It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica

A scream shatters the silence… Courtney Gray’s peaceful vacation turns into a nightmare when she discovers her brother and sister-in-law dead in their lakeside cottage. Her niece Reese is missing. Her nephew Wyatt is asleep upstairs—unharmed.

A town full of secrets… As police swarm the quiet resort, dark truths about Courtney’s family—and the town itself—begin to surface. Is Reese a victim… or the killer?

A truth no one saw coming…With everyone hiding something, Courtney races to uncover the terrible mystery. But the closer she gets, the harder it is to know who—or what—to trust.

A Killing in Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed by Scott Eden

Santa Cruz is one of the country’s surf meccas and a favored getaway of the Silicon Valley elite. For decades, marijuana has been cultivated, consumed, and trafficked in these mountains, one of the most important regions in the country for the crop. It’s where Ken Kesey threw his wild parties, where back-to-the-land types came to live off the grid, and where Tushar Atre, Silicon Valley founder, was found brutally murdered.

Charismatic, ambitious, arrogant, and rich, Atre was the leader among a clutch of tech execs and venture capitalists with a voracious appetite for risk, work, and money, riding waves at dawn and then putting in fourteen-hour days. When he met Rachael Lynch, a maverick cannabis grower and mover of product, he had a vision of how their lives could come together in business and in love. Atre sought to disrupt the newly legal cannabis trade by funding a start-up with black market capital. This illegal pursuit would entangle him with an array of colorful and dangerous characters, many of whom had compelling reason to want him dead.

journalist Scott Eden’s panoramic investigation exposes the symbiotic relationship between the legal weed world and its shadowy, illegal counterpart. It is a story of love, greed, and betrayal, set in a world where visionaries, hippies, masters of the universe, and stone-cold killers are all stakeholders, eager to exploit the power of the plant. 

Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan

As a child, Lucy Mangan was reading all the time, using books to navigate the challenges and complexities of this world and many others. As an adult, she uses her new relationship with literature to seize upon the most important question: (how) do books prepare us for life?

Bookish vividly tells the story of a reader’s life from the cusp of teenagehood, when everything – including the way we read – undergoes a not-so-subtle transformation. Lucy vividly recounts her metamorphosis from young bookworm to bookish adult, from the way school curricula impact our relationship with literature, to the growing pains of swapping the pleasures of re-reading for those of book-hoarding.

Revisiting the books of all genres (from literary novels and historical saga fiction to apocalyptic zombie novels) that ferried her through each important stage of life—falling in love, finding a job, becoming a mother, and navigating grief—Bookish is a coming-of-age story told through books. It’s an ode to our favorite bookish spaces (from the smallest secondhand bookstalls to our favorite libraries, mega-bookshops, and our own bookshelves) and a love story to how books not only shelter our souls through hard times, but also how they help us connect with the people we love through shared stories.

Good Intentions by Marisa Walz

On the surface, Cady has the perfect life. She has a thriving luxury event-planning business, the man she’s loved since she was seventeen, and a social calendar she can barely keep up with. She also has Dana, her identical twin, her most trusted confidante. But when Dana dies suddenly, before Cady can say goodbye, everything shatters.

Yet to her family’s alarm, it isn’t grief for Dana that consumes her. It’s Morgan, a stranger Cady meets in the hospital waiting room that same day―a grieving mother whose tragedy mirrors her own. Cady doesn’t believe in coincidences. She becomes convinced that helping Morgan is the key to facing her sister’s death.

But is that really what she wants? Or is Cady drawn to Morgan for reasons far more complicated―and dangerous―than she’s willing to admit?

Good People by Patmeena Sabit

The Sharaf family is the picture of success. Prosperous, rich, happy. They came to this country as refugees with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. And now, after years of hard work, they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.

When an unthinkable tragedy strikes, everyone is left reeling and the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that behind closed doors the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but. Did the Sharaf family achieve the American dream? Or was the image of the model immigrant family just a façade?

Little One by Olivia Muenter

From the outside, Catharine West’s childhood sounds idyllic—balmy days spent running barefoot through the gardens, plucking ripe tomatoes straight from the vine as sunlight warmed her skin. Her parents built a life that was simple and community-focused, an ethos that soon attracted others in need of a change. For a time, Catharine’s magnetic father was enough to keep the farm thriving and temptation outside its gates. But as she grew older, the farm and family she was raised to love faded into something darker, forcing Catharine to evolve with it.

​It’s now been a decade since Catharine abandoned the farm, and she has done her best to reinvent her life, until an email from a charismatic journalist interrupts her peace. Her first instinct is to ignore the stranger’s prying questions—whether she knew about a mysterious “cult” in central Florida, whether she is the same “Catharine-with-an-A” who lived there for a time. But when she realizes the journalist knows far more than he’s letting on, she reconsiders. If Catharine can stay one step ahead of him, she may be able to find the one person she never wanted to leave behind—her sister, Linna—and make sure her own secrets remain buried too.

Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play by Keza MacDonald

A lifelong gamer and a renowned video games journalist, Keza MacDonald digs down to Nintendo’s experimental roots, tracking the company’s rise with each new revolutionary product. She draws on private interviews with icons like Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, who continues to leave his stamp on the company, and takes readers on a trip to the secretive Nintendo HQ—making her one of the few Western journalists to have set foot inside the building.

Leaping from game to game, Super Nintendo tells the remarkable story of the people who brought us Super Mario Bros., Zelda, Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Splatoon, and more—not to mention the SNES, N64, Game Boy, Wii, Switch, and a host of other wacky gizmos—and charts the delights they’ve offered over the decades. Along the way, MacDonald uncovers the driving force behind these creative triumphs: a willingness to take risks and place long-term success over short-term profits.

Superfan by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Freshman Minnie is adrift at college in Austin, Texas, when she discovers a boy band called HOURglass and the online forums that worship them. She especially loves Halo, whose sharp edges feel somehow familiar. After a brief romance goes painfully awry, Minnie pours everything into her new fandom, clinging to each livestream and bonding with other fans online. But when a scandal threatens to expose Halo to harm, Minnie decides that she is the only one who can save him.

Except Halo’s secret is darker than anything the tabloids could imagine. Before he was a superstar heartthrob, he was Eason: a high school dropout haunted by a tragic accident. When he is recruited for HOURglass, it feels like a chance to become someone else. And when he is onstage in front of his fans, he can almost forget the horrors of his past–until one of those very fans threatens to destroy everything.

The Exes by Leodora Darlington

Natalie has only ever wanted to find “the one.” The perfect man, the happy family she never had. But each time she thinks she is finally getting somewhere, she’s bitterly disappointed. Another red line through a list of exes. And that was before the night of the Big Fallout that left her even more alone.

Then along comes James—wonderful, handsome James—and Natalie thinks her luck has finally turned. Maybe he’s the one for her. Maybe he’s the one she’s been waiting for all along. Maybe he won’t wind up dead.

But the harder Natalie tries to be a “normal” wife, the more world-upending truths are brought to her door, leaving her unsure of who she really is, and much less what she’ll do . . . leaving her to question whether there is a monster within her or whether there is a villain toying with her from the outside.

Wolf Hour by Jo Nesbo

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2016. When a small-time criminal and gun dealer is shot down in the street, all signs point to Tomas Gomez, a quiet man with a mysterious past—and deep connections to a notorious gang—who has seemingly vanished into thin air. Other murders soon follow, and it appears Gomez is only getting started. Meanwhile, Bob Oz, a down-and-out suspended police officer with a dubious past of his own, becomes fascinated by the case: he is obsessed with the notion of hunting down a serial killer who only he can understand, a killer with a story as tragic as his own.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2022. An enigmatic Norwegian man with ties to Minneapolis—a self-described crime writer—has traveled to the United States to research the Gomez case, in the hopes of writing a book about it. But as his investigation progresses, the writer’s seemingly neutral position reveals itself to be more complicated than the reader is initially led to believe.

Family Drama by Rebecca Fallon

t’s 1997, and snow is blanketing a New England beach. Two befuddled seven-year-olds watch as their mother’s body is tipped overboard a crumbling boat. A Viking funeral, followed by a raucous wake. A send-off fit for soap opera star: Susan Bliss.

Fifteen years earlier, Susan is a blazing, beautiful young woman, passionate about her art. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her, and so Alcott, a practical professor, does—hopelessly. And so begins the love story of Susan’s two-paneled life: an unconventional, jetlag-filled arrangement that takes her back and forth between her life in New England as a wife and mother to young twins to the bright lights of Los Angeles, where she becomes the beloved star of a daytime soap.

In the present, Susan’s twins grow up in the shadow of her all-consuming absence. Sebastian, a sensitive artist, cleaves to her memory, fascinated with the artifacts of her starry past. Viola, resentful of her mother’s torn allegiances, distances herself from the memories of her. But when Viola runs into her mother’s old costar Orson Grey—now a renowned Hollywood star—she finds herself falling deeply in love with him and begins to put together the pieces of a mother she never really knew.

Mass Mothering by Sarah Bruni

A. is an amateur translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. Adrift and burdened by debt following a medical trauma, she makes rent caring for a young boy who is not and could never be her own. Her nights are spent on the dance floor, chasing spontaneous connection. There, she encounters N., who shares her numbed state and sometimes her bed.

Among N.’s meager possessions, A. comes across a slim book about an unnamed foreign town of disappearing boys. The book, Field Notes, documents the stories of a community of mothers who assemble to mourn their missing sons together. A. is transfixed by this collective chorus of primal grief, the mothers’ preternatural strength, and their intuitive care for one another. When a near-assault stuns A. out of her inertia, she takes off for the city where Field Notes was written in search of its author and the end of the story. But A.’s digging leads her instead to the traces of a murdered poet, a mysterious woman whose legacy will intersect unexpectedly and pivotally with A.’s own life.