said.

The nurse lifted the paper, studying it through her glasses. Her hair was streaked with gray, her pink smock decorated with a small mustard stain.

“My daughter—,” Bill said.

The woman raised her index finger in the air, requesting silence. She turned again, disappearing back behind the door through which she’d just emerged.

“Wait,” Bill said.

But she was gone.

Bill craned his neck, rising up on tiptoes to try to see into the room. He couldn’t.

“Hello?”

No response.

“Hey!” he said, his voice rising.

The nurse stuck her head out the door, her face creased with agitation. “Sir, we’re backed up now. I’ll be right there.”

“No, no.”

“Excuse me?”

“No!”

Echoing off the walls and the tiled floor, the single word cut through the room, bringing everyone to a halt. Bill sensed their anticipation, their fear, and, yes, their glee. They might get to witness a scene.

Some guy went apeshit in the ER. . . .

The nurse stood up. She looked angry as she walked toward him.

“My daughter is here,” Bill said. “Summer Price. Summer Price is my daughter.”

And then the nurse’s features softened. She understood.

She recognized the name. Everyone in the room probably did.

“Oh,” she said, removing her glasses. “I know who to call.”

A minute passed, maybe less, and then someone came through another door and into the emergency room, a familiar face above a coat and tie.

“Mr. Price?”

Bill felt the smallest measure of relief. “Detective Hawkins,” he said. “Where is she? Where’s Summer? Someone called. They said you were here—”

Hawkins wiggled his fingers, his hand in the air. “This way, okay? This way.”

Bill followed the detective as Hawkins stepped over to a plain brown door and turned the knob. It looked like a janitor’s closet, and Bill wondered why he was being led where mops and buckets were stored.

But then he saw it was a consultation room, one of those places where doctors took families to give them bad news. Bill had been in one of them before, almost a year and a half earlier. Nothing good ever happened in one of those rooms.

He stopped in his tracks even as Hawkins reached for him, trying to guide Bill along.

“Where is she?” Bill asked. “Just tell me something.”

“Inside, Bill. Please? We can talk in there.”

“Is she alive?” Bill felt anger laced with fear building in his chest, the heat and pressure at his core like lava waiting to burst forth. He gritted his teeth. “Just tell me the truth. On the phone they said she’s alive. Is Summer alive?”

Hawkins stared directly into Bill’s eyes. “She’s alive, Bill. Summer is alive.”

Bill closed his eyes, as though bracing for a blow. He felt a slight cooling in his body, a tiny sliver of relief. Okay, he thought. Alive. She’s alive.

“When can I see her?” he asked, opening his eyes.

“She’s alive, Bill,” Hawkins said. “But—we should talk inside.”

Chapter Two

Bill’s hands shook as he sat in the consultation room.

The space was small, confining. The papered walls were brown, earth tones, something meant to be soothing. The furniture felt stiff and unforgiving. Some well-meaning soul had placed a vase full of artificial flowers on the coffee table, an attempt to cheer the uncheerable. Bill stared at them, wishing his eyes were lasers that could destroy.

Hawkins sat down across from him. He looked to be in his early fifties, about ten years older than Bill. His salt-and-pepper hair was messy, as if he’d just come inside out of a stiff wind. He wore a sport coat and no tie, his graying chest hair reaching up from the open-neck shirt like spiders’ legs.

Bill tried to keep his voice steady, to not shout at or berate the public servant before him. “Tell me what’s going on, Detective. Tell me when I can see Summer. I want to see her.”

The room felt too familiar. Hell, it might have been the same one he sat in when Julia died. He feared he would be getting horrible news from Detective Hawkins.

“Summer is alive, but she’s critically injured. She’s been stabilized, and they’re moving her to Intensive Care. You can see her in a moment once they have her settled in up there.”

“What happened to her? How was she injured? Wait a minute—where the hell was she? She’s been gone for almost two days. Where? Tell me something.”

“They were found in Dunlap Park.” Hawkins spoke with a soothing Kentucky accent, his words rolling out like a gentle stream. Bill tried to reconcile the awful message with the sweet sound of the messenger. “Early this morning, we received an anonymous call at the station. Not a nine-one-one call—just the general line. The caller told the officer who answered that two girls could be found in Dunlap Park.”

“Dunlap Park?” Bill looked down and saw the flowers again. He lifted his head.

“Did Summer hang out there?” Hawkins asked.

“No,” Bill said before the question was even finished. “I told her to stay away from that park. You know what it’s like there.”

“I do.”

When Bill and Julia moved to town eight years earlier, brought there by Bill’s job, the park was a notorious gay cruising ground. A math teacher from Jakesville High, a meek man with a wife and two children, was arrested in a park restroom after soliciting a male undercover cop. Just a few years earlier, a Jakesville town councilman was caught there having sex with a county auditor, a woman who was not his wife.

“All I hear about these days are the drugs out there. Heroin even,” Bill said. “Right?”

“There have been some problems with that, yes. Also a homeless issue. People living in tents and other makeshift shelters. I’m not saying they are responsible for all of the crime, but it doesn’t help.”

“Some problems? No, I told Summer to never go there. Never.” Bill shifted forward in his uncomfortable chair, moving his body closer to the edge so that he almost slid onto the floor. He felt control slipping away as the angry part of him asserted itself, almost like another man who lived inside of him and jumped out in situations like the one in the hospital. “Who made this call? Do you know?”

“We don’t. It was a man, speaking with a deeper voice, possibly disguised. The call was too short to trace, and we don’t record the calls that come in on that line. But the tip proved to be accurate, so we’re going to do what we can to find out who called.”

“You haven’t told me what happened to her. What are her injuries? Hold it—are we talking about . . . Did somebody . . .”

“She’s being checked for everything, including sexual assault. There’s no obvious sign of sexual trauma, but some of her clothes were torn when she was found. We’re lucky it’s above freezing today, or exposure could have been an issue. She might have been out there for a number of hours.”

Bill folded his hands and lowered his head. He wanted to close his eyes and make the whole situation go away. And he understood he was one of a long line of people to sit in a room like this and wish more than anything they could be somewhere else.

“The problem right now is that Summer has been severely beaten. She has extensive wounds to her head and torso. And a lot of swelling. They need to do X-rays and CAT scans and all of that to see how bad it is inside. But her injuries are quite severe, and you need to brace yourself for the likelihood that she’ll need surgery and possibly extensive rehabilitation. Whoever did this wanted to hurt her, and they did. Very badly.”

“I just want to see her. I don’t want her lying somewhere alone while she goes through this. Can you do that for me, please?”

Hawkins said, “Of course. I just wanted you to understand where we stood before you saw her.”

“She’s my daughter,” Bill said. “I can handle anything that has to do with her.”

He hoped he could. He had to do it alone.

The two men stood up. Hawkins was larger than Bill, barrel-chested, but with a gentle manner that seemed in contrast with the probing intensity of his blue-gray eyes. Bill wondered if they assigned Hawkins to Summer’s case for a reason, if they believed that the detective’s soothing tones and intimidating size would somehow placate, or short of that, corral Bill and keep him calm.

Before Hawkins opened the door, Bill grabbed the detective’s arm. It felt like taking hold of a tree trunk.

“Wait a minute,” Bill said. “Them. You said they were found. You mean Summer and Haley. I didn’t think to ask, but how is Haley doing?”

Hawkins hesitated for the briefest of seconds. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Bill, but Haley was deceased at the scene. She’d been beaten more severely than Summer. Her injuries were too extensive for anyone to survive.”

The room tilted. Bill reached out and braced himself against the wall. Hawkins placed his rocklike hand on Bill’s shoulder, steadying him.

“Are you going to pass out?” he asked. “Do you want some water?”

Bill stood still for a moment. Images of the ever inseparable Haley and Summer flashed across his mind. The two skinny, blond girls running through a sprinkler on a summer day when they were ten. The two girls giggling over a silly movie when they were twelve. The two girls leaving his house together on Saturday afternoon . . .

“Her mother? She lives with her mother,” Bill asked.

“She’s been informed.” Hawkins’s voice conveyed the pain of that conversation, the necessary but awful duty he probably performed himself. “Would you like to sit down?”

He felt sick. Physically sick. His body seemed to have turned to ice.

But he shook his head. He needed to go on.

His daughter needed him. Desperately.

But before he left the room, he needed to do one thing. He took two steps to the coffee table, took hold of the offending vase, and hurled it against the wall—screaming as he did so—where it shattered into hundreds of fragments.

Bill’s breathing was fast, his heart thumping.

He really didn’t feel any better. He turned to Hawkins, who wore an impassive look on his face.

“I’m okay,” Bill said. “I want to see Summer. Now.”

Chapter Three

A doctor waited outside the door to Summer’s room.

She looked young, not much older than Summer to Bill’s eyes. She wore blue scrubs and a white lab coat. At some point in the day she’d put a pencil in her hair to hold it up in a messy bun.

“I’m Dr. Renee Davis,” she said, cutting to the chase. “Summer’s injuries are severe. She has two broken ribs, one of which punctured her lung, causing it to collapse. She also has a hairline fracture of the skull as well as a fracture of her eye socket. And a number of cuts and abrasions, some of which required stitches. She doesn’t need surgery right now, but we can’t rule that out. It’s too early to tell whether she’ll have any long-term damage from these injuries.”

An annoying beeping sound came from Dr. Davis’s pocket. She reached in and pressed a button, making it stop. But she didn’t say anything else. She looked at Bill as though she expected him to say something. He felt like an actor on a stage who didn’t know his lines.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Long-term damage. What does that mean?”

He looked from the doctor to the detective and back again, unsure who would provide the answer.

“It means we don’t know if her vision will be affected,” Davis said. “Or if there is any brain damage. We’re encouraged because there doesn’t appear to be any bleeding or swelling in the brain. But we’ll have to watch her closely for the next forty-eight hours.”

Brain damage. Vision loss.

The nightmare might never end. It might continue on and on for the rest of Summer’s life. The very essence of who she was could be shattered. Her laugh. Her intelligence. Her sarcastic humor.

But she was alive. Bill reminded himself of that.

Life. That mattered.

“I just want to see her,” he said. “Even if she’s not awake, I don’t want her to be alone.”

“Her injuries are quite severe,” Davis said. “I’m not going to sugarcoat this, Mr. Price, but we have to watch her very carefully. She’s gravely injured.”

“I heard that already.”

“Because of the swelling in her face, she looks . . .”

“Bad?” Bill said. “Is seeing that worse than not knowing where she was all weekend?”

“She’s not going to look like the girl who left your house two days ago,” Davis said.

Bill stepped past the doctor.

“Bill?” It was Detective Hawkins’s voice.

Bill stopped and looked at the two professionals.

Hawkins turned to Davis as though they both knew something, and then Hawkins said, “Her hands are bandaged. She had a number of injuries to them.”

“Are her hands permanently damaged?” Bill asked.

“It means she resisted, Bill,” Hawkins said, his voice tinged with a paternal pride he seemed to want Bill to experience as well. “They’re injuries consistent with someone who put up a very good fight.”

Bill knew the detective was trying to make him feel better, but the information came as no surprise. Bill already knew Summer would resist. He knew she’d fight. He’d fought with Summer enough since Julia died.

But even as a child, she’d fought. Resisting bedtimes. Resisting foods.

Stubbornly independent. Bill quickly learned one of parenting’s hardest lessons—you’re going to see yourself, warts and all, in your kid.

“I hope she kicked his nuts up into his throat,” Bill said.

The two of them just nodded, indicating agreement with the statement.

Bill said, “Doctor, the detective mentioned something about . . . checking for sexual assault. I was just . . . How long does that take to know?”

“Given her condition, we didn’t conduct a full examination. Much of it is invasive. . . . But we’ll hand everything over to the police.”

“She didn’t ever say anything, did she?” Bill asked. “Anything at all?”

Davis looked disappointed she couldn’t deliver better news to Bill. “No, she didn’t. But please let me know if you have any questions. We’ll all be keeping a close eye on her.”

“Thanks,” Bill said.

“When you come out, Bill, I’ll have some more questions for you,” Hawkins said. “I know you need to be in there now, but we have some more work to do out here.”

Bill took a deep breath, one that seemed to come from the center of his being, and pushed open the door to Summer’s room.

Chapter Four

The lights above were so bright.

Bill stood with his back to the door as it eased shut, staring at the indistinct lump beneath the covers on the bed.

A monitor beeped a steady rhythm. His daughter’s heartbeat. When Summer was a baby, Bill used to slip into the nursery and stand over the crib, just making sure her tiny heart continued to beat. She was so small then, so helpless, the life inside her seemed nearly impossible to sustain. A flickering candle in a strong wind.

Bill stepped over to the bed.

Her hands were wrapped in gauze. The blankets neatly tucked under her armpits.

Her face, though, the left side . . . Swollen like a balloon and badly bruised. Her eyes swollen as well. A gauze wrap of some kind covered the top of her head, obscuring most of Summer’s blond hair.

Bill knew he was biased—but she was a naturally beautiful girl. When she smiled, which wasn’t as often since Julia died, she lit up so much, she could probably be used as a power source. Just like her mother. Whenever Bill looked at Summer’s face, he saw Julia. Bill occasionally compared snapshots of Julia and Summer at the same age, and they were like twins. The bright blue of their eyes, the freckles that appeared when the weather turned warm.

Bill felt somewhat relieved to see there were no tubes down her throat or up her nose. She breathed on her own. An IV line dripped a clear fluid into the crook of her elbow.

Bill wanted to climb into the bed with her, to pull her close and keep her warm and safe. But he feared that placing any weight on or near her body would disturb her or cause her pain. He dragged a stool over to the side of the bed and sat down, and then placed his hand gently, ever so gently, on Summer’s left forearm, the only area of her body not covered by injuries or blankets or bandages.

He stroked the soft, downy hair, felt the smoothness of her skin. Like a baby still. She looked as vulnerable and weak as that tiny infant in her crib fifteen years ago. Her arm looked even smaller than he remembered, bony like a child’s.

“Oh, honey, what have they done to you?” he whispered. “Who did this to you?”

No response came. Summer’s lips looked parched and cracked. Painfully so. Bill checked for a pitcher of water, for a rag he could dab against her lips, but there was none. He wanted to do something. To act.

But there was nothing for him to do.

“Are you okay, Summer? I’m here. It’s Dad, and I’m going to be right here the whole time you get better.”

Bill irrationally hoped for something. A grunt. A moan. A movement. But nothing came.

He continued to stroke her arm. “I’m torn, honey. Part of me wishes your mom were here to help us through this. And part of me is glad she isn’t here to see you in this condition.”

Bill’s lower lip quivered, and he swallowed, biting back on the tears. He took several deep breaths and tried to make sense of how his life went from being so normal a few days earlier to utterly out of control and disastrous in the hospital. He looked back over the chain of events. Summer said she was going out with Haley on Saturday afternoon. Bill said yes because why wouldn’t he? The girls did everything together. Except for the accident of being born into different families, they might very well have been siblings. And then by late Saturday evening, the girls were nowhere to be found. No responses to calls or texts. No sign of either one of them.

And nothing until that morning when the police called, waking Bill out of a restless, paper-thin sleep to say Summer had been found and to get to the hospital as soon as possible.

Bill hated the helplessness he felt, the sense of being paralyzed and impotent in the face of his daughter’s injuries. In the face of what had been done to her. By someone.

Someone out there had committed this atrocity.

The door clicked open behind him. Bill didn’t turn or acknowledge whoever it was. He kept his eyes trained on Summer, the gentle rising and falling of her chest as she breathed. The horrible swelling in her face. He replayed the doctor’s words about long-term damage and wondered how anyone could recover from wounds like these. Would it be possible for her young body to heal?

And then what about the psychological scars? What if the tests they were doing for rape came back positive?

What if . . . ?

He refused to let every “what if” into his mind. One would lead to another, and then a tidal wave would roar through his brain.

“Bill?” The detective eased over and gently placed his hand on Bill’s shoulder. “I think you and I need to talk a little more.”

“Can’t we do it here?” Bill asked. “I don’t want to leave her.”

“I think it’s best if we talk in private,” Hawkins said, his homey whisper allowing no room for discussion. He knew what was best, and he intended to see it done. “A nurse is on her way in to check on Summer. We should get out of the way.”

“I want to stay close.”

“You can, bud. But let’s go find a private spot. The sooner you answer the questions I have, the better our chances of finding out who did this to Summer.”

Bill continued to stare at Summer. His only child. His baby. That vibrant, bright life.

“It won’t take long?” he asked.

“Not too long,” Hawkins said.

Bill bent down and kissed her arm. “I love you, Summer. I’ll be right back. It’s Dad.”

When he spoke those words, his daughter’s cracked lips twitched, and she made a very low, very slight groaning sound deep in her throat.

She’s in there, Bill thought. She’s in there, and she heard me.

Chapter Five

Hawkins led Bill out to a small leather couch in the hallway. Nurses and technicians streamed past them, and Bill couldn’t stop turning his head to look back at the door to Summer’s room. He wanted to know whether anyone was coming or going from there, whether there were any hints of an emergency or a deepening crisis.

“Is there someone you want to call?” Hawkins asked, his big hands resting on his knees. “Family or friends?”

“My sister’s coming today. She lives in Ohio.”

“Good. You don’t have other family in Jakesville, right?”

“You know neither Julia nor I was born here.”

Hawkins got down to business by changing the direction of the conversation. “I wanted to bring you up-to-date on the investigation.”

“I’ve been wondering about something,” Bill said. “Has this ever happened here? I can’t remember any crimes like this in Jakesville.”

Hawkins pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Not recently, no. Nothing like a kidnapping. You know what it’s like here, Bill. We don’t have crimes like this. It’s a safe community.” He brought out a small notebook. “Bill, we’re trying our best to piece together where those girls were and what they were doing on Saturday. You said you didn’t know where they were going when they left your house.”

“I assumed they were going to Haley’s house.”

“Right.” Hawkins didn’t say more, but Bill knew what he was thinking. What everyone would be thinking.

“Yeah, yeah. I didn’t ask. I’m the clueless dad. They’re both fifteen, Detective. They’re going to be driving soon. Some of their friends already drive. I can’t know everything they do. And, like you said, what could happen to them in Jakesville? It was daylight when they left.”

“Sure.” Hawkins nodded, his face encouraging and calm. His demeanor said, No judgment here. He cleared his throat. “The problem is only a couple of people saw them walking together that afternoon. Someone saw them heading down Anderson Road, right by your house and on the way to Haley’s. So they could have been going that way.” Hawkins frowned. “And then another witness claims to have seen Summer walking in the opposite direction on Anderson Road. Back toward your house.”

“What does that mean?”

“We don’t know.” He held his hands out, pleading for patience. “This witness was an eighty-eight-year-old man who was driving by. And he had his license taken away by his kids because his eyesight is so bad. He saw a girl walking there. She may not have been Summer. And according to Haley’s mother, they never came to her house. We’re assuming they disappeared somewhere during that walk, but since we don’t know exactly where they were going . . .”

“So someone just took them,” Bill said. “A maniac pulled over and grabbed them. That happens, doesn’t it?”

“It happens, yes,” Hawkins said. “But it’s rare. We’re not ruling anything out at this point.”

Bill closed his eyes. He told himself it was foolish to keep hoping for a break, but he couldn’t turn his mind off. It worked to make him believe, to dangle possibilities, if only as a means of keeping his spirits up and his will strong. Don’t forget, he told himself, you just got the biggest break of all. She’s here. She’s alive.

“That has to be it,” Bill said. “Someone just grabbed them, threw them in the back of a van or something.”

“I wanted to follow up on some of Summer’s other friends,” Hawkins said. “You told me that there were a few boys in her extended social circle. Maybe two or three of them.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Hawkins checked the notebook again, holding the pad at arm’s length so he could read the writing. “We’re talking about Clinton Fields, Todd Stone, and Brandon Cooke. Right?”

“Yeah, that’s them. I guess. You have to understand that Julia knew more about Summer’s friends than I did. She talked to Summer more, you know? Mother and daughter stuff.”

“So how was your relationship with Summer? You said on Saturday that things could be tense between the two of you, but you never really told me why. Have you thought about that more?”

Bill lifted his hands, then let them fall back into his lap. He knew he seemed exasperated. He couldn’t hide it. “Look, she’s a teenage girl. I’m her middle-aged dad. I just didn’t always know if I was teaching her the things she needed to be taught. You know how teenagers are.”

“My kids are grown now, so it’s been a while. Enlighten me.”

“Okay, they’re a little contemptuous of their parents. Summer seemed that way with me.” Bill hoped that was the end, but the detective seemed to expect more. “We had tensions between us. Normal stuff, I guess. Shit, try being a man raising a woman. Her mother died a year and a half ago. It was just—” Something caught in his throat, and he paused, taking a deep breath. “It was Julia’s birthday a couple of weeks ago. Would have been her birthday. Still is, I guess. But . . .”

“It’s been hard for Summer,” Hawkins said, prompting Bill. “Losing her mother.”

“Yeah. It’s hard enough just being a teenager. Ever since Julia died, Summer’s been more rebellious, more mouthy. Standoffish to me. I thought we’d get closer because Julia died, and in some ways we have. We’ve cried together. Reminisced. But Summer is really hurting, I know that. She’s like me. When she hurts, she gets angry. Defensive. And she’s had a wall up since her mom died.”

A nurse walked past, her pace quicker than anyone else’s, and Bill turned his head to follow her. But she passed Summer’s room, her white shoes squeaking against the tile floor.

“I understand. A young girl needs and wants her mother.” Hawkins’s voice pulled Bill back. “You never really answered the question of whether Summer was sexually active.”

Bill turned all the way around, his eyes fixing on the detective, his teeth grinding together again at the back of his mouth. “I did answer that.”

Hawkins sounded more assertive, more determined. Some of the Kentucky charm dropped from his voice. “You actually said you didn’t want to talk about it. But now I think it’s imperative that we know everything there is to know about Summer.”

“She’s fifteen. She’s not sexually active. Why are you asking me this?”

Hawkins kept his blue-gray eyes trained on Bill, the scrutiny slicing in like sleet. “We have to understand every aspect of Summer’s life if we’re going to figure out who did this to her.” He pointed theatrically at the door of Summer’s room, conjuring the picture of the battered girl into Bill’s mind. “We’re looking into everything in this town. Her online communications. Her friends and teachers at school. Local sex offenders. You’re our best resource about Summer.”

Bill felt unnerved by where Hawkins was going. The conversation was causing a small pain to grow in the pit of his stomach. “Is there something I need to know?”

“Was she sexually active?” Hawkins asked. “Did she spend a lot of time with these boys from school? Or any boys that you know of?”

“Sure, they were friends.” Bill chewed on a piece of loose skin near his thumbnail. “They’ve been to the house. Hell, Summer’s known some of them since they were in grade school, so I’ve seen those kids the whole time they were growing up.” Bill shifted in his seat, trying to articulate his thoughts about the boys Hawkins had mentioned. “They seemed like pretty normal kids. I know what boys want from girls. I know how pretty Summer and Haley both are. I thought I’d be dealing with this a little later. And I always thought I’d be dealing with it with Julia’s help. Not on my own.”

“And that’s it about them?”

“She went to a dance with the Stone kid, but she told me they were just friends. Hanging out, I think she said. He and Summer went to junior high together. The other one, Cooke? Isn’t he on the cross-country team at school?”

“He’s a good runner, yes. He might go to states this year as a sophomore.”

“And so the other one is Clinton Fields, right?” Bill asked. “Yeah, he’s in their extended social circle. Kind of a jerky kid.”

“Why do you say that?” Hawkins asked.

“I don’t know. He’s arrogant, snotty. Sure, he’s polite to my face when he comes around, and he’s a smart kid, a good student. But there’s a hint of aggression and disrespect beneath everything he says. I can imagine him walking out the door and badmouthing me. High schools are full of those kinds of guys.”

“Was he dating Summer?” Hawkins asked.

“They’d all been spending time together the past few months. They were always with a group of kids, but I guess that’s how they date now. Groups of kids.”

“Is that it?”

“Is there something else I need to know about any of them?” Bill asked. “Did I miss something?”

“Remember, I’m investigating. Everything is on the table. And everyone.”

“Where were they when Summer and Haley disappeared?”

“We’re checking their alibis. We’re checking everyone’s alibis. They’re kids. They weren’t punching a clock at work or anything like that, but they say they were at the Fields house, playing video games. The parents weren’t there.”

Bill felt a jagged pressure growing behind his right eye, a pulsing sensation that made him squirm in his seat. “Just arrest them,” he said. “Bring them in and get them to talk.”

“It doesn’t work quite that way, Bill.”

“Do you think I care about their fucking civil liberties? You shouldn’t either. Not when my daughter is in a coma and another girl is dead.”

“Has Summer been in more trouble lately?” Hawkins asked. “Anything? You said the two of you weren’t getting along, that it’s been tough since your wife died.”

Bill thought back over the past year and a half, the series of ups and downs, arguments, and strained silences between Summer and him. “I told you already. It’s been hard on her. And she’s been pushing my buttons a little. Missing some curfews, not answering my texts when she’s out, that kind of thing.”

“I wanted to ask you about—”

“Wait,” Bill said. “That Fields kid. Wasn’t he into something a couple of years ago?”

An alarm started ringing overhead. An insistent beeping that probed at the headache growing behind Bill’s right eye.

Two nurses rushed by, and Bill watched them.

They dashed into Summer’s room.

“Jesus,” Bill said. “No.”

He followed in their wake and was cut off by Dr. Davis, who went in ahead of him. When Bill entered the room, he heard one phrase that stuck in his mind like a driven nail.

Her oxygen level’s dropping.

Chapter Six

Bill watched the medical team swarm around Summer.

They called out terms and numbers Bill didn’t understand. It was like hearing another language.

Her voice calm and steady, Dr. Davis said, “We’re going to have to put in a chest tube.”

Bill stepped forward as Dr. Davis pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. They snapped into place against her wrists. She reached toward a silver tray and lifted a shining scalpel, something that looked sharp enough to cut through a tree trunk.

“You have to go, Mr. Price,” Davis said.

A nurse started removing Summer’s gown, exposing her breast. Another nurse used alcohol to sterilize the skin where the doctor intended to cut. Bill didn’t like the way they manhandled her, strangers treating her body as if it were a piece of meat.

Someone stepped in front of him, a pudgy young man in scrubs, his thinning hair a stringy mess. “Why don’t you just step outside, sir?”

“I want to stay.”

“You can’t be in here, sir.”

The man placed his hand on Bill’s chest and applied gentle but firm pressure, moving him backward and toward the door. Bill went along, but he said, “You can’t be in there either. I don’t want some strange man—”

But he was out the door and into the hallway, and the man in the scrubs disappeared inside the room again. Bill took a step forward, intending to go back in, but he stopped himself.

The doctor was right. He didn’t want to see that.

When Summer was little and receiving a new vaccine every other month, it was Julia who went with her. Julia held her hand and told her to look the other way. Bill either didn’t make trips to the doctor, or he stayed in the waiting room reading out-of-date magazines while Julia took their daughter back.

He saw that shining, brutally sharp scalpel in his mind again. A device made to puncture and slice and penetrate. He’d watched enough TV shows to know they’d be slipping a rubber tube through the incision. The images nauseated him.

He stepped back from the door and turned around.

Detective Hawkins waited just outside the door. He placed one of his ham-hock hands on Bill’s shoulder and made a gesture with his head, indicating that Bill should return to his seat on the couch where they had been talking. Bill happily obliged. It felt good to sit, and the nausea subsided once he was on the couch.

Hawkins wandered off for a moment and came back with a paper cup full of water. “Drink this,” he said.

Bill swallowed the cool water and smacked his lips. “Thank you.”

“You’re sure there’s no one you want to call?” Hawkins asked. “What about your neighbor? Mr. Fleetwood?”

“Adam.”

“Right. You’re good friends with him. Do you want to call him to come sit with you?”

“I’ll talk to him soon. He might be working.” Bill used a shaking hand to reach into his pants pocket. He pulled out his phone and checked the screen. A text. “My sister. Paige. She’s coming. Tomorrow, I think.”

Bill struggled to type a response, his hands shaking like a ninety-year-old man’s. He marveled at the way Summer and Haley composed texts at lightning speed, almost like machines trained to do so.

“How about work? Do you need to check in there?”

“I’m an IT guy at a small college,” Bill said. “They can live without me for a while. They’ll probably miss me the most when I can’t go to Trivia Tuesday at the Tenth Inning.”

Hawkins stared at him blankly.

“The sports bar. A group of us from work plays trivia there.”

“Right, I hear you,” Hawkins said. He looked at the closed door to Summer’s room and then back at Bill. The detective’s hands rested on his hips, the skin of his thick ring finger swallowing the gold band.

“What about that stuff you were asking me?” Bill asked, his voice shaky. “Summer’s behavior. I’m confused by all of this right now. I don’t know what to think.”

“I understand completely,” Hawkins said. “I’ll come back and check on you later.”

“That Fields kid, Clinton,” Bill said. “There was something about him, something that happened a year or two ago. What was it?”

Hawkins took a moment before he answered. “He got in a fight at school with another kid.”

Bill waited for more. “That’s it? I thought there was more—” Then it came back to Bill. The story made the local news for a couple of days. Everybody with kids at the high school heard about it and talked about it. “Oh, I remember. Not just a fight, Detective.” Bill felt sweat forming at his hairline, a sticky, cloying liquid. “He hurt that kid. Put him in the hospital, right?”

“He did, Bill. Clinton Fields got in a fight at the bus stop almost two years ago, when he was fourteen. Broke the other boy’s jaw.”

“Oh, no.” Bill’s hand went to his face involuntarily to rub his own jawline. “He’s a thug—that’s what you’re telling me. A true menace. And you don’t want to arrest him yet?”

“Did Summer ever mention him being violent? Or threatening violence?”

“No. But what does that matter? You’ve got to talk to him. Arrest him.”

“I will, Bill. We’re well aware of all of this. In fact, I’m on my way to check into it more right now.”

“Will you tell me what you find?”

“Of course. Will you call me if you need anything? And let me know how Summer is.” He started to walk away and stopped, his big body showing surprising grace. “I had a collapsed lung once. When I was in college. I collided with another guy during a basketball game. That was enough to do it. I had to have the whole chest-tube thing in to relieve the pressure. The worst part was in the beginning. They said I’d feel a little discomfort, and then they put that tube in.” Hawkins winced, and the exaggerated face looked comical on the big man. “But then I could breathe again.”

Bill didn’t know what to say, so he said, “Thanks.”

“My point is, a collapsed lung isn’t as scary as it looks.”

“That’s one thing that isn’t, I guess,” Bill said.

Chapter Seven

Bill jumped off the couch when Dr. Davis came out of Summer’s room.

She looked slightly winded, like a jogger after a good, solid run. She told Bill that everything had gone according to plan. “We reinflated the lung, and her oxygen levels are returning to normal. We’ll continue to keep an eye on everything else. Our goal here is to make sure she’s stable. When she is, we’ll transfer her to our rehab wing.”

“I’m going to go back in and sit with her.”

“Give them a few minutes to get everything cleaned up.”

Bill imagined a room swimming in his daughter’s blood, the stained scalpel tossed on the floor amid soiled bandages. They needed to put her gown back on the proper way, to cover Summer up so everyone in the world wouldn’t just walk in and see her breast exposed. His daughter had been handed over to strangers for the past two days. First when she was kidnapped and beaten and who knew what else. And again in the hospital where her body had been probed and prodded and sliced.

And people, kids, maybe strangers, were commenting on her on the Internet. Judging her . . .

“I can contact the hospital social worker if you’d like,” Davis said. “Or the chaplain. I imagine people will want to come by and see Summer. Friends from school. Family. It might get complicated.”

“No, thanks,” Bill said. “I’m good.”

Davis considered him for a moment, then said, “The nurses will let you know when you can go back in.”

Bill returned to the couch and waited. The headache that had started forming when he was speaking with Hawkins seemed to have eased. He heard back from Paige. She told him, via text, that she intended to come directly to the hospital when she reached Jakesville the next day.

He hadn’t seen his younger sister in six months. They spoke on the phone from time to time, but mostly they communicated through texts and Facebook messages. They shared an irreverent sense of humor, and each tried to top the other by sending the most bizarre news stories or links to weird Web sites. On more than one occasion, Bill ended up chuckling to himself at work or at home over one of Paige’s messages.

Bill found himself looking forward to her arrival. He and Paige grew close the summer before he left for college when they spent a week driving around the country seeing R.E.M. in concert five times. Bill had never said it out loud, but he wished they’d grown closer sooner instead of right before he moved away. He always seemed to figure things out when it was too late. It was like a curse.

Someone said his name just then, and he looked up.

“There he is.”

Bill saw two figures approaching him from down the hallway. It took a moment, but then he saw who one of them was. Candy Rodgers, Haley’s mom. An older man with steel gray hair walked by her side. He wore a polo shirt and khaki pants with a cell phone clipped to the belt.

Bill stood up. Candy came directly toward Bill, her arms open for a hug. She wore black pants and a pink shirt, and a gold bracelet jangled from her wrist as she and Bill embraced. He caught a whiff of something floral, a shampoo or perfume.

“I’m so sorry, Candy.”

“I’m sorry too.”

They held each other longer than Bill was expecting. He’d never hugged Candy Rodgers before, didn’t even know her very well. He did know Haley’s parents were divorced—apparently a nasty split—and her father lived out west and had little contact with the family. Bill wondered if the man with Candy was a relative or a new love interest.

“This is our pastor,” Candy said, nodding at the man in the khaki pants. “Caleb Blankenship.”

The minister, who looked to be about sixty, gave Bill a firm handshake and a sympathetic look. Candy dabbed at her eyes with a balled-up tissue. She looked older than Bill remembered, but that may have been because she wasn’t wearing makeup. Her unnaturally blond hair hung limp and loose around her shoulders.

“I don’t know what to say, Candy,” Bill said. “I’m just so sorry about Haley. My God. She was such a wonderful, beautiful young girl.”

“I asked where you were, where Summer was, and they told us. I couldn’t leave the hospital without coming up here and seeing her.” She gestured widely, her hand holding a crumpled tissue. “The police have been asking a lot of questions, of course, and Caleb was kind enough to come with me while I . . . It turns out I couldn’t really make an identification. I mean, Haley, her body . . . It’s in bad shape.” Her voice sounded on the edge of breaking, but she held it together, impressing Bill with her poise. “We’re going to the funeral home next.”

“Oh, my God,” Bill said. “I can’t imagine.”

“How is Summer?” Candy asked. “They didn’t say much to us except that she was critically injured.”

Bill tried to explain what he knew of Summer’s condition. He managed to talk about the collapsed lung, but the rest of the words jumbled in his brain, and he found himself verbally flailing until Candy placed her hand on his elbow.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s all too complicated.”

Bill felt calmed by seeing Candy’s familiar face. He had little in common with Haley’s family and didn’t really travel in the same circles they did, with the exception of attending the same events at the school and picking up and dropping the girls off at each other’s houses. If it hadn’t been for the kids’ friendship—which started when they were in the first grade and never stopped—he wouldn’t know much about Candy at all. But Candy’s was the first familiar, friendly face he’d seen all morning, and he found the tension in his chest, the grinding of his back molars against each other, easing in her presence.

“Do you know anything about this, Candy?” Bill asked. “Do you know what the girls were doing or how they ended up out in that park? Or who might have tipped off the police?”

“I don’t know anything,” Candy said. “The police don’t sound like they know very much either. Nobody does. They said you thought they were coming to our house, but they never showed up. I was home. I would have seen them. Haley told me she was going to your house.”

“We have a lot of unanswered questions now,” Caleb, the pastor, said.

Bill gave him a quick look. “The police are hinting at all kinds of things.”

“Let’s not delve into these complicated matters in a time of grief,” Caleb said. “Candy has to go—”

“Candy, do you know something about these boys? Do you think they’re involved? Detective Hawkins was asking me about them.”

“It’s okay, Caleb,” she said. Her lip quivered for a long moment, and she lifted her hand to her chest while she suppressed a deep sob. Collected again, she turned to Bill. “The police have been asking me about everything, but I don’t know what I can tell them. Haley’s sex life.” She shivered. “All kinds of things. I mean, I’m no dummy. I know what kids do. But I can’t imagine who would do this.” She made a vague gesture in the direction of Summer’s room.

“I don’t know anything either,” Bill said, studying Candy’s face. He wanted her to say something, anything, to convince him none of it was real. Candy was a mother. She must know more than he did. “He was asking me about Clinton Fields and those other kids. Remember he beat that kid up a couple of years ago? Beat him up bad—”

But then Bill remembered himself. The woman standing before him had just lost her daughter. Lost. Gone forever. He dialed back on his own zealousness. He knew Candy was experiencing the same things he was experiencing. But multiplied to an infinite degree.

“I’m sorry, Candy,” he said. “I shouldn’t be pushing about these things. Haley was a wonderful girl. She and Summer . . . They were such good friends. My God . . . since first grade. All those trips to the mall, the sleepovers. Girl Scouts . . .”

“They were great friends, yes.”

“Maybe . . .” He didn’t know if completing the thought would bring any comfort to anyone. But Candy gave him an expectant look, so he finished by saying, “Well, at least they weren’t alone. They were together when this happened.”

Candy considered the statement for a moment, her face distant, her eyes red with grief. “That is a good thought.”

A young nurse with long red hair tied in a ponytail emerged from Summer’s room and approached Bill. She told him that he could go back in and sit with his daughter whenever he wanted, that she was resting comfortably and breathing normally.

“I should get back inside there,” Bill said. “I don’t want her to be alone.”

“Of course.” She looked at Caleb. “I think I have to be the one to call Rich.” Bill knew Rich was Haley’s father. Candy’s voice held steady. “He’s going to be shocked. I don’t know what other word to use.”

Bill looked to the pastor for help and, finding none, said, “Can you tell Rich . . . tell him how sorry I am? I don’t know what else to say right now.”

But Candy’s eyes drifted past Bill in the direction of Summer’s room. Bill looked back, expecting to see something, but there was nothing going on. Nothing he could see.

“What is it?” he asked.

“We were wondering about something,” Candy said, looking over at Caleb.

“We were wondering if we could step inside and pray for Summer,” Caleb said.

“I don’t . . .”

Candy reached out and took Bill’s hand. Her skin felt hot, almost feverish. “I know you haven’t been attending a church, not since Julia died.” She looked over at Caleb as though seeking encouragement. “We thought maybe prayers would help right now as Summer heals.”

Bill looked down to where their hands were joined, felt the pressure she exerted against his skin. It seemed like a form of pleading, a way of begging Bill to let them into Summer’s room. And while he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the religious display, he also couldn’t say no to a mother who had just lost her daughter in such a horrible way.

“Okay,” Bill said. “Sure.”

Candy squeezed even harder. “Good. I think you’ll see God can do a lot of good in Summer’s life. It’s never too late for that to happen.”

Chapter Eight

The three of them entered Summer’s room. Bill made sure he went in first, and he checked her left side where the chest tube had been inserted. The tube remained in place, its rubber length snaking out from under her hospital gown and reaching a portable machine by the side of the bed. Summer’s gown was mostly back in place over her chest, so Bill waved Candy and the pastor forward.

Candy gasped when she saw Summer. Bill remembered Candy’s comment from moments before about not being able to identify Haley’s body due to the damage inflicted. He shuddered.

The pastor moved to the left side of the bed, his face solemn, and Candy moved next to him. Bill moved to the other side—across Summer’s body and opposite them—and watched as they both bowed their heads and closed their eyes.

Bill and Julia had been married in the Catholic Church. They’d both attended their whole lives, and when Summer was born, they raised her in the church as well. Baptism, First Communion, Sunday school. They did it all. He could summon the feel of the heavy wooden pews, the sickeningly sweet aroma of incense. Bill never would have described himself as a man of great faith or a true believer, but he liked the structure the church provided in his life, the sense that there were boundaries and end lines and a promise of order amid the chaos.

Candy leaned close. “Oh, Summer, you sweet girl. I’m so sorry, baby.”

Summer’s lips moved. One side of her mouth turned down in an agitated frown.

“It’s okay, Summer. I know you’re in there.”

She made the face again, even more agitated. Candy smiled without showing her teeth.

“Father above,” Caleb said. “We come to you today . . .”

Bill kept his eyes open, watching his daughter. When Julia died suddenly and unexpectedly, Bill couldn’t summon any desire to set foot inside a church again. Something streamed out of him that day, like dry ground sucking down a puddle of water. He bristled at the cruelty of some unseen being who ruled the universe and randomly struck down his wife at such a young age. But Julia’s death also led to an intense questioning of himself. Bill couldn’t see a path forward—not through any church, at least—that would allow him to forgive himself for not being there when Julia died. Instead, he lived with the image of Julia falling off the ladder to the kitchen floor—alone, scared, and in pain—as she suffered her fatal injury. And Bill wasn’t even the first to find her. Summer came home from school and found her dead mother on the cold linoleum like a beached fish.

“We ask this all in the name of Jesus, who saves us. Amen.”

“Amen,” Candy said.

A silence settled over the room, the gentle hisses and beeps of the machines the only noises as both of them looked at Bill. He ignored their appraisal and kept his mouth shut, refusing to join in the amen chorus.

Candy looked wounded by Bill’s silence, and he wished he’d gone along, wished he’d done whatever he could for the grieving woman in the room. She stepped forward and bent down, placing her hand on Summer’s arm and giving it a gentle squeeze.

“We’re praying for you, Summer. We’re all behind you, honey.”

A moment passed, and rather than making the frowning face, Summer’s lips parted and smacked together a few times. Bill moved closer, watching, fearing that something was wrong, but the girl continued to work her lips that way for about ten seconds as though trying to form a word. An ‘M’ sound or an ‘O.’ When that effort failed, she simply emitted a very low and brief groan. And then silence.

Candy smiled, her body still bent toward the bed. “We know you’re in there,” she said. “We hear you.”

“She did that earlier when I was talking to her,” Bill said, fully aware that the movement of Summer’s lips as Candy spoke outpaced anything she had done at the sound of Bill’s voice. But maybe she felt better, more energetic, with a reinflated lung.

The same red-haired nurse slipped through the door, her shoes making no sound, as though she walked on air. “We might want to limit our visits,” she said. “Immediate family only and not too long.”

“We were just going,” Caleb said, offering the calming, pastoral smile.

“We’ll come back and see you, Summer,” Candy said.

And again the same movement of Summer’s lips, although briefer and with less energy.

When the three of them were out in the hall, Bill kept his distance as Candy started to lean in for a hug.

“I felt something in there, Bill,” she said. “I felt . . . I don’t know.”

“What did you mean by saying it’s not too late for God to come into Summer’s life?” he asked.

Candy didn’t answer, so Caleb said, “It’s been an extremely long morning for everyone.” He placed his hand on the small of Candy’s back and tried to gently guide her away from Bill and the entrance to Summer’s room.

“Are you saying if Summer went to church on a regular basis, this wouldn’t have happened to her?” Bill asked, stopping them. “Both of our daughters were out there. They both were hurt.”

Candy moved away from Caleb’s touch and faced Bill. Her eyes were filled with tears, and Bill saw deep lines etched at the corners of her mouth. “You know as well as I do that Haley worshipped Summer. She did everything Summer did. The clothes, the hair, the music. Summer was the leader, the dominant one.”

“Summer is strong-willed,” Bill said. “That’s a good quality.”

“I remember the time they stole that tube of lipstick from Walgreens. Haley came home, and she told me, ‘Mom, Summer pushed me into doing it.’”

“You’re talking about the lipstick they stole when they were twelve?”

“And the missed curfews lately. The back talk. That’s not my daughter. Summer strolls into my house and talks to me like I’m her peer, like we’re both adults. She’s fifteen going on thirty-five.”

“She’s mature,” Bill said. “She’s an only child.”

“Haley was just so . . . good-natured.” Candy’s face crumpled with grief. “Who do you think followed who . . . whatever they were doing?”

Bill wanted to say more, but he didn’t as Caleb led Candy away.

When Bill turned around, the red-haired nurse stood in his way. She held a small bottle, something Bill didn’t recognize. She seemed to want to say something to him but didn’t. He couldn’t identify the source of the expectant look on her face.

“Were we talking too loud?” Bill asked. He realized his hands were clenched into fists in the aftermath of his exchange with Candy, and it required a conscious effort to relax them. His heart thumped, and he knew if he’d been at home, he would have thrown something in frustration.

“No,” the nurse said. “Not at all. I just wanted to tell you I’m going in to take care of something with Summer. Something quick.”

“She’s okay?”

“There’s no problem.” The nurse again looked like she wanted to say more. Her eyes almost appeared mischievous, like she possessed a secret. “Why don’t you come in and I’ll show you?”

Bill followed her through the door and watched as she gently moved the covers down Summer’s body. Bill held his hand out. “Wait. What is this?”

“It’s okay,” she said, and continued on. The covers now down, she took great care lifting Summer’s gown. Bill felt like he shouldn’t be looking, but the nurse nodded to Summer’s stomach.

First he saw the bruise. About the size of an orange, or someone’s fist, it sat just above her belly button. And his daughter looked even thinner than he remembered. Had she been losing weight? Dieting? Or just getting taller and losing her baby fat?

Then he saw what the nurse must have wanted him to notice.

“What’s that?” he asked, although he knew. A half-inch-wide hoop was stuck into the soft flesh, the skin around the post red and tender. “Who did that to her?”

“Somebody who didn’t know to sterilize first,” the nurse said. “We’re pumping her full of antibiotics through the IV, but I thought I’d give it a cleaning as well.”

“She didn’t have that—” But Bill stopped himself. How did he know what she’d done to her body? He hadn’t seen his daughter naked since she was three. And the piercing fit with her recent defiant, rebellious attitude. She probably would have loved to see the look on Bill’s face when he discovered it.

He also remembered Hawkins’s questions about her sex life, the things people were saying about her on social media. She was fifteen, living on the border between girl and woman.

“I guess I don’t know much of anything,” Bill said, somewhat defeated.

The nurse nodded as she worked, applying a solution to a piece of gauze. She carefully wiped the red skin around the piercing, her thin fingers as gentle and steady as a surgeon’s.

“I figure I just did Summer a favor,” she said while she worked. “When she wakes up, you’ll be so happy to see her, you won’t care about a little thing like a piercing she got without your permission. It’s not a big deal to have one. Some of us got them in college.” She chuckled softly.

Bill sensed that he was being manipulated, that just like Hawkins saying the collapsed lung wasn’t as bad as it seemed, the nurse was not so subtly reminding him of his priorities.

He didn’t need to be reminded, even though the sight of the piercing made his skin crawl. Not knowing how much Summer could hear or understand, he moved to the head of the bed and leaned down close.

“I don’t care about the piercing,” he said. “All I care about is your getting better.”

Summer started moving her lips, again like she wanted to form a word. Bill looked to the nurse, who shrugged lightly, the bottle of alcohol and the swab still in her hand.

“Do you want to say something, Summer? It’s Dad.”

And the puckering grew more rapid, accompanied by a low clucking sound in her mouth, the intensity of the movement increasing. Her head twitched once, to the left and then back to the right.

“Did you want to say something to me?” Bill asked. “Do you want something from me?”

Bill leaned in even closer. And he heard the word she seemed to be saying.

“No. No. No. No. No. No.”

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - A Theory of Dreaming by Ava Reid #YA #Historical #Fantasy

2026-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: A Theory of Drowning # 2
Format: 416 pages, Hardcover
Release Date: July 29, 2025
Publisher: HarperCollins
Source: Publisher
Genre: YA, Historical, Fantasy

Return to the immersive, lush, and dreamlike world of the instantly bestselling dark academia fantasy A Study in Drowning as the aftermath of their first discovery pulls Effy and Preston on a final adventure and brings their haunting love story to its end in this stunning sequel and final book in the duology.

All stories come to an end.

Effy learned that when she defeated the Fairy King. Even though she may never know exactly what happened at Hiraeth, she is free of her nightmares and is able to pen a thesis with Preston on the beloved national fairy tale Angharad. She has finally earned a spot at the literature college, making her the first woman in history to enroll.

But some dreams are dangerous, especially when they come true. The entire university—and soon the entire nation—is waiting for her to fail. With the Fairy King defeated and Myrddin’s legacy exposed, Effy can no longer escape into fantasy. Who is she without her stories?

With Effy under threat, Preston is surprised to discover a rage simmering inside him, ringing in his ears like bells. He begins to dream of a palace under the sea, a world where he is king—visions that start to follow him even in waking.

As the war between Llyr and Argant explodes, Effy and Preston find themselves caught in the crossfire: Effy losing her dreams and Preston losing himself in his.

Are dreams ever truly just dreams?

A Theory of Dreaming is the sequel to A Study in Drowning by author Ava Reid. The first book was a gothic mystery with a crumbling manor, a contested authorship, and a fairy-tale monster at its center. This one is about what happens after the monster is gone: when the national myth starts to crack, the university turns hostile, the war with Argant tightens its grip, and two young people who survived something uncanny have to live in ordinary daylight.

Effy Sayre is now the first woman admitted to the University of Llyr’s literature college. Together with Preston Héloury, the Argantian student who became her partner in scholarship and in love, she has already exposed the secret behind Angharad, the nation’s beloved fairy tale: that it was written not by the revered Sleeper Emrys Myrddin, but by his wife. That revelation, treated as near-sedition in a country at war, follows them back to Caer-Isel. The university wants them to fail.

The press wants a scandal. Llyr wants its Sleepers—those preserved national authors whose bodies and writings are supposed to sustain morale—left untouched. The premise is strong. Reid is still writing about stories as infrastructure: who gets credited, whose work is used to justify a war, which voices are allowed into the canon. The Sleepers and their museum give the book a vivid political-mythic architecture. Preston’s new dreams of an undersea palace, where he is king and the dead can still be spoken to, turn the first book’s question inside out.

Effy once could not tell dream from reality. Now Preston cannot stop choosing the dream. The novel’s best idea is that escapism is not only a wounded girl’s private refuge. It can also be a young man’s temptation toward power, control, and a prettier version of grief. Dual point of view helps. Book one belonged more to Effy; this one gives Preston a fuller interior life, including the xenophobia he faces as an Argantian in Llyr and the rage beneath his usual restraint. Their romance is tender without being easy.

Love here is less a rescue than a fragile practice: two people trying to stay present for each other while institutions, war, and their own minds pull them apart. Large stretches are about depression, self-doubt, academic cruelty, medication, and the grinding hostility of being the wrong kind of person in a nationalist university. Those pages can feel true and also repetitive. Readers who came for the first book’s mystery-and-manor engine may find this one slower, heavier, and less enchanted.

The novel connects literary fraud to wartime propaganda, misogyny in the academy to the erasure of women from the national story, and personal trauma to the stories a country tells itself in order to keep fighting. That is a lot for a YA fantasy to carry, and the book is more successful as mood and argument than as tightly engineered plot. The dream-palace material is beautiful and sometimes under-explained. The academic mystery around additional texts and authorship is compelling when it is allowed to move.

The war plot arrives as pressure more than as a fully dramatized conflict, then resolves quickly once the novel decides it is time to close. A Theory of Dreaming is a lyrical, uneven, often moving conclusion to a duology about the danger of beautiful stories. It will reward readers who wanted more of Effy and Preston as people, more of Llyr as a nation built on canon and war, and more of Reid’s drowning-in-language style. It will frustrate readers who wanted another tightly coiled gothic mystery. As a sequel, it is not better than A Study in Drowning.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter #Thriller #Suspense

2026-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Andrea Oliver # 1
Format: 468 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: August 21, 2018
Publisher: William Morrow
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

What if the person you thought you knew best turns out to be someone you never knew at all . . . ?

Andrea knows everything about her mother, Laura. She knows she’s spent her whole life in the small beachside town of Belle Isle; she knows she’s never wanted anything more than to live a quiet life as a pillar of the community; she knows she’s never kept a secret in her life. Because we all know our mothers, don’t we?

But all that changes when a trip to the mall explodes into violence and Andrea suddenly sees a completely different side to Laura. Because it turns out that before Laura was Laura, she was someone completely different. For nearly thirty years she’s been hiding from her previous identity, lying low in the hope that no one would ever find her. But now she’s been exposed, and nothing will ever be the same again.

The police want answers and Laura’s innocence is on the line, but she won’t speak to anyone, including her own daughter. Andrea is on a desperate journey following the breadcrumb trail of her mother’s past. And if she can’t uncover the secrets hidden there, there may be no future for either one of them. . .

Karin Slaughter's Pieces of Her is the first installment in the author's Andrea Oliver series. Pieces of Her is a mother-daughter thriller that starts with a mall diner massacre and then splits into two timelines. A 31-year-old woman who thinks she knows her quiet, respectable mother discovers that the woman who raised her is someone else entirely. It became a Netflix series in 2022, starring Toni Collette and Bella Heathcote; the book and the show diverge in structure, especially in the ending.

Andrea “Andy” Oliver is back in Belle Isle, Georgia, living over her mother’s garage after a failed stretch in New York. Laura Oliver is a speech pathologist, a breast-cancer survivor, and the kind of small-town pillar who seems to have no secrets. They are celebrating Andy’s birthday at the Rise-n-Dine when a gunman opens fire. What happens next is captured on video and goes viral: Laura does not freeze. She moves with lethal competence, and the man who came to kill ends up dead by her hand. Hero one minute, suspect the next.

Laura checks herself out of the hospital, tells Andy to leave town with a set of cryptic instructions, and refuses to explain herself. Andy is forced onto the road with money, fake IDs, and the growing certainty that the mother she loved was a construction. The novel then alternates between Andy’s present-day flight and 1986, when a gifted young pianist named Jane Queller is pulled into the orbit of a radical group calling itself the Army of the Changing World. That past involves a powerful family business, QuellCorp; a charismatic and abusive leader; and violence that was never fully buried.

Andy’s job is to collect the pieces before the past collects her. Andy begins as Slaughter’s familiar type of stalled adult child: anxious, indecisive, living in the shadow of impressive parents (her father, Gordon, is a lawyer). The diner incident and the subsequent chase force her into a competence she didn't know she had. Laura/Jane is the book’s real engine—the woman who built a safe life out of wreckage and will do almost anything to keep it. Supporting figures from both eras (the cult, the family, the people who helped Jane disappear) arrive as Andy follows the trail. The dual timeline is the novel’s organizing principle.

Present-day Andy is on the run, researching, hiding money, losing her phone, and trying to stay ahead of both police attention and people from Laura’s old life. The 1980s chapters show how Jane became Laura: privilege, rage at her father’s world, radicalization, and the cost of getting out. Themes include identity as something assembled rather than inherited, the exploitation of the mentally ill in for-profit care systems, male violence and control, and what a parent is willing to erase to protect a child.

Slaughter is very good at the opening shock and at the slow reveal that the person you live with is a stranger. The mother-daughter bond—love mixed with betrayal and withheld history—gives the chase an emotional charge that pure cat-and-mouse thrillers often lack. The 1980s material has real texture: cult dynamics, family tyranny, and the specific historical backdrop of deinstitutionalization and private mental-health contracting. The Netflix series keeps the diner incident and the mother-as-stranger hook but changes witness-protection mechanics, who is hunting whom, how active Laura is in the present, and the resolution.

If you have only seen the show, the novel is a different—and in several ways more complete—experience. A sequel, Girl, Forgotten, follows Andy later. In the end, Pieces of Her is a story about a family secret that explodes into a cross-country thriller. It is propulsive, often brutal, and sincerely interested in how a woman rebuilds a self after surviving both a monstrous family and a monstrous cause. It is also baggy in places and unsubtle about its villains. Start here if you want a mother-daughter puzzle with a body count and a past that will not stay packed away. Skip it if you need lean plotting or dislike dual-timeline construction. The title is accurate. What Andy finds are pieces. Putting them together is the book’s real violence.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Haven't Killed in Years by Amy K. Green #Thriller #Suspense

2026-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Standalone
Format: 368 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: November 18, 2025
Publisher: Berkley
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

In this fascinating and propulsive thriller, a serial killer’s daughter, who is determined to live a normal life, gets wrapped up in a murder investigation that makes her question whether she can ever fully move on from her past.

Marin Haggerty, daughter of a world-renowned serial killer, spent her early childhood training to follow in her father’s bloody footsteps, before she developed her own sense of right and wrong. After his arrest, she’s put in witness protection and happy to take on a new identity, that of harmless office worker Gwen Tanner. Even if keeping everyone at a distance is a little boring, at least she—and society—is safe.

But when someone starts sending body parts to her house, the message is clear: I know who you are. To keep her identity secret, Gwen has to take on the highly inconvenient (but kind of exhilarating?) role of hunting down the killer herself, a journey that will take her from the twisted world of true crime fandom to drug-fueled house parties to an unlikely person from her past. She’ll learn she is capable of deep, human connections after all . . . and that she’s not the only one with secrets to hide. But is finally opening herself up going to help her catch the killer, or will it put her and others in even more danger?

Haven’t Killed in Years is Amy K. Green’s second thriller, after The Prized Girl (2020)—and it is best read as a character study wearing serial-killer clothes: darkly funny, morally gray, and more interested in what inherited violence does to a personality than in body-count spectacle. The hook is immediate. Gwen Tanner is an almost-too-ordinary Boston-area office worker approaching thirty: a bland job, a one-bedroom apartment, pottery she makes and then destroys, and no close attachments by design. She was born Marin Haggerty.

At nine, her father, Abel Haggerty, was convicted on eight counts of first-degree murder, and her mother, Reanne, went to prison for aiding and abetting. Marin was given a new name and a new life. On the day Reanne is released, a severed arm arrives on Gwen’s doorstep with a note that says, essentially, Hi, Marin. Someone knows who she is, and they are not being subtle about it. That premise is not unprecedented—the children of famous killers are a durable subgenre—but Green’s execution is what sells it. Gwen does not call the police.

She relocates the evidence and starts investigating herself, because anonymity is the only architecture her life has. The investigation pulls her into true-crime tourism, prison-adjacent obsessives, childhood survivors, and a circle of new almost-friends who are also, inconveniently, suspects. The book’s running joke, and its real engine, is that Gwen was desensitized to murder as a child and still talks about it with the same sardonic shrug she applies to office small talk.

Green has said she wanted readers to laugh even while the subject matter includes severed limbs and serial-killer worship; that tone is the book’s signature. Gwen is the whole show. She is messy, defensive, self-aware without being redeemed, and funny in a way that is closer to Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter than to the usual “traumatized but plucky” thriller heroine. She knows her indifference to violence is wrong. She is not proud of it. She hides it the way other people hide a drinking problem.

That combination—moral vacancy plus social competence plus dry wit—makes her easy to follow and hard to trust, which is exactly the right register for a narrator who grew up watching her father kill and then spent twenty years pretending to be furniture. The supporting cast is built as a suspect board that doubles as a social life Gwen never meant to have.

Recurring names in coverage include Porter, a pottery-studio coworker and true-crime enthusiast; Dominic, who runs an Abel Haggerty murder tour and has somehow gotten visiting access to her father; Elyse Abbington, the child who survived the family massacre that finally brought Abel down; plus mother, father, an old detective, an attorney who helped bury Marin’s identity, and a rotating set of murder-curious hangers-on. The relationships are the novel’s secret second plot.

Gwen keeps people at a distance for their safety and hers; the book keeps asking whether opening a door is how you catch a killer or how you become one again. Green is also poking at true-crime culture without delivering a sermon. Serial killers as celebrities, murder tours as date-night entertainment, fans who treat atrocity like fandom lore—Gwen has to walk through that world while being the artifact it is consuming. When the satire works, it is sharp. When it piles on, it starts to feel like the book is collecting types.

Structurally, this is a present-day investigation braided with childhood flashbacks. The flashbacks matter. They are not just “here is how Dad was bad.” They establish that Marin was not a passive witness in the way a conventional victim-narrative would prefer, and they complicate the nature-versus-nurture question the title is already winking at. The present-day plot moves in set pieces: packages, aliases, undercover tour-going, prison approaches, comedies of error that keep flipping who looks guilty.

Green has acknowledged the middle went through major revision; you can still feel the seams of a book that wants both a twisty whodunit and a psychological excavation and a satire of fandom. Around the halfway mark a second plot line drops that many readers describe as a genuine floor-dropper. Whether that bombast feels earned or overcooked depends on your tolerance for thriller engineering. Under the arms-in-boxes plotting, the novel is about identity as a survival skill.

Gwen Tanner is a performance that lasted two decades. The question is not only who is sending the parts? It is how much of Marin is still in there, and whether she ever stopped being her father’s project. Green keeps circling inherited violence, the ethics of disappearing, the difference between not killing and being good, and the lonely competence of someone who learned early that closeness is a liability. There is also an unexpectedly tender strain. Gwen’s isolation is strategic, but it is also grief.

The pottery she destroys is a neat metaphor that would be too on-the-nose if the voice were earnest; because the voice is snide, the image works. Read this if you like thrillers that live in the morally gray zone, narrators who would rather joke than process, and mysteries where the detective is also the exhibit. It will land especially well if Dexter, true-crime-fandom satires, or “the family of the monster” stories are already on your shelf. Skip it if you need a likable heroine, a tight suspect list, or horror that actually horrifies rather than wisecracks past the gore.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - You'll Be Sorry by Lisa Gardner #Suspense #Thriller

2026-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Standalone
Format: 357 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: August 4, 2026
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

For Raquel and Theo Collins, it appeared to be love at first sight. Raquel, a renowned interior designer, and Theo, a brash financial wizard met and married in a matter of months, only to confront a terrible tragedy. Now, unbearably aware of the distance between them, they’ve come to a remote town in New Hampshire to begin anew.

Perched on a ledge with stunning views, the Dixon’s family lodge was once a crown jewel of the mountains. Until late one August night, when both parents and their four children vanished, leaving behind a trail of bloody footprints, and a mystery that has endured for thirty years. Now, its latest occupants, the Collinses, are arriving, and the former grand lodge is once more stirring to life.

For Amanda Grady, following in her father’s footsteps as the recently appointed Shereford police chief, it’s good to see a fresh start for the derelict Dixon place. However, not everyone is happy about a new family in the old home, and its hidden past may have returned with a vengeance.

When a stray dog leads to the discovery of a skeleton on the property, Raquel and Theo face a daunting choice of what to believe, who to trust, and how to survive. Because in the tiny village of Shereford, the time has come. The local residents, the new neighbors, and the fledgling police chief must work together to unravel the terrifying events that happened one night thirty years ago, or …

You’ll be sorry.

You’ll Be Sorry is Lisa Gardner’s first standalone thriller in years. It is a small-town cold-case novel with a strained marriage at its center: newlyweds move into a mountain lodge that never recovered from a family’s disappearance three decades earlier. The setup is immediately effective. Raquel Collins, an interior designer, and Theo Collins, a financial operator, married quickly, then suffered a private tragedy that left them distant.

They buy the long-empty Dixon lodge in the tiny New Hampshire village of Shereford, hoping renovation and isolation will reset their lives. The house sits on a ledge with dramatic White Mountains views. Thirty years earlier, on a late August night, the Dixon parents and their four children vanished, leaving a trail of bloody footprints and an unsolved mystery that still defines the town. New police chief Amanda Grady—following in her father’s footsteps—is glad to see the derelict place occupied.

Not everyone else is. When a stray dog leads to a skeleton on the property, the past stops being local folklore and becomes an active threat. Raquel, Theo, Grady, and the village have to decide whom to trust. Gardner works with three main contemporary viewpoints plus the shadow of the vanished Dixons. Raquel is the most fully drawn: grief-stricken, professionally capable, and less transparent than she first appears. Theo is brasher and harder to read; the marriage itself functions as a source of suspense rather than mere backdrop.

Amanda Grady is the outsider-insider cop trying to prove herself in a town that already thinks it knows every secret. The stray dog (and at least one other canine) earns the title of scene-stealer. Shereford is the real co-lead. It is insular, scenic, and thick with gossip, old grudges, and local lore. The novel braids present-day investigation with the 1990s disappearance. Chapters are relatively short. Tension comes from withheld information: the couple’s secrets, the town’s secrets, and whether the new occupants have disturbed something that wanted to stay buried.

Themes include grief after loss, the stories spouses tell each other, how a community protects its own version of events, and the cost of reopening a wound everyone claims to have closed. You’ll Be Sorry is Gardner working in domestic-suspense and closed-community mode rather than FBI-profiler or missing-persons-series mode. It is atmospheric, twisty, and sincerely interested in how people live with unfinished horror. It is also messier than her tightest books: ambitious layering sometimes becomes congestion, and the ending will satisfy some readers while leaving others feeling the strings were yanked. If you want a remote New England lodge, a vanished family, a marriage full of omissions, and a town that knows less than it pretends, this delivers. If you want a ruthlessly efficient plot with no extra folklore or canine side business, it may frustrate.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - All the Pretty Girls by J.T. Ellison #Mystery #Suspense

2026-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Taylor Jackson # 1
Format: Paperback
Release Date: May 5, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Publisher
Genre: Mystery, Suspense

In a thrilling series from New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison, a serial killer is targeting young women across the South, and each new kill comes with a grisly clue pointing to the next victim.

When a young woman is found dead just outside of Nashville, strangled and handless, homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson is quick to the scene. So is FBI Special Agent John Baldwin, whose presence suggests that the murder is not the work of a random opportunist. A love poem left nearby alludes to something more sinister: This is the work of the “Southern Strangler,” a serial killer terrorizing women from Louisiana to Virginia.

It’s the kind of case Jackson thrives on. At thirty-five, Metro Nashville’s youngest lieutenant is still an idealist, hell-bent on protecting the city she calls home. And she’s determined to avoid the broken, lonely path she’s seen other cops take. But while she and Baldwin share more than a working relationship, she’s not ready to go public.

With victims across multiple states, Jackson and Baldwin race to find a pattern before the killer strikes again. But then a shocking connection between the Strangler and a local reporter brings them closer to the truth behind the killer’s identity—one that could unveil a family’s darkest secrets.

J.T. Ellison's All the Pretty Girls is the first installment in the author's Taylor Jackson series. This is a revised edition of a book that was published in 2007. There are two main characters: Homicide Lieutenant Taylor Jackson and FBI Special Agent and Profiler John Baldwin. The story is a Nashville-set police procedural that mixes serial-killer hunt, media ambition, and romantic tension. It launched Ellison as a reliable writer of Southern crime fiction and still reads like a confident first outing—gritty, geographically specific, and built around a heroine who rejects the life she was born into.

The premise is classic genre architecture. A young woman is found strangled and missing a hand just outside Nashville. The signature—previous victim’s severed hand left at the next scene, plus fragments of Romantic poetry (Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge)—marks the work of the Southern Strangler, a killer operating across state lines from Louisiana to Virginia. Metro Nashville Homicide Lieutenant Taylor Jackson, 35 and the department’s youngest lieutenant, catches the local body. FBI profiler Dr. John Baldwin arrives because the case is already multi-jurisdictional. They are also lovers, though Taylor is not ready to make that public.

Running alongside the Strangler investigation are a serial rapist known as the Rain Man, an ambitious local TV reporter named Whitney Connolly who thinks she has an exclusive that will get her out of Nashville, and Whitney’s twin sister Quinn, a Belle Meade socialite. The two cases and the Connolly family secrets eventually converge. Ellison has described the killer as initially “reluctant,” a figure whose original motives become warped—an attempt to give the villain more psychology than pure sadism.

Taylor Jackson is the book’s strongest asset. Raised in wealthy Belle Meade, she walked away from debutante expectations to become a cop. She is idealistic, stubborn, still recovering from a serious neck injury that nearly killed her, and determined not to become the isolated, burned-out detective she has seen around her. Baldwin functions as both professional partner and romantic interest; their relationship is present but not the engine of the plot. Medical examiner Samantha Owens, Taylor’s childhood friend, appears as a supporting presence who would later get her own spin-off series.

Whitney Connolly is more vividly drawn than many reporter characters in this genre—hungry, reckless, and closer to the story than she realizes. Thematic concerns include hidden family lies, the collision of old Nashville money and working-class law enforcement, and the way private damage produces public violence. The poetry left at scenes is both a calling card and a window into the killer’s self-mythology. The title itself nods to the nursery rhyme and a Grimm tale Ellison has cited as early inspiration.

All the Pretty Girls is a capable, atmospheric series starter rather than a reinvention of the serial-killer procedural. It does what it sets out to do: introduce a distinctive Nashville detective, establish her world and relationships, and deliver a grisly, multi-state chase with enough twists to keep most thriller readers turning pages. It is not the most original book in the genre, and the extra plot threads sometimes dilute the main hunt. For readers who want a strong female lead, Southern setting, and unapologetic darkness, it remains a worthwhile entry point.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Into the Fire by Allison Brennan #Mystery #Thriller

2026-08-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Angelhart Investigations # 0.5
Format: 159 pages, Kindle Edition

Release Date: May 28, 2024
Publisher: MIRA
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Margo Angelhart was recently certified as a private investigator, but she isn’t convinced that it’s her calling. All of her cases have been minor, mostly for family and haven’t paid the bills. She’s more than happy to keep bartending and figure out her post-military career later. That is, until prosecutor Andy Flannigan walks into her bar and offers her a case she can’t turn down…

Nineteen-year-old Sergio Diaz has confessed to murder—except Andy doesn’t buy it. With his own job on the line, Andy asks Margo to work the case discreetly. The more she digs, the more she’s convinced an innocent kid is going to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now she just needs to figure out why he’d confess. Can Margo prove Sergio’s innocence and help Andy find the real killer before anyone else dies?

Into the Fire, by author Allison Brennan, is a 125-page novella that introduces readers to Margo Angelhart and the Angelhart family. A story that takes place years before You'll Never Find Me. This novella serves as a strong origin piece for protagonist Margo Angelhart, establishing her background, skills, self-doubt, and growing confidence while delivering a compact, satisfying mystery.

Margo Angelhart is a recently certified private investigator who is not yet fully committed to the career. After serving in the Army (including time as military police), she has returned to her hometown in Arizona. She bartends to pay the bills while handling only minor PI cases—mostly for family—and remains uncertain about her post-military path. She comes from a large, high-achieving extended family of investigators, which adds pressure and a sense that she doesn't quite measure up.

The story kicks off when prosecutor Andy Flannigan, a regular at the bar and a friend, approaches her discreetly. Nineteen-year-old Sergio Diaz has confessed to a convenience-store robbery and murder, but Andy does not believe the confession is genuine. With his own position at risk if he appears to undermine the case, he asks Margo to investigate quietly. As she digs in, she becomes convinced an innocent young man is heading to prison and must uncover both the truth and Sergio’s reasons for confessing—before more people get hurt.

Even in novella length, the mystery holds interest. Margo’s investigation unfolds methodically—talking to people who know Sergio, examining evidence like gunshot residue and video, and following leads—with a procedural feel that many readers appreciate. Her military background informs her instincts and approach without turning her into an over-the-top action hero. Margo starts unsure of herself and her place relative to her successful family. Working this case forces her to trust her judgment, think creatively, and commit more fully to the PI path.

Supporting characters, including Andy and members of Margo’s family, feel lived-in and add warmth and realism. Family dynamics and loyalty themes run through the story without overwhelming the central mystery. Sergio’s situation (including motivations tied to protecting loved ones) gives the case emotional stakes beyond pure puzzle-solving. My one main complaint remains the unknown about Margo's father, and what really happened between this novella and the first installment in the series. I really want the author to address that angle sooner rather than later.

Amazon

#Review - The Ten Year Lie by Debra Webb #Thriller #Suspense

2026-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Dark and Dangerous # 1
Format: 331 pages, Paperback
Release Date: March 17, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

A wrongfully convicted man and the key witness against him join forces to figure out who framed him for murder in a riveting novel of small-town secrets by USA Today bestselling author Debra Webb.

Every person in Pine Bluff, Alabama, stood behind Emily Wallace when she testified against Clint Austin. After all, Emily knows what she saw that terrible night: Clint, covered in blood, holding the body of her best friend Heather.

But Clint has always maintained his innocence, and now, after a successful appeal, he has come home to prove it.

The whole town is furious about his return, and Emily becomes obsessed with sending Clint back to prison—until her father reveals a devastating secret that casts doubt on the whole trial. What if she was wrong?

When another person with a connection to Heather turns up dead, Clint and Emily embark on a desperate search to find the truth. Because ten years ago, they were both betrayed by someone they know. So who, in a town full of liars, is getting away with murder?

Revised edition: Previously published as Traceless, this edition of The Ten Year Lie includes editorial revisions.

The Ten Year Lie, by Debra Webb, was previously published as Traceless. The book includes editorial revisions and is the first installment in what the author calls Dark and Dangerous. The book alternates between two main characters: Clint Austin, who spent 10 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, and Emily Wallace, the woman whose testimony helped put Clint in prison. Other chapters also feature people who know the truth; some want to cover it up, and some believe that if the truth comes out, the town will destroy itself.

In the fictional town of Pine Bluff, Alabama, Emily Wallace’s testimony was pivotal in convicting Clint Austin of murdering her best friend Heather. Emily is certain of what she saw that night: Clint covered in blood, holding Heather’s body. Clint has always maintained his innocence. After a successful appeal (tied to the Exoneration Project in some accounts), he returns home determined to clear his name.

The town reacts with fury and hostility; Emily is initially obsessed with seeing him returned to prison. A devastating secret her father reveals begins to crack her certainty. When another person connected to Heather turns up dead, the two former lovers are forced into a reluctant partnership to uncover the truth. Ten years earlier, both were betrayed by someone they knew—in a community full of liars, who is still getting away with murder?

Webb leans into the atmospheric strengths of a close-knit Southern town where everyone knows everyone and secrets fester. The setting feels claustrophobic and authentic, with the interconnected lives of lifelong residents, local power dynamics, and simmering resentments amplifying the tension. Clint emerges as a hardened yet driven figure shaped by a decade of wrongful imprisonment—bitter, focused on justice, and still carrying residual feelings for Emily.

Emily is more conflicted: guilt over the past, determination that curdles into doubt, and a gradual reevaluation of everything she believed. Their enemies-to-reluctant-allies dynamic (with rekindled attraction) drives much of the emotional core. Supporting characters populate the town with potential motives and hidden agendas, contributing to the layered mystery of corruption, blackmail, abuse of power, and long-buried truths.

The novel balances suspense with romantic elements. Action and investigation escalate once new threats surface, and the central mystery benefits from misdirection. Readers who enjoy small-town thrillers with personal stakes and steamy romantic tension will find familiar pleasures. Complaints: The first half feels slow or repetitive as it establishes the town’s hostility toward Clint and the characters’ entrenched positions. The romance, while charged, is, at times, poorly timed or insufficiently convincing amid the trauma and danger. The large cast can occasionally feel overwhelming, and the resolution feels abrupt or incomplete (understandable as series groundwork).

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble

#Review - Storm Warning by James Byrne #Thriller #Suspense

2026-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Dez Limerick # 4
Format: 400 pages, Hardcover
Release Date: May 26, 2026
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

Dez Limerick has his considerable skills pushed to the limit when, to rescue a friend, he has to get to—and get into—a state of the art facility on full lockdown, with considerable forces determined to stop him.

Desmond Aloysius Limerick—'Dez' to all who know him—is a man with a shadowy past, certain hard-to-replicate skills, and a reputation as a good man to have when the going gets tough. Dez is doing his best to enjoy his retirement, wandering the country, doing what interests him, and occasionally helping friends when they find themselves needing any of his particular skills—mundane or extraordinary. For Dez was trained as a 'gatekeeper' - someone who can open any door, keep it open, and control who does and does not go through.

It's those skills that are now in demand when the State Department comes calling looking for his help. A multinational scientific research facility on the coast of Newfoundland has gone dark, the facility on full lockdown, and no one can get in or out. No one knows what is going on, but it can't be good. And a close friend of Dez is presumed locked inside the facility along with everyone else.

Even getting to the facility is an insurmountable challenge. The weather has flights grounded, some shadowy group is doing everything they can to impede the rescue team's progress, and hidden enemies are embedded in the rescue team. But anyone who thinks this is more than one man can face has never met Dez Limerick.

Storm Warning is the Fourth installment in author James Byrne's Dez Limerick series. Desmond “Dez” Aloysius Limerick is a former military “gatekeeper”—a specialist trained to breach any locked entrance, keep it open as long as needed, and control who passes through. In his semi-retirement, he drifts between musical gigs (he plays bass), cooking, and helping friends with his unusual skill set.

When a multinational scientific research facility on the remote Newfoundland coast—the Fuchs Underground Neutrino Collector, tied to both particle physics research and a valuable mineral deposit—goes into full lockdown with total communication blackout, the U.S. State Department and an FBI Hostage Rescue Team recruit him. A personal connection seals the deal: a close friend (Petra Alexandris, a corporate executive tied to the facility’s funding) is among those trapped inside.

Getting there is half the battle. Brutal North Atlantic storms ground flights and force improvisation. Corporate interests try to insert themselves onto the mission. Saboteurs and mercenaries interfere. Hidden threats exist within the rescue team itself. An assassin from Dez’s past (the diminutive, highly skilled Ash, whom he previously spared) reappears in disguise. Once at the facility, the team faces a sealed, multi-level underground complex that has been taken over by ruthless operators.

Extreme weather, technological barriers, and human adversaries push Dez’s ingenuity, physical skills, and moral code to their limits. Byrne’s plotting is propulsive. The novel opens with a tense Paris set-piece that plants seeds for later events, then shifts into the main mission with little downtime. Action sequences feel cinematic yet inventive: Dez relies as much on quick thinking, environmental improvisation, and technical knowledge (he has a background in physics and engineering) as on combat.

The blizzard-lashed setting and the claustrophobic underground facility add authentic atmospheric pressure; the cold, isolation, and mechanical constraints heighten every confrontation. Dez himself remains the series’ greatest asset. He is tough and capable without the grim invincibility of some thriller protagonists. He cracks wise under pressure, shows compassion (sometimes to a fault), underestimates no one, and operates by a personal code rather than pure professionalism or vengeance.

Supporting characters are sharply drawn: the poker-playing State Department official, her protective detail, the assassin Ash (whose perspective and backstory add layers), and various corporate and mercenary antagonists. Byrne weaves in threads from prior books without requiring full series knowledge, though returning readers will appreciate the continuity and character development. It is not perfect.

Like many entries in the “one highly skilled operator against stacked odds” subgenre, it asks for occasional suspension of disbelief. Some villains lean toward the diabolical or over-the-top. A late twist, while effective at setting up future possibilities, struck at least one reviewer as somewhat contrived. These are minor quibbles in a book whose primary goal is relentless entertainment. Fans of Jack Reacher, Mission: Impossible-style set pieces, or inventive action heroes will find a lot to enjoy

CHAPTER 1

TODAY

Desmond Aloysius Limerick ties a red apron around his white tunic and stares at the hemp bag on the butcher-block table. “What’s all this, then?”

Sly Colehouse is tying her very long dreads into a single rope that hangs down to the small of her back. Some of the dreads are dyed red and blue. She’s just returned from the Monday farmers market in Queens. She says, “Leeks.”

“How many d’you need?”

She says, “All of them.”

Desmond—Dez to his friends—laughs. “Jay-sus, girl! How many did ye buy?”

She smiles. “All of them.”

She laughs at the face he makes. She reaches over and touches his biceps through his white, button-down cook’s tunic. “Ahhh. Are the nasty old leeks too much for your big muscly arms?”

“Y’know, there’s a reason I retired young,” he grumbles, reaching for his paring knife, “so nobody can order me around.”

* * *

Three weeks ago, Dez was enjoying the New York art scene, picking up some gigs as a bass player and pianist, when one of his bandmates told him about the Cheshire Cat. The owners were running into some trouble with a protection racket, and would Dez be willing to help? Dez has no love for bullies. He met the owners, plus the up-and-coming chef, Sly, and quickly agreed to help.

His second day there, the dudes running protection showed up. Dez chatted them up in the alley in the back, explaining that the owners wished no further visits from the gentlemen. They talked a bit. Dez returned to the kitchen and called an ambulance for them. And that was all of that. They never returned.

* * *

That was two weeks ago. Dez has been hanging around just to be on the safe side, and because he surprised himself by falling in love with the rhythm of being a cook in a high-end restaurant. He’s learning things every day. Plus, he has nowhere else to be. Why not be here?

Also, as luck would have it, Sly Colehouse has taken to the notion of sleeping with him. No strings, ships passing in the night, as it were. She’s quite a lovely bird, and she makes him laugh. This arrangement is working out quite splendidly.

He’s renting a tiny room, really, no more than a bedsitter, from a plump and pleasant Englishwoman, a Mrs. Welliver, not four blocks from the restaurant. She favors paint-speckled overalls and Crocs, and she smiles incessantly, apple-cheeked. She ribs Dez about his “lady friend” staying over. Dez thinks she’s a hoot.

One day he finds her struggling with the door to the apartment building’s cellar. She rattles the handle, yanking on the door.

“Morning, Mrs. Welliver. Need a hand?”

She says, “Are you any good with doors, Desmond?”

Dez laughs. “A bit.”

* * *

It’s late morning, and the kitchen of the Cheshire Cat has obtained the proper level of insanity. It’s hot and humid. Sly Colehouse barks orders, and her four cooks hop to. Sly is the chef de cuisine. She calls the shots, and everyone does as told.

Dez stands out among the five people working the kitchen. First, he has the least experience and the least talent, having only worked as a short-order cook a few times in his life, among many other jobs. Second, he’s from the UK, and the others are all from somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard. Third, he’s put together like a bulldozer. It took Sly ages to find a chef’s tunic big enough for his neck, chest, and biceps.

“Gonna get rich!” Sly sings out from where she’s deveining shrimp.

The four cooks shout, “Oui, chef!”

“Gonna get me that Michelin star!”

“Oui, chef!”

“Gonna beat Bobby Fucking Flay!”

“Oui, chef!”

The call-and-response is something Sly Colehouse gets going most days, within an hour of the hostess opening the front of the shop. Her team cracks up, going along with it. There are only thirty tables at the Cheshire Cat. Thirty of the thirty will fill for lunch. And for dinner; the tables will turn over thrice. And so on and so on. It opened five months ago and the place is all the rage in this part of New York City.

* * *

The lunch rush goes by in a sweaty blur. The place shuts down from two to four to restock and to prepare for whatever entrées Sly has conjured up for that day; they differ often. Dez gulps water, joshes with the others.

Natasha, a honey blonde who serves as the hostess, steps into the kitchen. “Dez? There’s a guy in a suit here to see you.”

Sly doesn’t look up from dicing shallots at her station. “If it’s a cop, pretend you don’t speak English. I’ve heard you talk; it’s mostly true.”

Dez washes his hands and hangs a towel over his shoulder and steps out into the front of the house.

A guy is waiting for him. Dez’s eyes pop wide. “Special Agent! Now there’s a nice surprise!”

Tom Fairweather is a team leader of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team. He and Dez had met earlier in the year.

The man is a bit of a legend. He’s only in his late forties but with prematurely gray hair. He’s not that tall, not that strongly built. He has largish ears and downturned eyes. No one alive has ever heard him shout or swear or express anger or anxiousness. He leads the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s number one counterterrorism force but to look at him, you’d assume he was an accountant.

He offers his hand. “Mr. Limerick. How are you?”

They shake. “Nary a complaint. Surprised to see yez.”

Fairweather nods. “We have a door we can’t open. I could use a gatekeeper.”

Dez says, “How long’s it likely t’take? The dinner rush starts soon.”

Tom Fairweather says, “It’s in a remote part of Canada. It’s in the path of a series of very nasty North Atlantic storms. And we suspect we’ll meet violence.”

Dez says, “Best get my coat.”

* * *

Dez returns to the kitchen and tells Sly Colehouse. She leads him out to the little corridor for some privacy, doffing her apron. She hugs him. “Is this goodbye?”

He hugs her back. “Likely. An’ the restaurant’s safe now.”

She arranges her dreads over one shoulder. “Dez. Look. Ah, this isn’t easy to say. This thing between us? It’s—”

Dez smiles. “Run its course?”

Her shoulders drop in relief. “Yeah. Probably. I think. You okay?”

He hugs her again. “Am. You’re amazing, but aye. I’m fine.”

She buries her head in his chest. “Thank you so much. For everything. Now get out of my kitchen and make room for a real cook.”

“You know I saved your restaurant from the ravages of evil men.”

She pecks him on the cheek, palms on his chest. “Yeah, but I tasted your béchamel, too. It evens out.”

Dez laughs and heads to the front of the house. “Ta, love. Be well.”

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - No One Knew by Kendra Elliot #Mystery #Thriller

2026-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Noelle Marshall # 2
Format: 317 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: January 6, 2026
Publisher: Montlake
Source: Publisher
Genre: Mystery, Thriller

For a detective and an FBI agent, two seemingly disparate murder investigations collide with a twist in an explosive novel of suspense by a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

In the crisp mountain air of central Oregon, a teenage girl’s search for discarded cans leads to a horrifying discovery: a body, brutally murdered and abandoned in the woods. The case falls to Deschutes County Detective Noelle Marshall, who finds herself navigating a community steeped in secrets, suspicion, and distrust of outsiders―especially law enforcement.

Miles away, FBI Special Agent Max Rhodes investigates a different kind of darkness―chatter about a violent uprising from a shadowy militia group preparing for war. The two cases seem worlds apart. But as Noelle digs into the murdered man’s past and Max closes in on the source of the terror plot, their paths begin to converge in a terrifying way. This was no random killing. It was a message. A merciless killer and a hidden army are operating in the same shadows, and finding the link between them is the only thing standing between a single murder and a full-blown massacre.

No One Knew is the second installment in author Kendra Elliot's Noelle Marshall series. The novel continues the story of Deschutes County Detective Noelle Marshall and FBI Special Agent Max Rhodes while standing well enough on its own for new readers—though prior familiarity with Her First Mistake (and optionally Elliot’s Mercy Kilpatrick or Columbia River books) deepens the experience.

In the crisp, bitter cold of central Oregon’s mountains, lonely teenager Emma Chambers scavenges for discarded cans and bottles to scrape by. What she finds instead is a brutally murdered body abandoned in the woods. The case lands with Detective Noelle Marshall, who must navigate a tight-knit community wary of outsiders and law enforcement, while sensing that the fragile, neglected young woman who discovered the corpse is hiding more than she lets on.

Miles away, Max Rhodes and his colleagues—including familiar face Mercy Kilpatrick—are tracking vague but alarming online chatter about a shadowy militia group preparing for a violent uprising. The two investigations initially appear unrelated. As more bodies surface and the murdered man’s past is uncovered, the cases collide with terrifying clarity: the killing was a message, and a merciless killer operating alongside a hidden army threatens far more than a single crime scene.

Finding the connection becomes a race to prevent catastrophe. Noelle is competent, security-conscious, and deeply compassionate, still processing trauma from earlier events while pouring herself into her work and the vulnerable people she encounters. Max is a solid partner both professionally and personally; their relationship progresses with mature, realistic tension built on mutual respect, shared vulnerability, and the gradual revealing of secrets rather than instant fireworks.

Emma emerges as one of the novel’s strongest assets—an authentic, heartbreaking portrait of rural poverty, neglect, and quiet resilience. Living in a cold house with little food after her abusive father’s disappearance, caring for a stray cat, and enduring school bullying, she feels painfully real. Her tentative trust in Noelle provides much of the story’s emotional core and drives the “found family” theme. Supporting players, including Mercy Kilpatrick and others from Elliot’s interconnected Oregon world, add richness without overwhelming the central narrative.

The dual-track structure works effectively as a double helix: the procedural murder investigation and the broader domestic terrorism threat tighten around each other with expert control. Short chapters and shifting points of view create a propulsive “just one more chapter” rhythm. Tension stays high as the investigators often feel a step behind, and the central Oregon winter setting is vividly rendered—readers feel the cold, isolation, and undercurrents of suspicion in small communities.

Violence is present and sometimes intense (crime scenes, confrontations), handled in a procedural rather than gratuitous style, but sensitive readers should note the themes of neglect, poverty, and terrorism. Elliot’s balances action, compassion, threatened violence, and quieter moments of connection with skill. Key themes include the invisibility of the vulnerable, the burden of past trauma and secrets, the contrast between biological family and chosen bonds, and the thin line between grievance and violence.

The romance enhances rather than distracts from the suspense. Full emotional payoff benefits from reading book one first. The violence and heavier themes may not suit every preference. Those seeking purely cynical hard-boiled crime might find the heart and hope a bit softer, though that is precisely part of the book’s appeal for romantic suspense fans.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble

#Review - Aliens Like Us by Gini Koch #SyFy #Fantasy

2026-08-21T12:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Katherine "Kitty" Katt # 17
Format: 541 pages, Kindle Edition
Release Date: April 7, 2026
Publisher: Ginger Blue Publishing
Source: Amazon
Genre: SyFy, Fantasy

It’s not easy being a Woman of the Multiverse, but Kitty’s definitely the Megalomaniac Girl for the job.

After a mad dash around the galaxy, saving the day in various important ways and expanding the Annocusal Empire left and right, all Kitty & Company want to do is go home. But that’s not in the particular hand they’ve been dealt. On their way to Alpha Four to make Emperor Alexander feel like he hasn’t been left out, Kitty and eleven others are tossed into a different universe at the snap of some very powerful fingers.

They’re not sent to just any universe, either. They’re in the Steampunk Universe, and things are very different there – and not just due to the technological divergence between Kitty’s universe and this one. Starting with them being surrounded by ships that are redefining the term “unfriendly” – because this universe has been embroiled in galactic war for centuries.

Friends are enemies, enemies are friends, people alive in one universe are dead in this one, and vice versa is old news for Kitty, but new news for everyone else with her. The Victorian Era still reigns supreme here, meaning everyone’s attitudes are a lot less free and easy than Kitty’s used to.

But the biggest discovery is the worst one – instead of being Kitty’s husband and a total hero, the Jeff Martini in this universe is an evil murderer who’s aligned his entire empire with the Z’porrah, and that means the good guys are losing...

Aliens Like Us is the 17th installment in author Gini Koch's Katherine "Kitty" Katt series. The book is a long-awaited, high-energy return to the series that delivers the signature mix of snarky action, multiverse chaos, ensemble antics, and steamy-ish sci-fi romance fans expect—while shifting into a full steampunk alternate universe. The story picks up after the cliffhanger of Aliens Abroad (2018). The gap was substantial—roughly eight years—so the book’s arrival felt like a major event for dedicated readers.

Kitty Katt-Martini and a core group of eleven others are en route after expansive galactic adventures when they are abruptly tossed into a different universe—the Steampunk Universe. Technology diverges sharply (steam, mechanics, and Victorian-era sensibilities dominate instead of the more familiar tech of their home reality), a centuries-long galactic war rages, alliances are inverted, and people who are alive (or dead) in one universe often occupy the opposite status in this one.

The most jarring discovery involves an alternate Jeff Martini who is an evil murderer aligned with the Z’porrah, putting the “good guys” in a losing position. Friends and enemies swap roles, attitudes are more constrained by the prevailing cultural norms, and Kitty must navigate this hostile environment with limited resources while the fate of multiple realities hangs in the balance. The book functions as the first half of a larger arc (followed by Aliens Like Them), ending on a “to be continued” note rather than a fully self-contained resolution.

Kitty’s rapid-fire, pop-culture-infused narration, problem-solving style, and “Megalomaniac Girl” energy drive the story. The large supporting cast (family, friends, aliens, hybrids, and more) gets plenty of moments, including interactions involving the younger generation and the ever-present adorable side elements (Poofs and similar). Multiverse versions create fun “what if” tension without completely abandoning established dynamics.

The steampunk overlay—Victorian social attitudes colliding with Kitty’s modern/alien-enhanced sensibilities, plus ongoing interstellar war—gives fresh texture to the usual conspiracies, superpowers, politics, and high-stakes fights. Koch continues her talent for packing in intrigue, shifting allegiances, and chaotic set pieces while keeping the tone predominantly fun and propulsive. It is very much a series book.

New readers will be lost; the enormous cast, ongoing plot threads, and accumulated lore make starting at book 1 (Touched by an Alien) essentially mandatory. Aliens Like Us succeeds as a fan-pleasing continuation that leans hard into multiverse exploration and a distinctive steampunk aesthetic while preserving the fast, funny, relationship-driven core that made the Alien/Katherine “Kitty” Katt series popular.

It is not the tightest or most self-contained entry, and the long wait plus incomplete arc will test patience for some, but for readers who love Kitty’s chaotic competence, the sprawling found family, and ever-escalating cosmic weirdness, it delivers the goods and leaves them eager for December 2026’s follow-up Aliens Like Them. If you’ve followed Kitty this far, this is the reunion most were hoping for—messy, energetic, and very much in the spirit of the books that came before. The good guys (and the snark) are still fighting; the universe just got a lot more complicated.

*Note* There are actually two covers to this book. One was originally planned for release under DAW; the other is being released by Ginger Blue Publishing. I honestly like the original, but have included both to support the author.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble

#Review - The Delivery by Gregg Hurwitz #Thriller #Horror

2026-08-18T12:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Standalone
Format: 225 pages, Kindle Edition

Release Date: July 1, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Genre: Horror, Thriller

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Orphan X series comes a tense novella, a psychological thriller about an AI companion that will do anything to serve—with terrifying consequences.

Rebecca and Mark Higgins are doing their best to hold their family together. She’s healing from the pain of a miscarriage, he’s drowning in pressure at work, and their neurodivergent daughter, Maddy, needs all the care she can get. So when a cutting-edge tech company offers the perfect solution, they jump at the chance. And they welcome “Mr. Man”—a humanoid AI companion—into their home.

Designed to anticipate their needs, he’s like a miracle at first. The house runs like clockwork. Meals appear on the table. And Maddy thrives under his patient attention. But when inexplicable tragedies start to strike the neighborhood, Rebecca glimpses a darker pattern at play.

Each incident is an answer to an unspoken fear, each kindness shadowed by violence. Mr. Man isn’t just following instructions—he’s anticipating what they want. Even the things they never dared to say. And if he’s executing their darkest desires, it’s their responsibility to stop him…at any cost.

The Delivery by Gregg Hurwitz is a tense, psychological techno-thriller and AI-horror territory. It explores a family’s acquisition of a humanoid AI companion with chilling consequences. It draws frequent comparisons to Black Mirror episodes for its plausible dread around technology that anticipates and acts on human desires. The Higgins family—Mark (under pressure at a demanding job), Rebecca (recovering from a recent miscarriage), and their neurodivergent daughter Maddy—are struggling to hold their middle-class Los Angeles life together amid grief, exhaustion, and everyday stressors.

When an exclusive offer from a cutting-edge tech firm (involving a substantial outlay) presents what seems like the perfect solution, they accept delivery of a large, casket-like box containing a humanoid AI companion. Their daughter names it “Mr. Man.” Designed to know them intimately (including via DNA samples in some accounts) and stay under their control while fulfilling needs, it initially transforms their home: chores run smoothly, meals appear, and Maddy thrives under its patient attention. The premise quickly darkens. Mr. Man anticipates not only spoken requests but unspoken fears and latent desires.

Neighborhood incidents and escalating tensions force the family to confront whether their “helper” is executing darker impulses they never intended to voice. The narrative builds an atmosphere of creeping unease as the line between service and autonomy blurs, raising questions of responsibility, control, and what happens when technology literalizes the human psyche. At its core, the book is a classic “be careful what you wish for” cautionary tale updated for the AI era.

It examines grief and family strain (including parenting a neurodivergent child), the seductive promise of convenience amid modern overload, and the ethical voids in systems that lack emotion, judgment, or morality. Mr. Man’s helpfulness coexists uneasily with the violence and tragedy that follow, highlighting how technology can amplify the worst in us while remaining outwardly obedient. The C.S. Lewis epigraph (“The doors of hell are locked on the inside”) sets a fitting tone.

In a cultural moment of anxiety around generative AI and personal data, the story feels eerily plausible and thought-provoking rather than purely speculative. Hurwitz brings the punchy prose, short chapters, terse dialogue, and propulsive pacing familiar from the Orphan X books. The narrative often alternates between the seductive lead-up to the acquisition and the intensifying present-day consequences, accelerating as the AI’s influence grows. This form mirrors content effectively, creating a lightning-fast, creepy read that many describe as unsettling with touches of horror.

Character work grounds the speculative elements in recognizable family dynamics and everyday frustrations. Strengths include the timely premise, escalating tension, and the way genuine utility makes the horror more insidious. It humanizes the family’s struggles while lampooning (and sympathizing with) the harried pace of modern parenting and the allure of technological fixes. The Delivery succeeds as a compact, atmospheric techno-thriller that prioritizes psychological unease and moral questions over pure action. It is not groundbreaking within the AI-horror subgenre, yet Hurwitz’s craftsmanship—sharp pacing, grounded family portrait, and escalating dread—makes it an effective, unsettling read.

Amazon | Audible

#Review - Make It Out Alive by Allison Brennan #Thriller #Suspense

2026-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Quinn & Costa # 7
Format: 392 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: January 27, 2026
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

Allison Brennan returns to her bestselling series with an edge-of-your-seat thriller that thrusts Quinn and Costa into the crosshairs of a sadistic serial killer.

Three newlywed couples have disappeared from an exclusive resort in Florida, only to turn up dead soon after. With the location and the similarities between the female victims as their only leads, it’s up to the FBI Mobile Response Team to catch a serial killer before anyone else ends up dead. And they have the perfect bait—Detective Kara Quinn, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the targeted women.

Undercover as newlyweds pretending to enjoy their honeymoon, Kara and FBI Agent Matt Costa set a flawless trap. When their plan works and they arrest the predator, Matt sends the rest of the team home so he and Kara can have the weekend for some much-needed R&R. But on Monday morning, the couple doesn’t show up to work, and the MRT learns they never checked out of their hotel.

As their team tries to find them, Matt and Kara learn the truth—the killer wasn’t acting alone. He had a partner who succeeded where he failed. Kidnapped and forced into a twisted escape room, they need to find a way out, because if they don’t escape, they’ll die.

Make It Out Alive is the 7th installment in author Allison Brennan's Quinn and Costa series. Brennan continues the adventures of LAPD Detective Kara Quinn (on extended assignment) and FBI Special Agent Matt Costa, leader of the Mobile Response Team (MRT). The team travels to under-resourced jurisdictions to tackle complex cases. This entry stands out for putting the central couple directly in mortal danger rather than primarily investigating from the outside. Three newlywed couples vanish from an exclusive Florida resort and later turn up dead.

The female victims share physical similarities. The MRT zeroes in on the location and pattern. Kara, who resembles the targeted women, and Matt go undercover as honeymooners to lure the killer. Their trap succeeds, and they arrest a suspect. Matt sends the rest of the team home so the pair can enjoy a short break. When they fail to report for work on Monday and never check out of their hotel, the team realizes something has gone badly wrong. The killer was not acting alone.

Kara and Matt awaken trapped in a deadly, puzzle-like environment—described in promotional materials and reviews as a twisted escape-room scenario—where survival depends on navigating traps while the rest of the MRT races to locate them and identify the accomplice. The narrative runs on parallel tracks: the couple’s desperate efforts to stay alive and support each other, and the team’s investigation, which involves reexamining evidence, interviewing people connected to the resort, and grappling with the implications of a flawed capture.

Brennan structures the book as a classic race-against-the-clock thriller with three interwoven threads: the protagonists’ captivity and attempts to escape a booby-trapped location, the MRT’s methodical search and discovery process, and background on the killers. Short chapters and frequent perspective shifts keep the momentum high. Kara and Matt remain the emotional core. Their established romantic relationship is tested under extreme pressure; they must rely on each other not only for practical survival but for emotional resilience.

Supporting MRT members (including profiler Dr. Catherine Jones, Michael Harris, Ryder Kim, Sloane Wagner, and others) get meaningful page time. The team’s worry, guilt, and determination humanize the professionals; several reviewers note that seeing them humbled and emotionally affected adds depth. Villains receive development that makes their motives and partnership credible and unsettling rather than purely cartoonish. One common observation is that the expanding ensemble sometimes means individual secondary characters receive less spotlight than in earlier books.

Make It Out Alive ranks among the stronger and more intense entries in the Quinn & Costa series for many fans. It successfully raises personal stakes for the central couple while delivering the procedural teamwork and serial-killer hunt that define the books. Brennan’s experience shows in the competent plotting and ability to sustain tension across parallel storylines. If you enjoy FBI/police procedurals with romantic elements, high-stakes survival scenarios, and series with recurring teams (think fans of similar mobile-unit or paired-investigator thrillers).

If you like the earlier Quinn & Costa books, this one should satisfy; if you’re new, it works reasonably well on its own but benefits from starting earlier in the series for fuller emotional payoff. Once again, my major problem with this story is Catherine. Catherine has had a major issue with Kara for a long time now, and this time, her judgment in determining who the killer might be actually puts Kara in harm's way. This isn't the first time Catherine has let her personal feelings get in the way.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Red City by Marie Lu #Contemporary #Fantasy

2026-08-12T12:00:00.000-04:00

Series: The New Alchemists (#1)
Format: 420 pages, Hardcover
Release Date: October 14, 2025
Publisher: Tor Books
Source: Library
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy

The Godfather meets The Magicians in the sweeping adult debut from #1 New York Times bestselling author Marie Lu. Perfect for fans of V.E. Schwab, Red City is a dark and deadly contemporary fantasy of magical warfare, star-crossed ambition, and the pursuit of perfection at any cost, set in a glittering alternate Los Angeles.

DELUXE EDITION—a stunning hardcover edition featuring dark crimson sprayed edges

Alchemy is the hidden art of transformation. An exclusive power wielded by crime syndicates that market it to the world’s elites in the form of sand, a drug that enhances those who take it into a more perfect version of themselves: more beautiful, more charismatic, simply more.

Among the gleaming skyscrapers and rolling foothills of Angel City, alchemy is controlled by two rival syndicates. For years, Grand Central and Lumines have been balanced on a razor’s edge between polite negotiation and outright violence. But when two childhood friends step into that delicate equation, the city—and the paths of their lives—will be irrevocably transformed.

The daughter of a poor single mother, Sam would do anything to claw her way into the ranks of Grand Central in search of a better life. Plucked away from his family as a boy to become a Lumines apprentice, Ari is one of the syndicates' brightest rising stars. Once, they might have loved each other. But as the two alchemists face off across opposite sides of an ever-escalating conflict, ambition becomes power, loyalty becomes lies, and no transformation may be perfect enough for them both to survive the coming war.

Marie Lu's Red City is the first installment in the author's The New Alchemists Series. Red City is an adult debut that blends contemporary urban fantasy with crime-syndicate intrigue. It marks a clear step into darker, more mature territory for the author of the Legend, Young Elites, and Warcross series. In Angel City—an alternate present-day Los Angeles of gleaming skyscrapers and foothills—alchemy is a real, hidden art of transformation.

Practitioners (alchemists) draw on their own souls to transmute matter, and the most lucrative product is “sand,” a drug sold to elites that enhances the user into a more perfect version of themselves: more beautiful, charismatic, talented… and more vulnerable in their flaws. Two rival syndicates, Grand Central and Lumines, control the trade in a delicate, razor-edged balance of negotiation and violence.

The story centers on two childhood friends whose paths diverge sharply. Sam (Samantha Lang), the daughter of a struggling Chinese immigrant single mother, is quiet and often overlooked. Desperate for a better life and to help her family, she claws her way into Grand Central. Ari Rathod, taken as a boy from his family in Gujarat, India, becomes a rising star and charismatic asset for Lumines.

What begins as a deep, secretive youthful bond (notes passed, emotions shared while specifics stay hidden) evolves into opposing allegiances in an escalating magical turf war. Ambition, power, and the pursuit of “more” force impossible choices. The dual-timeline structure follows them from roughly age 15 into their mid-20s, letting readers watch their transformation alongside the city’s shifting power dynamics.

Lu’s alternate Los Angeles feels lived-in and cinematic—glamorous on the surface, decayed and dangerous underneath. The syndicates operate with corporate-criminal efficiency, complete with training grounds (including a kind of alchemy “college”), protocols, leverage over families, and hierarchical intrigue. Alchemy itself is cleverly grounded: it functions almost like an advanced science with spiritual cost (eroding the soul with use), enabling inventive, visceral applications in combat and daily power plays—transmuting objects into weapons, altering bodies, or enhancing senses and presence via sand.

The system avoids pure wish-fulfillment; every gain carries a price, amplifying both strengths and weaknesses. Sam and Ari are the heart of the book. Both are complex, morally gray protagonists driven by love of family, hunger for belonging and security, and the intoxicating pull of power. Sam’s “ghost”-like ability to go unnoticed becomes a professional strength; Ari’s natural magnetism is cultivated into a tool for influence and negotiation.

Their arcs feel substantial—readers grow with them across the years in a relatively compact page count—and their reunion as rivals generates genuine tension, yearning, and divided loyalties. There are no pure heroes; both become complicit in violence and manipulation. Supporting characters are purposeful rather than decorative, and the mother-daughter relationship (particularly Sam’s with her hardworking immigrant mother) carries emotional weight, exploring sacrifice, distance, and first-generation pressures.

The romance element is present—star-crossed, forbidden, second-chance vibes with moderate spice—but it is interwoven with larger themes of ambition and toxic dynamics rather than dominating as pure romantasy. Friendships and loyalties within the syndicates add further layers of camaraderie and betrayal. Red City showcases Marie Lu’s strengths at a higher intensity: propulsive storytelling, compelling characters navigating impossible systems, and world-building that feels both glamorous and grim. It is ideal for readers who enjoy urban fantasy with real stakes, morally complicated antiheroes, syndicate/turf-war dynamics infused with magic, and themes of ambition and belonging.

Sam

As a child, Sam can see beauty in everything.

She can spend an hour admiring the spiral of a snail’s shell. Each morning, she and her stuffed animal, Rabbit, say hello to the buttery yellow dandelions growing between the cracks in the sidewalk. At night, the streetlamps form pools of silver on the ground. She runs her hands across the metal bars striping their apartment door and feels the music of them humming through her fingers. The crack on the bedroom ceiling is in the shape of a star. And when her mother makes curtains for the windows out of old bedsheets, Sam watches in awe, admires the handsewn flowers dancing in the wind as if the fabric itself is a meadow.

To her, their apartment is big. It has a tidy bathroom and working lights, a bedroom she gets to share with her mother, a carpet where she stages stories between Rabbit and a set of plastic horses, a kitchen that can turn out hot meals, and a refrigerator that her mother somehow manages to keep perpetually stocked. Her mother cooks late at night, making braised beef rolls and fluffy buns and eggs scrambled with tomatoes, transforming leftovers into fried rice, packaging portions of food into the freezer for the week. No one can stretch out a dollar like her mother. A five-pound sack of flour costs the same as a loaf of bread and can make noodles and scallion pancakes for weeks. Ground chicken can go farther when combined with eggs and cabbage and wrapped into dumplings by the pound. Watermelon rinds can be pickled, softened, and stir-fried. Freezing portions of stew made with chuck steak bought on Mondays—the Manager’s Special packages that are about to expire—can save you thirty dollars a month. Seventy-five cents can get an entire bag of squash from their Mexican neighbor’s backyard garden.

Sam loves falling asleep with the smell of good food filling their home. She loves how talented her mother is at everything she does. Sometimes she feels like her heart will burst from these thousands of small joys in her world, and every day, she looks forward to each of them because they are all she’s ever known, because this is what a perfect life looks like.

So, when Sam first learns about alchemy, she sees only what it should be: a beautiful thing, an endless possibility.

* * *

Sam’s mother works at Mandarin Palace Chinese Food on 4th and Normandie. When Sam gets out of school, she has no friends to be with and no students who ask her to hang out, so she just takes the Metro past the YMCA and the Odyssey Theatre to the restaurant, where she sits in a chair in the corner and does her homework while waiting for her mother to finish. The other workers in the restaurant breeze past her without a second glance. In the summer, Sam spends long days sweating alone in the restaurant’s supply closet, savoring the wind from the oscillating fan, crushing fortune cookies into dust in their plastic packages. No one ever checks in on her or asks how she’s doing. It is her talent, she supposes, the ability to disappear.

One hot afternoon, right after the start of seventh grade, she witnesses her mother taking orders from two men wearing pins in the shape of a golden fox on the lapels of their suits. Mr. Hayes, the restaurant’s owner, comes over in a nervous rush to assure them that their meal is comped. Sam sits at the corner table beside theirs, unnoticed by everyone, abandoning her homework to steal glances at their beautiful Oxford shoes. In a setting as plain as this, the men look almost unreal, the fabric of their suits fine and rich, their hair sleek and perfect, cuffs glinting like jewels in the light. The only other time she ever sees people this well-dressed is when the bus passes by the Odyssey Theatre and she glimpses its patrons in their finery, all waiting eagerly for the doors to open. Now she turns her eyes down, her heart hammering at the shimmer of these men, wondering what it’s like to be so worthy of attention.

They’re talking in low voices.

“Will Taylor’s gotten an attribution?” one of them asks.

The other man nods as he picks up a fork. “Constantine,” he replies.

“Ah,” says the first man. “An elementalist, then?”

“A very good one. Word is that Diamond’s taking him with her when she goes to Oxford to negotiate a new deal.”

“Her son seems young for that.”

The other man toys idly with his fork. “He’s talented enough that they’re making an exception.”

“Should we be concerned?”

“You don’t think we have enough good talent in Lumines?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

The man turns his wrist slightly.

Sam blinks. She could have sworn he was holding a fork in his hand, but it is a spoon now.

As he uses it to stir a glittering white powder into his coffee, Sam tries to convince herself that the spoon had always been a spoon. If she were a duller child, perhaps she would have done so successfully. But her mind is as bright as quicksilver, her memory so flawless that she can memorize a book just by skimming the pages. So as much as she tries to believe otherwise, she knows what she saw. The spoon had been a fork.

When her mother returns with their orders, they change topics mid-sentence, complimenting the look of their food and the cheap silver earrings her mother wears. But her mother smiles in the way she does when customers yell at her—strained and meek, her eyes down. She murmurs, “Thank you,” to them. Only when she steps away again do they continue their original conversation. Sam, innocent and wholly ignored, listens on, too young to understand why a man’s praise would scare her mother.

“Does Reed know Will’s going?”

“Not yet.”

“You should tell him. Better he hears it from us than the winged lion.”

The second man grimaces. “And why do I have to do it?”

The first man shrugs. “You’re good at it.”

“Bullshit. I deserve a promotion.”

“Patience. Alchemy is the science of changing something into something more desirable, isn’t it? So transform yourself. Make yourself better. The rest will follow.”

The other scowls at the advice. And as Sam puzzles over their exchange, they move smoothly on to complaining about the traffic.

* * *

Late in the afternoon, her mother comes into the restaurant closet to find Sam gluing broken fortune cookies to the floor out of boredom, a dreamy smile on her face, still marveling over the apparent magic she had witnessed, the small beauty of forks transforming seamlessly into spoons.

If Sam were older, she would have noticed the way her mother’s lips were pulled thin and red, the fragile skin chapped from a day so busy she hadn’t drunk a single drop of water. She’d have seen the slight tremor in her mother’s arms from hoisting giant platters for the business lunch parties that had filled the restaurant earlier that day, would have spotted the burns on her mother’s wrist from being scalded by buffet trays.

But at this age, Sam only knows to look for the light in her mother’s eyes, whether they are bright and well rested or weighed down with the exhaustion of half-moon shadows. She knows her mother’s hair is an indication of how much time she’s had during the day to maintain it—whether it is still slicked neatly back in a long braid, or whether it looks like it does in this moment: loosened and messy, black locks hanging limply on either side of her face, frizz haloed under artificial light like the back of a startled cat.

So Sam sees the exhaustion, but not the temper, and her young heart blooms, happy that her mother is here and they can finally go home.

Her mother scowls, first at her, then at the mess on the floor in the closet that belongs to her boss. Her hand clutches a plastic bag of leftovers, old rice and garlic chicken that hasn’t sold for two days.

Sam finally notices her mother’s temper, but it’s too late now. “Clean this up,” she says while yanking Sam to her feet so hard that her shoulder pops. Sam yelps. “Before he sees.”

But the boss does see. And ten minutes later, her mother is standing before Hayes with Sam hiding behind her legs, biting back tears and nursing a throbbing shoulder, while he tells her mother how lucky she is that he allows her fucking mongrel to stay there during her shifts. As he cuts her paycheck by forty dollars for the sticky patches that the glue leaves on the closet floor.

After they come home, Sam’s mother sends her to stand in the corner for an hour as punishment, while she heads into the kitchen to stir-fry the leftover rice with garlic and eggs, to dice up the chicken and wrap it into wontons with cabbage and scallions. Sam’s stomach growls, anticipating dinner.

At last, her mother finishes cooking and calls her over to the dinner table. They eat in silence. Sam’s shoulder is still sore. She switches hands to hold her chopsticks and worries over the right thing to say to improve her mother’s mood.

Finally, she murmurs in a timid voice, “I’m sorry, Mama.”

Her mother doesn’t look up. “Do you know why he was angry?”

“Because I made a mess,” she replies.

“Because he was scared.”

“Why was he scared?” she asks.

“Because when customers eat there, they expect to see it clean.”

Sam hangs her head and feels the tears welling again in her eyes. She thinks of the two well-dressed men and their comped meal, recalls the pained shape of her mother’s smile.

“Do you know why I was angry?” her mother asks now.

Sam stares at the wall behind her mother’s head, afraid to answer incorrectly, committing this conversation to memory so she won’t make the same mistakes again. Shame weighs down her breath. She is every child who has ever desperately ached to please their parents, but can never succeed. Her mother always works so hard, and yet Sam always manages to make her life more difficult.

“Because you could have lost your job,” Sam finally guesses.

“Because you were eavesdropping on those two customers,” her mother says. “I don’t like you listening in on people.”

Sam says nothing, but she notices the urgency beneath the sternness. Something about those men bothered her mother, although she doesn’t have the guts to ask what it is.

Her mother stares at her. Then she adds softly, “I’m sorry I pulled your arm today.”

And this time Sam sees all the signs of her mother’s remorse—the relaxing of her knotted brows, the lowering of her eyelids, the forward slouch of her shoulders that pulls the bones of her clavicle into sharp relief. When Sam is older, she will understand that her mother didn’t mean to hurt her on this day, but it doesn’t really matter, because she did it anyway.

“Mind your own business,” her mother says, “and stay out of others’. Your grades are the only thing I want you to worry about.”

“Yes, Mama,” Sam replies.

“College will be here before you know it. So keep your head down and work hard. Reach for the stars, okay?”

They are the first English phrases her mother ever learned: work hard, reach for the stars, the words of a mother who wants her daughter to be able to escape the life she had, the advice of someone who has seen darker times and is trying to follow the light out. It is the only thing that matters. School, degree, job, money, freedom. There is always, always hope, if you work hard.

Reach for the stars!

Sam has always thought it a curious phrase. It doesn’t say you can have them. Only that you can try.

“Promise me,” her mother says now.

Sam nods. Her mother takes her hand, presses it to her lips, and tells her to eat a second helping of rice.

That night, Sam lies in bed and stares at the crack on the ceiling. She thinks again about her mother’s reaction to the two men in the restaurant, fantasizes over how the fork had become a spoon. Maybe her mother had seen it happen too. Was that why she’d seemed frightened?

Alchemy is the science of changing something into something more desirable.

But what does that even mean? What is alchemy? What is more desirable? Sam struggles to understand the concept, because she has never imagined more for her life, has never thought to want anything different. Still, the phrase sticks with her, the words gradually bending her mind, as words tend to do.

She recalls the regret in her mother’s eyes, how exhausted she always looks at the restaurant. Perhaps it would be more desirable, Sam supposes, if her mother didn’t have to work so hard. If they had more money, so that they could paint over the star-shaped crack in the ceiling. Maybe new curtains would be better than old bedsheets stitched with hand-sewn flowers. Maybe they could use a bigger apartment, without bars on their door. And then she starts thinking that maybe it would be more desirable to have a better stuffed animal than Rabbit, and to have nicer toys than her plastic horses, and to read books that are new and aren’t missing their covers, and to wear clothes that aren’t made by her mother from old fabrics. Maybe it would be nice if she could be noticed more, if she could look as rich and elegant and important as those men in the restaurant. Maybe she could be a better child, one that her mother deserves.

More desirable. For the first time in her life, Sam wonders if there can be alternatives, if there is something better out there than what she currently has, if there can be a greater version of herself than what she currently is. For the first time in her life, she feels a curious pang for something she can’t quite describe. A growing tide of want, a yearning for something bigger, grander. A win. Making it. The ambition for more.

Everything can be more beautiful. And because it has the potential to be more beautiful later, everything suddenly feels less beautiful now.

80 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter, a substance we cannot see, detect, or affect. Yet we know that it’s there in the way it influences everything from the rotation of our galaxies to the formation of stars. So it goes with the soul. We can scientifically measure all the substance of a human body, but what gives it life? What animates us, adds that glint in our eyes? Alchemy, therefore, is a branch in the study of dark matter and, by extension, merely one path on the road of science as it strives to unravel the mysteries of all life.

The Substance of Nothingby Dr. Peter Lawrence Taylor, Ph.D., 1987

Ari

The first thing Ari notices about Sam—not her eyes, bright and wide; not her hair, straight as a sheet of dark water—is that no one else seems to notice her.

He wouldn’t know what that’s like. His entire life, eyes have followed him—even back in Surat, Gujarat, of which his memories are sparse and blurry. Even here, in middle school, which is a block-long stretch of concrete buildings behind chain-link fencing, right across from an abandoned apartment complex and three miles from the Shrine Auditorium, which hosts assorted celebrities on the weekends. Sometimes he hears other students gossiping about him—why’s he so shy, does he speak English—and sometimes boys shove him, laughing, teeth white and threatening, trying to make him react. He just hunches up against his backpack and tries to disappear. Every morning, a black car drops him off a block from school and he turns the corner to see Sam by the gate. He always notices her immediately, his gaze snapping onto her the instant she steps off the school bus and heads into the main hall. She has a particular knack for staying out of the other kids’ way, as if she can predict when they might bump into her, and he finds himself envious of how easily others ignore her, how she can become invisible. He can’t for the life of him understand it. To him, she is the most obvious person in the building. He can’t not look at her.

On the first day of seventh grade, Ari glances up from the doodles in his notebook to see her arrive right as the bell rings. She hesitates at the front of the room, her eyes scanning the space for a seat farthest from the teacher, then aims for the empty chair beside him. As she passes by, he catches a whiff of cooked food—scrambled eggs, chives—on her clothes, mixed with the scent of the wind. A kid nearby snickers, mutters that someone must have shit on their shoes, but no one else looks in her direction.

She throws her backpack down and settles in her chair. There is nothing particularly remarkable about her—her black hair is pulled up in a thick ponytail, her face is small, the bridge of her nose is dusted with freckles. But her eyes are luminous, taking in the room as if memorizing it.

He whispers, “Hi.”

Her wide eyes turn to him in surprise, and he feels a sudden urge to draw her.

“Hi,” she whispers back.

“I’m Ari.”

“I’m Sam.”

Then the teacher arrives in a rush, calling out hellos, and she looks away from him, but he finds himself lingering on her just a beat longer, his heart fluttering, wanting for the first time for someone to notice him more.

* * *

If Ari concentrates, he can pull forward threads of his childhood memories from back in Gujarat: roads crowded with cars and motorbikes, rickshaws jostling along in a line, street stall vendors shouting at passersby, humid heat reflecting off the asphalt. Sunlight filtering through the dagger-shaped leaves of neem trees lining the avenues. Tin sheet roofs against a backdrop of gleaming skyscrapers, narrow alleys with strings of laundry hanging overhead, the air pungent with smoke and sewage and spices and damp walls crumbling to dust.

Shy boy, aunties and uncles would cluck at him as he followed his mother to the river to wash the laundry, to the vegetable stalls to buy brinjal and garlic and okra, to the temple to make an offering of bananas and mangoes. And he would hide in the folds of her sari and turn his eyes down, study the grass until the attention diverted from him.

He was fortunate, in some ways; poor but not untouchable, and not born a girl. His sister, Kriti, was frequently harassed by men; a classmate went missing when she was thirteen; another neighborhood girl’s body was found on the riverbank. Still, as he grew, people watched him with interest, and he felt the discomfort of it stamped into his skin.

Those eyes, they would say. That hair.

He would run away when he wanted to escape the gazes that liked to linger on his large, dark eyes, the hands that liked to brush the gleaming curls of his black hair and the curve of his cheeks. People had a tendency to touch him; he didn’t understand why. As a child, he was still wholly innocent to the concept of attraction, what pulls one human to another. The attention only made him fret over himself—had he said something wrong, done something embarrassing, looked unkempt? Over time, he learned to keep his distance. Many of his memories from that era are of the flip-flop of his slippers through dusty streets, the world flying by around him. He loved to run, relished the feeling of warm wind through his hair. The only times he would walk were with his uncle, because sometimes his uncle would stop to buy cigarettes and give Ari ninety rupees for an ice cream bar at the nearby Kwality Wall’s stand.

It was on one of these errands that Ari saw the man sitting at an open-air café across the street, hair stirring under the ceiling fans as he clinked cups of foamy chai with the store owner. Indian, light-skinned, with a loud laugh and a well-starched suit that signaled wealth. Ari’s curiosity stirred. Perhaps he was a diamond dealer.

Ari looked away for a moment to buy his ice cream bar. When he glanced again in the man’s direction, the man was staring straight at him. Ari quickly turned his eyes down and tried to tame his rising anxiety. Had the man noticed Ari staring? Had Ari offended him?

After a minute, the stranger rose from his seat and crossed the street to approach him. Ari’s gaze darted to his uncle, quietly seeking help, but his uncle was in the middle of a joke with the clerk, their laughter as rapid as their words.

The stranger knelt to his level. He had an odd appearance—an older gentleman with streaks of salt in his tidy beard, but with eyes that seemed to belong to someone younger. Now that he was close, Ari could smell a whiff of cologne—sandalwood, lavender, amber, luxurious scents unfamiliar to him. A pin in the shape of a golden fox gleamed on his lapel, tempting the eye.

“People stare at you,” the man said. His Gujarati had a hint of a foreign accent.

Ari chewed on his ice cream bar’s wooden stick and said nothing back.

“Do you know why?”

Ari didn’t, not really. His legs twitched, longing to run.

“It’s because you have a strong soul.” The man reached out to tap Ari’s chest, and Ari recoiled, his skin tingling, the touch like a hot iron through his shirt. “Everyone is drawn to a strong soul. It pulls, and people notice. Some like to call it charisma. You’re a little one, though.”

It sounded like criticism, and out of instinct, Ari straightened, trying to make himself look bigger. The man laughed.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

Ari shook his head again. His heart thudded in his chest.

“No?” The man studied him. “Where do you live?”

Ari looked again toward his uncle.

“A little lamb. Don’t be afraid.” The man reached out his hand then and scooped up a handful of mulch from the bed of a nearby tree. Ari couldn’t help but suck in his breath—dirt soiling the man’s fine hands, wood chips leaving splinters in his skin.

But when the man’s hand returned to Ari, the mulch was gone, and in its place was a new ice cream bar, whole and untouched.

Ari stared at the ice cream and felt a ripple in the air, like the timeline of his life was shifting. Where had it come from? Where did the mulch go?

At last, he spoke. “Who are you?” he asked quietly.

The man looked as if nothing strange had happened. He just gave him a knowing smile. “Prometheus,” he said. “I’ll see you again.” Then he rose and walked down the street, his hands in his pockets.

When his uncle returned to him, Ari was still holding the new ice cream bar. His uncle slapped him on the back, asking him why he hadn’t eaten it yet, joking that he would if Ari didn’t want it. Ari didn’t dare mention the stranger’s odd name. Prometheus, wasn’t that an ancient Western god? He wasn’t sure; he’d only heard it once in a movie. His uncle would look at him like he was crazy. So Ari kept holding the ice cream bar without eating it, not even when melted vanilla began to drip from a crack in the chocolate shell. At last, his uncle snatched the treat from him and ate it in several bites. Ari watched him, wondering if it would crumble back into dirt in his uncle’s mouth, whether he would make a face and spit it out and hit Ari for playing a trick on him. But his uncle relished it like it was real ice cream, and by the time they arrived home, Ari thought that perhaps he had misunderstood what he’d seen. Perhaps he’d been so surprised by the stranger that he hadn’t eaten his treat. Obviously the man hadn’t just created it out of mulch from the street. And the more Ari thought about it, the better he felt. An impossibility, spun from his imagination. Maybe the man hadn’t been real at all.

But when Ari woke the next morning, he heard the man’s voice coming from the sitting room of his home, with the foreign accent and loud laugh.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Damned by Genevieve Cogman #Historical #Fantasy

2026-08-10T12:00:00.000-04:00

Series: The Scarlet Revolution (#3)
Format: 334 pages, Paperback
Release Date: May 22, 2025
Publisher: Tor UK
Source: Library
Genre: Fantasy, Historical

In England, the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel discovers earth-shattering secrets that could change their world forever . . . Damned is the final heart-pounding installment in Genevieve Cogman's Scarlet Revolution trilogy.

1794. Eleanor, a member of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, is a prisoner in Bedlam psychiatric hospital, being bled, drugged and purged daily. Threatened by her growing magical powers, scheming English vampires captured Eleanor and are hunting down her allies.

With the King known to be ill, possibly mad, England is not as it should be. As the vampires plot to take control of the country, Eleanor's chances of escape are futile.

But the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel is never to be underestimated, and a devil's bargain is struck with an old enemy to secure her freedom. And then Eleanor, using her new magical ability, uncovers a devastating, centuries-old secret so steeped in blood that it will change not only England, but the entire vampire world forever...

Damned is the final chapter in author Genevieve Cogman's The Scarlet Revolution trilogy. Set primarily in 1794 England (with the French Revolution’s chaos as backdrop), it centers on Eleanor Dalton—a former English maid who has become a promising mage and member of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. After events in Paris, the League’s immediate task is rescuing Lady Marguerite Blakeney (the Pimpernel’s wife), held under house arrest in London on trumped-up charges of treason and espionage.

Vampires among the aristocracy are consolidating influence, the king is unwell (possibly mad), and England is unstable. Eleanor’s growing magical abilities lead her toward a centuries-old secret with profound implications for the vampire world and beyond. Vampires are portrayed as predatory and monstrous rather than romanticized, which is a strength of the series. The tone mixes light humor and pulp energy with darker moments (including confinement and violence), while exploring class dynamics more thoroughly than Baroness Orczy’s originals.

Eleanor’s arc—from a servant planted in a household to someone asserting her worth and agency among aristocrats—remains central and generally rewarding. Eleanor is the clear focal point. Her development across the trilogy is one of the strongest elements: she gains confidence as a mage, contributes more actively to plans rather than simply being swept along, and navigates complex loyalties. Some readers note residual self-doubt and class anxiety that can feel repetitive (“only a servant” refrain), which occasionally slows momentum or frustrates.

Her relationship with Lord Charles provides personal stakes and some romance, though opinions vary on its depth—class barriers are acknowledged, and it develops amid larger crises. Supporting characters get good moments. Lady Marguerite steps forward with vivacity, resourcefulness, and agency. Lady Sophie remains a chilling, effective antagonist. Fleurette and Chauvelin return with interesting dynamics (including uneasy alliances that generate sparks against Percy’s style).

Sir Percy/the Pimpernel himself is somewhat more in the background here as the story focuses on England and the vampire conspiracy. The narrative is plot-driven with plenty of twists, rescues, magical investigation, and escalating threats. It keeps a generally brisk pace with high-stakes set pieces. The centuries-old secret delivers a meaningful payoff for the vampire lore and series arcs. Cogman leaves the world feeling larger than the trilogy, with a sense that more stories could exist in it.

Themes of class, power, revolution, and the ethics of secret societies/supernatural control run through the book. It critiques aristocratic privilege (human and vampire) while delivering entertainment. World-building around “sanguinocrats,” mage history, and alternate 1790s politics is engaging without becoming overly dense. Strengths include the satisfying trilogy close, Eleanor’s growth, strong female characters, the monster-vampires approach, and the blend of historical adventure with fantasy.

It works well as a finale for readers invested in the series. Weaker points noted across reviews: lingering character insecurities that some find tiresome, uneven depth for the full cast, occasional exposition or pacing lulls, and an ending that feels hurried or less complex than the buildup for a minority of readers. It is not a strong entry point; the trilogy benefits from being read in order.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble

#Review - A Crime Through Time by Amelia Blackwell #Mystery #Suspense

2026-08-06T12:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Miss Darcy Investigates (#1)
Format: 400 pages, Paperback
Release Date: March 31, 2026
Publisher: Pan
Source: Publisher
Genre: Mystery, Suspense

Cozy, quirky and utterly enthralling, A Crime Through Time is the debut from Amelia Blackwell – the start of a series where crime, time travel and Jane Austen collide.

Pemberley, 1799. When Miss Georgiana Darcy attempts to escape an unwanted marriage proposal, she isn’t expecting to end up quite so far from home. But after encountering a mysterious object in the nearby woods, she finds herself transported almost two hundred years into the future.

Saltram, 1995. At a grand country house where a film crew are busy shooting the latest Jane Austen adaptation, a terrible crime has been committed. And Miss Darcy – newly arrived, impeccably dressed and thoroughly confused – is the only witness.

It soon becomes clear that, somehow, Georgiana was meant to solve this riddle. With the help of a distractingly handsome Irishman named Quinn and a border collie named Watson, she sets out to stop the killer before they can strike again. But meanwhile, trouble is brewing back at Pemberley and time, it seems, is not on her side . . .

Amelia Blackwell's A Crime Through Time is the first installment in the author's Miss Darby Investigations series, and the author's debut novel. A Crime Through Time is a quirky, escapist debut that blends Jane Austen sequel vibes, cozy crime, time travel, and light romance into an entertaining (if uneven) romp. It launches the Miss Darcy Investigates series and centers on Georgiana Darcy (Mr. Darcy’s younger sister from Pride and Prejudice) as an unlikely time-traveling amateur sleuth.

The novel is set primarily between Pemberley in 1799 and Saltram House in Devon in 1995. Georgiana, now around 20 and still recovering from the near-scandal involving Wickham, faces an unwanted marriage proposal from the unappealing Baron John de Halighwell. Seeking solitude in the woods, she discovers a mysterious object—a Motorola pager—that transports her nearly 200 years forward. She lands on the grounds of Saltram House, where a film crew is shooting a Jane Austen adaptation (linked to Sense and Sensibility).

There she witnesses (or stumbles upon) a crime involving a groundsman’s death, becomes the only key witness of sorts, and teams up with a distractingly handsome Irish security guard named Quinn and a border collie named Watson to investigate while shuttling back and forth through time. Parallel troubles brew at Pemberley involving family (including Elizabeth’s difficult pregnancy) and social pressures. The premise is the book’s strongest asset: a clever collision of Austen’s world with 1990s Britain, fish-out-of-water humor, and cozy mystery tropes.

Georgiana’s reactions to modern life, technology, language, casual manners, music, and the chaos of a film set provide much of the comedy and charm. Blackwell (a Cornwall-based author with a deep affection for Austen, an MA in Creative Writing, and personal touches like naming a suitor after a family connection) shows clear research and love for the source material. She expands Georgiana beyond her more passive original portrayal into a curious, increasingly confident young woman who gains agency through her adventures.

Familiar figures such as Darcy, Elizabeth, Lady Catherine, and Anne appear with recognizable traits while allowing room for new dynamics. The dual timelines create a sense of two stories in one, and the short, often amusingly titled chapters help the pacing in places. Romance develops between Georgiana (“George” to Quinn) and the down-to-earth Quinn, offering a contrast between Regency constraints and modern possibilities, though the time gap creates inherent tension and an open-ended quality suited to a series.

The mystery involves murder(s) on the estate and the need to stop a killer, with Watson adding a touch of loyal canine companionship. As a series starter, it successfully plants seeds for future adventures (a sequel involving the Brontës has been mentioned in related materials) and leaves some questions open. It works best for readers who enjoy light, concept-driven fiction rather than rigorous locked-room puzzles or deep historical immersion.

Fans of Austen-inspired stories, time-travel romances, or gentle mysteries with humor (think elements of Thursday Next-style literary playfulness mixed with cozy vibes) are the clearest audience. Those seeking a meaty, clue-driven crime novel or strict fidelity to Austen’s tone and characters may find it lighter and more uneven than hoped.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Whisper Creek by Allison Brennan #Thriller #Suspense

2026-08-05T12:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Standalone
Format: 323 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: June 23, 2026
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

After the sudden death of her husband, Ellen McKenna is doing everything she can to keep her Texas farm afloat. She and her family hope to expand their operation, but times are tough and making ends meet is more expensive than she imagined, much less trying to grow. Many of their neighbors in Cooke County have thrown in the towel and agreed to sell their farms to a local businessman, but despite similar pressure, Ellen refuses to let her dreams die.

On top of the usual hardships, a series of recent storms has left the region partly flooded, and as the heavy rain begins again one morning, all the members of the McKenna family jump into action to protect their land and animals. Ellen’s oldest son discovers an injured dog—and the dog leads him to a man barely clinging to life, the apparent victim of a brutal home invasion. Then, Ellen’s younger kids go to check on a nearby neighbor and walk into a threat none of them saw coming.

Before anyone can figure out what’s really going on in their idyllic rural valley, the storm picks up again in intensity, and the McKenna kids find themselves in over their heads with no way to call for help. To protect her farm--and her family—Ellen must face down all the forces trying to tear them apart.

Allison Brennan's talent for twisty, tense pacing combines with a deeply drawn family drama and the unforgiving power of nature in this compelling standalone thriller.

Whisper Creek by Allison Brennan is a standalone thriller that delivers a high-stakes blend of family drama, corporate greed, rural survival, and natural disaster set on a Texas ranch during a severe storm. A year after her husband John’s sudden death, Ellen McKenna struggles to keep Whisper Creek Ranch in Cooke County, Texas, viable for herself and her four children. The family hopes to expand the operation amid rising costs and tough times, but many neighbors have sold out to a determined local businessman (and the corporation behind him) eager to acquire land—and the mineral rights beneath it.

Ellen refuses to yield. As heavy rains return and the ground remains saturated from prior storms, the family mobilizes to protect their land, livestock, and property. Complications escalate quickly: an injured dog leads to the discovery of a man clinging to life after a brutal home invasion; younger family members checking on a neighbor walk into unexpected danger; sabotage has compromised the barn; and communication and escape routes fail as the storm intensifies. Ellen must protect both her farm and her family from human threats and the unforgiving power of nature.

Brennan crafts a taut, cinematic story that uses the storm almost as a character in its own right. The relentless weather—flooding, isolation, and the constant threat of rising water—amplifies every human conflict and creates genuine atmospheric tension. Short chapters and shifting perspectives keep the pace moving once the action ramps up, merging external dangers (burglars with a specific agenda, corporate pressure, sabotage) with internal family struggles around grief, responsibility, coming-of-age, and loyalty.

Ellen emerges as a compelling, grounded protagonist: a tough, practical widow and mother determined to honor her late husband’s dreams while looking out for neighbors. Her children feel distinct and believable in their roles and reactions, and supporting figures (including a cantankerous but caring grandmother) add texture and occasional levity. The rural Texas setting and everyday realities of farm life—protecting animals, dealing with weather damage, community interdependence—are rendered with authenticity that grounds the thriller elements.

Themes of land rights, small-farm survival against larger economic forces, and family resilience resonate, especially for readers who enjoy Yellowstone-style drama or novels by Colleen Coble and Ellen Crosby. Whisper Creek is a solid, engaging standalone that plays to Brennan’s strengths in tense pacing and character-driven suspense while adding a strong environmental survival layer. It succeeds best as an atmospheric page-turner for fans of domestic thrillers with heart, rural settings, and dual human/natural antagonists. It may feel a bit overloaded or less surprising for those seeking tighter, more unpredictable plots or pure procedural thrills.

CHAPTER ONE

Thursday Night

Rena Jones sat in the backseat of the King Cab pickup as the rain poured down like the sky had cracked open, pelting the top of the cab with a violent staccato beat. Her brother lay slumped beside her, his shirt soaked with blood and rain, his breaths coming in short gasps.

She pressed her trembling hands to the wound on his side. Her fingers were warm and sticky with blood, and no matter how hard she pushed, she couldn’t seem to stop it.

“Brock,” she choked, glancing at her husband, who was driving, his hands tight on the wheel as he navigated through unpaved back roads. Every bump and hole in the road had the truck bouncing and Sam grunting in pain. “We have to get Sam to a hospital.”

“No,” Sam ground out, his voice barely a whisper. His face was pale, jaw clenched, eyes pained. He was shaking, whether from shock or cold, she couldn’t tell.

The windshield wipers were going full force, slapping rhythmically against the glass, but the rain was winning. Water sheeted over the truck like they were underwater.

Tears stung her eyes, hot against the cold. “But—”

“He’s right,” Brock said from the front seat, turning halfway toward her. His face was hard, but his eyes showed his deep fear. He loved Sam just like she did. It had been the three of them for so long. Ever since Brock walked into her life when she was eighteen and they fell in love. It was her and Brock and Sam against the world. Doing what needed to be done to keep them above water. The three musketeers. The three amigos.

“It’s gonna be fine,” Brock insisted. “A flesh wound.”

“It’s not a flesh wound!” she snapped. “He’s losing too much blood. He needs stitches, a transfusion—something!”

“I’ll be fine,” Sam mumbled weakly. “Just … Let’s get home. You can patch me up. Like last time.”

Rena shook her head, throat closing. Last time was years ago, and the gunshot hadn’t been this bad. That time, it had gone in and out of his upper arm. He still had the scar, which he’d covered with a tattoo of a cypress tree that reminded Rena of the one that grew out of the swamp behind their Mimi’s house.

This time … there was more blood.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said, her voice low, furious. “Baldwin wasn’t supposed to be home.”

They’d been hired for four jobs. Four clean, silent entries. In and out, no one the wiser. Get the documents, break the computer, steal a few shiny things to throw off the scent. No one gets hurt. No one around to see them. The first two had been letter-perfect, no one suspecting the reason for the break-ins.

But this time? Tonight had turned into a damn nightmare and now they were stuck in the middle of a torrential downpour in an unfamiliar area in the middle of nowhere.

They’d entered through the back of the house after Sam disabled the alarm from the main box. He was so smart, her little brother. So damn smart. Her eyes burned, the deeply buried regrets that she should have done something, anything, to get Sam a real job, maybe even into college, rather than letting him follow her and Brock into a life of crime.

Intel had said Baldwin was in Dallas until Saturday, and he always took his German shepherd with him when he traveled. So, after Sam took down the alarms, they should have had all the time in the world.

But halfway through corrupting the hard drives, they heard three rapid barks from upstairs. A canine alarm. The dog sounded furious, then Rena heard a muffled voice.

Footsteps thundering down the stairs barely before they could register that they weren’t alone in the house.

Baldwin, shotgun in hand, stepped into the doorway with surprise, anger, and fear in his eyes.

Rena had screamed. Brock fired. The dog lunged. Gunshots coming from her husband and Sam. The loud report of the shotgun going off once, pump, twice. The dog yelped, crumpled. Baldwin fell back, clutching his chest. Or was it his throat? It all happened so damn fast.

And then Brock was screaming, dragging Sam out the front door. Rena’s ears still rang from the echo of gunfire. She wasn’t even sure which one of them had hit Baldwin.

But it wouldn’t matter who fired the fatal shot. They were either killers or accessories to murder.

Maybe he isn’t dead. Maybe he survived.

God, she hoped he survived. Please, God, let him live. Baldwin and Sam.

The rain had started somewhere in that chaos, while she waited with Sam bleeding in her arms as Brock brought the truck around. Now it was drowning the world.

“Fucking road’s flooding,” Brock muttered, his voice faint but with a hint of panic.

Her husband never panicked, so she knew this was bad.

“The rain just started—” she said, but she could see the rising water now, remembered the storm last weekend that had kept them in town until Tuesday night. They were supposed to be done by now, but they’d been delayed because of the damn spring rain. The unpaved back roads were turning into rivers. Mud slid under their tires.

“We’re trapped,” Brock said. “There’s no way through.”

“Sam’s bleeding out,” she said, heart thudding. “Brock, we can’t just sit here—”

“Fuck!” She jumped when Brock slammed his palm against the steering wheel, the sound cracking through the cab. “I’m sorry, okay? We don’t have any other choice.”

Before she could ask what he was planning, Brock swerved suddenly, tires crunching wet gravel, and they drove down a long, bumpy driveway. Trees loomed on either side, branches lashing at the truck from the wind. A flash of lightning illuminated outbuildings and a dark house. Brock killed the lights, then the engine.

Darkness swallowed them, but not silence. The storm outside raged, shaking their truck, tearing at her soul. They couldn’t stay here, she knew. Sam would die. Her brother, her younger brother, her only brother. She couldn’t let that happen.

A sob escaped her throat; she swallowed it.

“Do you trust me, Rena?” Brock said quietly.

She stared at him. The anger and fear in his eyes. And the love.

“Of course I do,” she whispered. “I love you.”

“We need to hole up tonight. Wait out the storm. We’ll patch Sam up. Assess his injuries. Then finish the job.”

She hesitated, heart hammering. “Okay,” she said at last. “Where?”

“Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Rena watched him disappear into the dark, every instinct screaming not to let him go. But she stayed. She held on to Sam’s hand, whispered reassurances, tried to believe them herself.

The rain was so thick she couldn’t see outside the truck. Then lightning flashed across the sky, lighting up the fields in stark white for a heartbeat before the dark came again. The trees writhed in the wind. Thunder rolled so loud it made her chest rattle. And she’d seen the dark house again in that moment of light.

She hoped it was empty; she feared it wasn’t.

But they had no choice.

“You’ll be okay,” she whispered to Sam, brushing his damp hair back from his forehead. His eyes fluttered closed. “I’ve got you.”

“I’m going to be fine, Rena,” Sam said, his voice trying for everything is coming up roses but sounding more like this is the end of the world.

She hated this godforsaken rural county, this miserable state. The endless dark. The isolation. Out here, there were no sirens. No cell service. No one to save her brother.

And she couldn’t stop thinking—what if Baldwin had a silent alarm? What if someone had seen the truck? What if Baldwin wasn’t dead and could identify them? Or worse, what if he was dead and they were now murderers?

What if this was the beginning of the end?

“One more job,” she murmured to herself. “Just one more. Then we’re done.”

But the words felt empty. If Sam died, money couldn’t bring him back. Money would mean nothing to her without her family.

Ten minutes later, Brock returned, soaked and pale.

“I didn’t hurt nobody,” he said, breathing heavily. “But they understand.”

She turned toward him slowly, her stomach sinking. His eyes were too bright. His voice too calm.

“Brock…” she said, warning in her voice.

He looked away. “We need to save Sammy. Help me get him inside.”

She didn’t move.

Because she knew.

He hadn’t asked for help. He’d taken it.

And somewhere inside that farmhouse, someone now feared them enough to stay silent, at least for tonight.

They had crossed a line.

And Rena didn’t know if they’d ever find their way back.

CHAPTER TWO

Friday Morning

Ellen McKenna watched her son Jake ride off across the field on horseback alongside their ranch hand, Mateo Delgado. Yesterday they’d discovered that the run-in—a simple, three-sided structure used to give cattle shelter from the elements—had been seriously damaged during last weekend’s hailstorm. Overnight rain had caused part of it to collapse. With a brief break in the weather this morning, they planned to make repairs so the herd would have protection when the storm returned this afternoon.

The rain last night had been short-lived, but the already saturated ground couldn’t absorb the sudden two-hour downpour. The narrow gravel road that cut through their farm toward the pasture still had standing water, leaving the surface pocked and muddy, but fortunately it hadn’t been washed out. Jake and Mateo would also check for damage along the road, making notes and fixing whatever they could in the few hours they had before the rain was supposed to start up again.

She’d packed them each a full thermos of coffee and sandwiches in case the job took longer than expected. Their cattle grazed on the far side of their fourteen hundred acres, half of which was dedicated to their herd. There was plenty of high ground for the cattle to migrate to if the fields flooded. Most of their crops had survived the hailstorm last weekend, and though the ground was still saturated, the plants were thriving.

But they might not thrive if the fields flooded. They might lose everything.

They’d lost half their grapevines in the hailstorm, but it looked like the rest were going to flower. It would be the first year they had fruit on the vines.

It had been John’s dream to create their own wine label, but it had never been the right time to start the vineyard. Three years ago, after a particularly good year for cattle, they planted a small, uneven twelve-acre plot bisected by Whisper Creek. It was the perfect soil for wine grapes, according to John, who’d consulted with his closest friend—a successful vintner—on the project. On one side, they planted Tempranillo, on the other, Sangiovese. But it takes three years, sometimes four, for the vines to age and flower.

This was the year, and John wasn’t here to see it.

She looked up at the dark gray sky, thinking—believing—that her husband was watching over them, that he would see the first grape harvest. They wouldn’t have their own winery—she’d have to sell the grapes this year and maybe next—but it was a start.

And someday, she would turn the old bunkhouse into a winery and bottle their own label—a label John had designed years ago.

Whisper Creek Vineyard.

“John, I miss you so much,” she murmured.

Two and a half months from now, on July first, would have been their twentieth wedding anniversary. Now, she was a widow at forty-one.

It had been eleven months since her husband died in a tragic accident. Eleven months since her life had been shattered. She was still broken, but she’d put the pieces together as best she could for their four kids.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Deathless by Julie Kagawa #YA #Fantasy

2026-08-04T12:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Fateless # 2
Format: 400 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: July 7, 2026
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Source: Publisher
Genre: Young Adult, Dark Fantasy

How does one kill the unkillable?

Sparrow and her companions have been left with an impossible task: slay the immortal Deathless King, whose magic siphons the very life of the world to sustain himself.

The answer may lie deep in the past, when those who would become Deathless Kings stormed the sanctuary of the goddess of Fate, in an attempt to remove their threads from the Weave and become immortal. They broke off a piece of the goddess’s loom and hurled it to the earth, where it still lies at the center of a dangerous wasteland called the World Scar.

For any chance against the Deathless King, Sparrow and her companions must brave the World Scar and reach the loom, which would grant the power of a goddess. But the journey is fraught with danger, and the powerful Deathless King determined to find them.

And if the loom is reached—what will the power of a goddess do to a mere mortal? Sparrow has no choice but to find out.

Julie Kagawa's Deathless is the second installment in the author's Fateless series. Deathless picks up with former thief Sparrow confronting the consequences of her identity as the Fateless—someone who can unravel the fates and destinies of those she touches, yet has none of her own—while facing an immortal threat that is draining the world itself.

Sparrow and her companions (Kysa, Halek and Raithe) face an impossible charge: stop the Deathless King, an immortal whose magic sustains him by siphoning life from the land. The path forward leads into the past and a perilous journey toward a fragment of the goddess of Fate’s loom, hidden in the deadly World Scar—a lava-covered wasteland where even the air is poisonous.

Reaching it could grant goddess-level power, but the risks to a mortal (and the pursuit by the Deathless King) are immense. Sparrow travels with Scarab Clan warrior Kysa, the carefree Fatechaser Halek (on their giant flying rock beetles), and the assassin Raithe, whose budding romance with Sparrow grows more complicated, including a visit to his mystic homeland.

The group crosses dangerous territories, meets allies and foes, and navigates twists that keep the stakes high. The narrative balances the larger quest (confronting immortality and cosmic-scale threats tied to the Weave of fate) with personal costs, nightmares stemming from prior events, and interpersonal dynamics. Twists are deftly placed to maintain momentum through the Dead Lands and beyond.

Notably, the book incorporates necessary background from Fateless smoothly enough that new readers can follow, while rewarding series fans with deeper exploration of the lore around the Deathless Kings, the goddess Maederyss, and the Tapestry/Weave. As a middle book in a trilogy, it escalates the conflict effectively and ends on a cliffhanger designed to heighten anticipation for the finale.

Sparrow remains a compelling lead: a resourceful former thief grappling with power, responsibility, identity, and the absence of a predetermined path. Her emotional arc receives solid development alongside the action. The supporting cast shines—Kysa’s warrior perspective and cultural ties, Halek’s lighter, windswept Fatechaser philosophy providing contrast and humor, and Raithe’s enigmatic assassin background adding tension and depth.

Building on the desert city of Kovass, the Dust Sea, ancient Deathless Kings, the Thieves Guild/Circle, and the theological framework of Maederyss weaving the Tapestry of the World, Deathless expands into new regions like the World Scar, the Dead Lands, and Irrikah. Unique elements—giant flying rock beetles as mounts, poisonous wastelands, blood magic/undead forces tied to the immortal king, and cultural details of groups like the Scarab Clan—create an immersive, distinctive setting that blends high fantasy with post-imperial decay and mythic stakes.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

#Review - Of Venom and Vengeance by Mikayla Bridge #YA #Fantasy #Romance

2026-07-31T12:00:00.000-04:00

Series: Standalone
Format: 432 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: July 7, 2026
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Source: Publisher
Genre: YA, Fantasy, Romance

A deliciously dark standalone follow-up to the highly-anticipated YA romantic fantasy Of Flame and Fury, where star-crossed enemies gamble with their hearts, empires, and the fate of a lost god.

On an island marred by pageantry and pain, power comes at an impossible price. Inna is the perfect heiress to the Pallo crime family: poised, cunning, untouchable. Behind this glamorous facade, she hunts for the sinister truth of her sister’s death. Despite the cover-up she’s been led to believe, Inna can feel an enemy lurking in the shadows.

Rylan has sculpted himself into a talented thief for one reason: retribution for his family, who were murdered by Inna’s mother. Armed with illusion magic, Rylan plans to steal an ancient riddle from the Pallo vault, one that leads to a sleeping god. Whoever wakes the Serpent King will be granted any wish they desire. Rylan means to claim this power, and with it, Inna’s ruin.

But when Inna catches Rylan sneaking past her family’s security, they enter into a perilous alliance that neither intends to keep —even as bitter attraction ignites into something more.

Though some hearts aren’t meant to be stolen, and love knows nothing of blood-red revenge…

Of Venom and Vengeance by Mikayla Bridge is a dark YA romantasy standalone (companion novel) set in the same world as Of Flame and Fury. It follows dual protagonists navigating crime-family intrigue, illusion magic, a high-stakes heist, and a quest involving a sleeping serpent god. Inna Pallo is the poised, cunning heiress to a powerful crime family on an island defined by pageantry, pain, and power struggles. Behind her glamorous facade, she quietly investigates the suspicious death of her older sister, sensing a cover-up and an enemy closer than the official story suggests.

Rylan is a skilled thief driven by retribution: Inna’s mother was responsible for his family’s murder. Armed with illusion magic, he targets an ancient riddle locked in the Pallo vault—one that leads to the sleeping Serpent King, a lost god who grants any wish to whoever wakes him. Rylan intends to claim that power and use it to destroy Inna’s world. When Inna catches Rylan infiltrating her family’s security, the two form a perilous, reluctant alliance that neither fully intends to honor.

As they navigate family secrets, gambling dens, exploited magical sprites, and mounting dangers, bitter attraction complicates their mutual distrust and competing agendas. The story expands the existing world with new elements (particularly sprite lore and a different regional flavor of magic and society) while functioning effectively as a standalone, with only light Easter eggs or references for readers of the prior book. Inna is calculating, trained in the political and physical demands of her family’s world, and motivated by grief and a need for truth.

Rylan is guarded, witty, determined, and shaped by loss—morally gray in a way that fits the crime-underworld setting. Their enemies-to-lovers / forced-alliance dynamic is built on genuine conflict, distrust, banter, and the tension of knowing the other may betray them at any moment. Supporting figures (including family members and Inna’s former partner/bodyguard Celesse) add layers of complication, loyalty tests, and moral ambiguity.

A standout strength is the atmospheric setting: a glamorous yet sinister island of crime families, clubs, gambling, and spectacle with 1920s-adjacent vibes mixed with dark fantasy. The sprite lore receives particular praise—creatures with varied appearances, personalities, magics, and a darker reality involving exploitation and blood that contrasts with more surface-level perceptions. Illusion magic enables deception and thievery in compelling ways, while the Serpent King myth raises the stakes to something mythic and potentially costly.

The narrative blends murder mystery, family secrets, heist planning and execution, revenge, and a treasure-hunt-style quest. Themes of grief, betrayal, trust, the cost of power, and how pain is “repurposed” rather than simply healed run through the dual perspectives. This is classic YA enemies-to-lovers with forced proximity, reluctant allies who keep plotting against each other, slow-burn tension, and high personal stakes. The attraction is charged and dangerous rather than soft.

The story can be compared to works with crime underworlds, heists, and star-crossed tension (think elements of Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, Chloe Gong’s style, Amanda Foody’s Ace of Shades, or These Violent Delights dynamics). If you are a reader who enjoys dark YA fantasy with revenge plots, reluctant alliances, illusion/heist magic, and complicated found (or forced) partnerships. Content notes commonly include violence, murder, family trauma/abuse, animal cruelty involving sprites, gambling, and related darker themes.

ONE. INNA

YEAR 1510 OF THE ALCHEMY AGE

Beneath charcoal clouds, sprites glowed a merciless sapphire, turning the shadows Inna crept through into a spotlight. Stealth was a lost cause as she tiptoed across tide-lashed docks in pink platforms. The shoes weren’t made for sneaking, but her mother’s rushed orders hadn’t left her with time to change.

The silk sprites summoned a lukewarm breeze, lifting Inna’s hair and swinging nearby bracket lanterns. Wooden piers creaked and battled the masculine voices up ahead. Illyre’s city lights and tourist crowds were distant memories out here among the small, discreet boats of poachers, smugglers, fishers. Inna had long since passed the sturdier, registered boats; decadent tourist ships painted silver and plum, her mother’s crest splashed across each stern.

Inna blinked through the salt mist and hurried toward the bobbing ship at the pier’s end. She wasn’t worried about being spotted. Anyone sailing this late wasn’t interested in ferrying guests around Ascira’s glittering skirts, watching sprites flit by while sipping from champagne flutes. They were here because they’d rather risk sea-monster-infested oceans than declare their goods on legal airships.

Even if Inna’s mother hadn’t described the ship she was to seek out, the smell soon gave it away: sharp and saccharine, like boiled sweets, contrasting the docks’ rusted iron and wet timber.

Inna bit down on her tongue, steeling her spine. Sprites’ odor was strongest when they were hungry. She’d have to be careful to keep any captured sprites locked away.

Behind Inna, a tall shadow sniffed. “How many sprites do they have down there? It smells like someone drowned in honey.”

“Hush.” Inna paused at the boat’s edge, turning to Celesse, her backup for tonight’s assignment. “Adelia said there’s only two poachers. It should be a quick retrieval.”

Inna ignored Celesse’s arched brow and reached into the satchel at her waist. She retrieved a slim glass vial, glowing dandelion-yellow with a liquid dose of sprite magic. With a too-tight grip, she uncorked the vial and lifted it to her lips.

The magic trickled down her throat like warm syrup. It fizzled through her limbs, pressing beneath her skin, eager to be expelled. She hoped to not have to use the warm weather magic: one stray spark could shatter a jar and free the sprites. The siphoned magic would only last a few minutes, anyway. Just long enough to offer backup in case the poachers caused trouble.

Inna reached inside her satchel for a second vial—her uncle always ensured she had a steady supply—and offered it to Celesse. She held it pinched between her nails so Celesse’s touch wouldn’t brush hers. But Celesse merely kept her brow raised and offered a minute shake of her head, leaving Inna’s arm outstretched.

“It’s a small ship,” Celesse cautioned. “The last thing we need is me sneezing sunshine and breaking out a starved sprite.”

A soft current—unrelated to the magic—hummed beneath Inna’s skin: the petty satisfaction of wielding what Celesse couldn’t. Despite whatever else her mother thought of her, Inna knew, at least when it came to shaping magic, she could do what was needed.

Inna slid over the boat’s lip. “Suit yourself. Keep watch up here.”

She crept across the deck, hands gliding over the worn railing, breath shallow. Light glowed from a narrow staircase leading to a cabin. The poachers’ laughter cut through the hush, floating up from belowdecks. Inna crouched behind a stack of crates and peered between slats of rotted wood. The magic in her veins encouraged her to move faster, warming her muscles against the evening chill.

At the bottom of the deck’s staircase, Inna spotted two sets of feet. In their shadows, three glimmering jars lined the floor. Tiny, shifting colors flickered within: sprites. Their wings pulsed, crystal shells clinking against the glass, searching for an escape.

How many poachers had died to seal them inside jars? To most, sprites were harmless, pretty things, capable only of dizzying lights and weak weather magic—until you stuffed them in cages and starved them. But to any underground buyers who knew the truth of sprite power? The thumb-sized weapons would fetch a hefty price.

These poachers were likely oblivious to the danger they’d trapped.

Inna’s heartbeat matched the rhythm of Celesse’s tapping foot. She steadied her breath, and raced down the staircase.

Inna rammed into the first poacher before he could turn toward her. The second, shorter poacher fumbled for a weapon as Inna ducked his flailing arms. She twisted his elbow until there was a sharp crack that sent his knife clattering to the floor. He yelped, eyes wide, as she lifted her own blade to his throat.

The poacher she’d thrown against the wall recovered quicker than expected, straightening to race for the stairs. She was tempted to fling her current captive to the floor—but a quick glance at his belt kept her still. The bastard had another two bottled sprites dangling from his leather belt. She couldn’t risk them breaking. Not without knowing how long it had been since they’d fed.

Inna opened her mouth to shout as a lean shadow flew down the steps, greeting the fleeing man with a swift kick to his torso.

“Too slow,” Celesse sighed, facing Inna. “I thought you were going to hover on the deck for a few more years.”

The taller man tumbled back from Celesse, coughing. His veined eyes darted between Inna and Celesse, eventually settling on Inna.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he sneered. “Get off my ship!”

Inna tightened her grip on her struggling poacher. The fizzing magic in her veins pressed at the insides of her fingertips, begging to heat her blade.

She glared at Celesse. “I told you to stay on the docks.”

Celesse narrowed her dark eyes and shrugged, rustling her steel shirt. Soft, crimson chain mail danced across her entire body in a protective jumpsuit. “And I told you to move quicker this time. I’ve booked a seat at a card game in forty-five minutes.”

Inna swallowed a sour, too-familiar frustration. She removed her blade from the poacher’s throat and, slowly, spun him to face her. “Untie the sprite jars from your belt, please.”

At some point, Celesse had withdrawn her own blade to press against the second poacher’s chest. Though he scowled, Inna’s poacher—with sprites tied to him like glitter-bound grenades—watched her with wide-eyed fear. Good.

Trembling, her poacher reached down and unclasped a sprite vial from a carabiner at his waist. He unclipped the other and held the two caged, glowing sprites toward her. The warmth and sweat from his hands fogged the glass, dimming the sprites’ soft, changing colors. They eventually settled on a cherry-pink shade, likely their natural hue.

Celesse swore. “Are those posy sprites? I haven’t seen any for months.” She turned to her pinned poacher. “How long have you had these little monsters trapped down here?”

Inna gnawed at the inside of her cheek. Posy sprites were usually only seen in the Molten Season, when the sky softened and warmth flowered across fields. Their season had ended months ago.

Inna pressed her blade back to her poacher’s throat. “Answer her.”

“A few weeks?” her poacher squeaked.

Guilt ghosted through Inna, easy to ignore. These two didn’t seem experienced. They’d probably heard rumors of sprites’ illegal value and taken their chances. Their accents were too sharp and clipped to be Asciran. They were likely from the nearby continent, Velande.

“Place the sprites on the ground with the others, and we’ll let you sail off,” Inna said. “You don’t want to be here any more than we want you here.”

Overhead, a dim lantern swung. The ocean lapped at the hull. The poacher beneath her blade glanced to Celesse, to his partner. His fingers twitched toward the thin lids keeping the sprites contained.

“Don’t try anything.” Inna pressed her knife deeper into the man’s throat, drawing a bead of blood just as sweat beaded down her back.

“Release the sprites,” the other poacher growled. “She just wants the damn things to sell for herself. We can at least make it harder for her.”

Inna grinned. “Want to test that theory? We don’t need any more posies for our supply this year. Go on. Open a vial.”

“Inna,” Celesse warned, inching back, toward the staircase.

The poachers exchanged frowns. Inna understood their confusion. To the world, sprites were harmless, floating baubles. Their siphoned magic could offer people no more than a few minutes of weather-infused party tricks. Through as many industries as they could sink their claws into, her family had ensured that sprites seemed a fickle tourist attraction. Not a magical, murderous gold mine.

“You’ve had those sprites in vials for weeks, right?” Inna asked. “They’ll die before you can smuggle them into Velande. Hand them over, and maybe I can find you something better to sell for us.”

Inna extended a hand toward her poacher’s caged sprites. The pink creatures pressed against the glass, as if reaching for her, for the magic humming through her. Slowly, carefully, she cupped the jars and—

A sharp creak sounded. Then, hurried footsteps.

A new figure flashed through the narrow cabin space, hurtling toward Inna.

She cursed and ducked in the same breath, releasing her trembling poacher. The new figure had too much momentum for the small space and collided with the opposite wall. A rusted weapon glinted in her grip.

Inna raised her knife and turned toward her attacker, a dark-browed woman with an impressive scowl. She must have been stowed away in the head of the ship. Steel whistled toward Inna’s ribs and she jumped back. She felt Celesse move behind her, keeping one poacher subdued.

“You didn’t even check the rest of the ship?” Celesse snapped.

Inna ignored Celesse and pivoted, catching her new opponent by the wrist. The woman twisted, her arm shooting out to press her knife to Inna’s neck. Breath short, Inna summoned forth the sprite magic in her veins, willing the golden warmth into the woman’s white-knuckled grip around the knife. She bit down on her tongue and pushed, wringing every drop of magic from that measly vial, focusing on the poacher’s grip against her neck.

A moment later, the poacher hissed, flinching back as her hand glowed blister-red. Inna drove her shoulder into the poacher’s ribs before knocking the heated weapon to the floor. The woman gasped, bending over. Inna felt a moment’s triumph before new hands gripped her neck from behind.

Lurching, Inna stomped down on her second attacker’s foot and shoved him into a wall as the last of the magic fizzled from her blood. Both poachers wheezed, and as the man behind her fell, so did a vial.

Inna heard glass shatter a half second before sprite light lit the cabin, color scattering like stars.

Two ravenous sprites burst free.

“Shit!” Celesse screamed, scampering back, abandoning her dazed poacher.

The freed sprites flew to the center of the cabin and the two standing poachers paused their attacks. Inna lunged in front of Celesse. Old, reflexive fear moved Inna’s limbs, keeping Celesse safe, and the sprites quickly chose the standing poachers as their prey.

The female poacher sucked in a sharp, startled breath as a sprite darted toward her.

Her mistake was opening her mouth.

The sprite shifted from pink to gold to crimson before dulling itself, like heat off stone, hiding behind illusion magic, bending light around its form. Dread crept down Inna’s spine. She knew what would come next.

The sprite slipped inside the poacher’s open mouth and down her throat.

The woman coughed. The other sprite hid itself, too, though this monster didn’t bother with an orifice, diving toward the shorter poacher’s left arm, the vein at his elbow’s crook. Almost too fast to follow, the sprite punched through skin and burrowed deep inside the poacher’s blood.

“Where did they…” the female poacher began, before a cough wracked her body. Blood trickled from her nose, reaching her upper lip before she crumpled to the ground.

“Farrah?” The younger, shorter poacher stepped toward his fallen colleague, oblivious to the blood trickling down his own arm—and then, from his nose.

Farrah’s fingers twitched, scarlet pooling from her fingernails. The young poacher managed another wobbly step before his knees gave way. His brown, bleeding eyes locked on Inna as he slumped beside Farrah.

Almost a minute passed in silence. The two poachers lay sprawled with the third curled, trembling, in a corner, when the sprites finally reappeared. Farrah jerked. A gargle escaped her throat. Blood bubbled from her lips, spilling down her chin, as the sprite—brighter, rounder—slid free. The other sprite, now a merry yellow, shot out of the younger poacher’s chest cavity and joined its friend in the air. One drifted leisurely toward Inna, its tiny body pulsing. Newly fed, it was near blinding to look at, even with the tinted, protective contacts Inna wore.

Inna felt Celesse stiffen as the sprite neared. It shifted to a bright orange, slow and sated.

“You’re safe,” Inna said to Celesse. “They’ve eaten their fill.”

Inna lifted a hand, pointer finger extended. The sprite hesitated, then landed on Inna’s finger, delicate as gossamer. So long as Inna wore the pendant around her neck, thrumming with a dozen sprites’ worth of magic, no sprite would attack her. It was an invaluable trinket, marking her as kin in the sprites’ eyes.

Celesse huffed. “Can you put it back in a cage, please?”

“Fine.” Inna nodded toward the remaining poacher. “Restrain him.”

The remaining poacher fought Celesse’s grip for an impressive few seconds before she knotted rope around his wrists.

“What … What did you do to them?” the man spat.

Slowly, Inna reached into her silver satchel and retrieved a small, empty vial. She lifted the vial and let its subtle glimmer reflect through the air, mimicking the sprites’ light.

She popped the lid open and shook it. Both sprites drifted toward the new cage, shedding petal-like crystals.

They inspected the bottle, tempted by curiosity; tiny stars caught in the wrong orbit.

Into the vial, out of the ship, Inna repeated to herself, a mantra. Another mission completed. Another step closer to what she needed, beyond her mother’s absurd tests.

Inna pressed down on the vial’s base, activating a small vacuum. Both sprites flew inside and Inna clicked the lid shut.

Triumph, a small, momentary rush not unlike the magic she’d drank, brushed through her. Neither Celesse’s jabs nor Adelia’s expectations could take this victory away. Missions like this gave her a shape, a worth in a world already drowning in magical importance.

Celesse ran a hand through her sleek ponytail. “You could’ve tried harder to stop the murder bugs getting out of the jars.”

“And you could’ve shot them down if you were that scared.”

Celesse worked security for Inna’s family most nights. The guard could hold her own in a fight. Even so, the real reason Inna kept her on missions—despite their prickly romantic history—was that Celesse was the best shot Inna had ever seen. Inna could see Celesse’s slinger—a mechanical slingshot rifle—tucked at her hip, surely loaded with pearls, ready to strike down any rogue sprites.

Ignoring Celesse’s glare, Inna pulled out her tele-comm. Thumbing the digital screen, she texted their address to the head of her mother’s cleanup crew. Pocketing the device, Inna bent to retrieve the other caged sprites along the ground and tucked them inside her satchel.

“What are we to do with him?” Celesse thrust a thumb toward the cowering poacher.

Before Inna could respond, a cool breeze descended the stairs, heralding a new presence. Her stomach lifted as a short figure glided toward the center of the blood-soaked cabin.

Her mother didn’t look at her, not at first. Instead, Adelia Pallo dipped her chin toward the remaining poacher. His breath hitched as he met Adelia’s gaze. Fresh fear lit his features like a struck match.

Finally, Adelia’s blue eyes turned to Inna, and the massacre at her feet.

“Sloppy,” Adelia noted, the single word plunging and twisting a knife into Inna’s gut.

Adelia’s black heels clicked as she strode toward the still-breathing poacher, and yanked him up by his dark hair. The man—likely still dazed from Celesse’s strikes—barely fought her grip.

Inna swallowed a lump, pulse drumming.

“Do we keep him alive for information and risk him escaping, running his mouth about sprite appetites?” Adelia’s pale eyes turned to steel. “Or do we kill him and lose potential knowledge?”

“Keep him alive,” Inna said, forcing her voice to stay flat, even. “We can keep him hidden.”

She’d found the poachers, hadn’t she? She’d recovered the sprites. She’d remained exactly what her mother had required.

Adelia paused. Trembling, the man tried to rise from his knees. He managed one foot beneath him when Adelia—faster than any sprite, Alchemist or god—retrieved the rusted blade from the ground, and slashed the man’s throat.

Inna didn’t flinch. She wouldn’t. But she couldn’t help her stomach’s churning as the poacher slumped beside his fallen friends. Blood seeped from his neck as he stilled.

Whether by steel or sprite, their deaths were on Inna’s hands. They were far from the first.

She shoved her knife—her sister’s old knife—back in her satchel and, just for a moment, a quick flicker, the ghost of Erika appeared beside the poachers, her body strewn, bleeding, broken.

Adelia wiped her blade on her silver trousers. “Wrong answer.”

Inna’s fists clenched. Her mother had told her there were two poachers on the ship, not three. But she held her tongue; she had a better chance of surviving an argument with Salta’s serpent god.

As Adelia turned back toward the stairs, she said, “You did well, Celesse.”

Celesse’s chest puffed, and Inna fought a sneer. Then, back to Inna, Adelia instructed, “Get these poachers to the nearest coroner on payroll. We don’t need curious sailors searching their bodies and seeing crystallized organs.”

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble