Finlay Donovan Digs Her Own Grave by Elle Cosimano

Finlay Donovan may have skeletons in her closet . . . but at least there’s not a body in her backyard.

Finlay Donovan and her nanny/partner-in-crime, Vero, have not always gotten along with Finlay’s elderly neighbor, Mrs. Haggerty, the community busybody and president of the neighborhood watch. But when a dead body is discovered in her backyard, Mrs. Haggerty needs their help. At first a suspect, Mrs. Haggerty is cleared by the police, but her house remains an active crime scene. She has nowhere to go . . . except Finlay’s house, right across the street.

Finlay and Vero have no interest in getting involved in another murder case―or sacrificing either of their bedrooms. After all, they’ve dealt with enough murders over the last four months to last a lifetime and they both would much rather share their beds with someone else.

Say Everything: A Memoir by Ione Skye

In 1987, sixteen-year-old Ione Skye landed the breakout role of Diane Court, the dream girl who inspires John Cusack’s iconic boombox serenade in the hit Cameron Crowe film, Say Anything. While Skye seemed perfectly typecast as an aloof valedictorian, she was anything but.

Deserted by her dad, the folk singer legend Donovan, Skye was a ninth-grade dropout who sought solace and validation in the eyes of audiences and dreamy costars like Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, Matthew Perry, John Cusack, and Robert Downey Jr. But like her sixties It Girl mom, Skye’s greatest weakness was musicians.

On the heels of a toxic relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis, which began when she was just sixteen and he was twenty-four, the actress leapt into wedded bliss with her first great love, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz.

But marriage was not the magical hall pass to adulthood Skye had imagined. Awakening to her bisexuality and desperately insecure, she risked her fairytale marriage for a string of affairs with gorgeous nineties “bad girls.” The dream marriage imploded, and Skye’s trust in herself and her future along with it.

Set against a backdrop of rock royalty compounds, supermodel cliques, and classic late-century films like River’s Edge, Gas Food Lodging, and Wayne’s World, Say Everything is a wild ride of Hollywood thrills as well as a lyrical reflection on ambition, intimacy, and a messy, sexy, unconventional life.

Woodworking by Emily St. James

Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced―and trans. Not that she’s told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn’t exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.

Abigail is seventeen, Mitchell High’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. It’s a role she plays faultlessly, albeit a little reluctantly. She’s also annoyed by the idea of spending her senior year secretly guiding her English teacher through her transition. But Abigail remembers the uncertainty―and loneliness―that comes with it. Besides, Erica isn’t the only one struggling to shed the weight of others’ expectations.

As their unlikely friendship evolves, it comes under the scrutiny of their community. And soon, both women―and those closest to them―are forced to ask: Who are we if we choose to hide ourselves? What happens once we disappear into the woodwork?

The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes

When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work.

Millie arrives to an eclectic staff claiming their missed deadlines are due to sabotage, possibly from the state’s powerful Copper Kings who don’t want their long and bloody history with union organizers aired for the rest of the country to read. But Millie begins to suspect that the answer might instead lie with the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.

More than a decade earlier, Alice Monroe created the Boxcar Library in order to deliver books to isolated mining towns where men longed for entertainment and connection. Alice thought she found the perfect librarian to staff the train car in Colette Durand, a miner’s daughter with a shotgun and too many secrets behind her eyes.

Now, no one in Missoula will tell Millie why both Alice and Colette went out on the inaugural journey of the Boxcar Library, but only Alice returned.

A Harvest of Hearts by Andrea Eames

Everyone in Foss Butcher’s village knows what happens when the magic-workers come; they harvest human hearts to use in their spells. That’s just how life in her kingdom works. But Foss, plain, clumsy, and practical as a boot, never expected anyone would want hers.

When a sorcerer snags a piece of Foss’s heart without meaning to, she is furious. For once a heart is snagged, the experience is . . . well, unpleasant. So, Foss finds herself stomping toward the grand City to keep his enchanted House and demands that he fixes her before she keels over and dies, or whatever happens when hearts are Snagged.

But the sorcerer, Sylvester, is not what she expected. Petulant, idle, and new to his powers, Sylvester has no clue how to undo the heart-taking, or how to do much of anything really, apart from sulk. Foss’s only friend is a talking cat and even the House’s walls themselves have moods.

Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective’s Obsession, and ’90s Los Angeles at the Brink by Matthew McGough

In June 1990, Ronald Baker, a straight-A UCLA student, was found repeatedly stabbed to death in a tunnel near Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his followers once lived. Shortly thereafter, Detective Rick Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, were assigned the case. Yet the facts made no sense. Who would have a motive to kill Ron Baker in such a grisly manner? Was the proximity to the Manson ranch related to the murder? And what about the pentagram pendant Ron wore around his neck?

Jackson and Garcia soon focused their investigation on Baker’s two male roommates, one Black, and one white. What emerges is at once a story of confounding betrayal and cold-hearted intentions, as well as a larger portrait of an embattled Los Angeles, a city in the grip of the Satanic Panic and grappling with questions of racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of Rodney King.

In straightforward, matter-of-fact prose, Rick Jackson, the now-retired police detective who helped inspire Michael Connelly’s beloved Harry Bosch, along with co-writer, Matthew McGough, take us through the events as he and his partner experienced them, piecing together the truth with each emerging clue. Black Tunnel White Magic is the true story of a murder in cold blood, deception and betrayal, and a city at the brink, set forth by the only man who could tell it.

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

Broken Fields by Marcie R. Rendon

Minnesota, 1970s: It’s spring in the Red River Valley and Cash Blackbear is doing fieldwork for a local farmer—until she finds him dead on the kitchen floor of the property’s rented farmhouse. The tenant, a Native field laborer, and his wife are nowhere to be found, but Cash discovers their young daughter, Shawnee, cowering under a bed. The girl, a possible witness to the killing, is too terrified to speak.

In the wake of the murder, Cash can’t deny her intuitive abilities: she is suspicious of the farmer’s grieving widow, who offers to take in Shawnee temporarily. While Cash is scouring White Earth Reservation for Shawnee’s missing mother—whom Cash wants to find before the girl is put in the foster system—another body turns up. Concerned by the escalating threat, Cash races against the clock to figure out the truth of what happened in the farmhouse.

Connecting Dots: A Blind Life by Joshua A. Miele

At the age of four, Joshua Miele was blinded and badly burned when a delusional neighbor poured sulfuric acid over his head in a crime that shocked New York. It could have ended his life, but, instead, Miele—naturally curious and a born problem solver—not only recovered but thrived, finding increasingly inventive ways to succeed in a world built for the sighted. At first reluctant to even think of himself as blind, he eventually embraced his blindness and became a committed advocate for disability and accessibility. Along the way, he grappled with drugs and addiction, played bass in a rock band, worked for NASA, became a guerilla activist, married the love of his life, and had two children.

Miele introduces us to an extraordinary cast of characters, from his lovingly quirky family, to his rock-and-roll buddies and romantic loves, to the devoted teachers and brilliant colleagues whose encouragement and collaboration supported him. He also chronicles the development of revolutionary accessible technologies and his role in shaping them, including screen readers, tactile maps, and audio description. Connecting Dots delivers a captivating first-person perspective on blindness and disability as incisive as it is entertaining and, ultimately, triumphant; in 2021 Miele won a MacArthur “Genius” award for his work. His story demonstrates the normality of blindness as he lives, loves, invents, raises a family, and takes pride in his blind identity. Interweaving tales of invention and independence with humor, struggle, and achievement, this is the story of one ordinary blind life with an indelible impact.

Count My Lies by Sophie Stava

Sloane Caraway is a liar.

Harmless lies, mostly, to make her self-proclaimed sad, little life a bit more interesting.

So when Sloane sees a young girl in tears at a park one afternoon, she can’t help herself—she tells the girl’s (very attractive) dad she’s a nurse and helps him pull a bee stinger from the girl’s foot.

With this lie, and chance encounter, Sloane becomes the nanny for the wealthy, and privileged Jay and Violet Lockhart. The perfect New York couple, with a brownstone, a daughter in private school, and summers on Block Island.

But maybe Sloane isn’t the only one lying, and all that’s picture-perfect harbors a much more dangerous truth. 

Firstborn Girls: A Memoir by Bernice L. McFadden

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar.

Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.”

Interwoven with Bernice’s personal journey is her family’s history, beginning with her four-times enslaved great-grandmother Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1822 Hancock County, Georgia. Her descendants survived Reconstruction and Jim Crow, joined the Great Migration, and mourned Dr. King’s assassination during the Civil Rights Movement. These women’s wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down like Louisa’s handmade quilt.

Glory Daze: A Glory Broussard Mystery by Danielle Arceneaux

After her life was turned upside down by solving the murder of her best friend, Sister Amity Gay, all Glory Broussard wanted was a little peace and quiet. That included getting back to her Sunday morning routine as a bookie in a coffee shop, and planning the annual Mardi Gras gala for her church. But there’s no rest for Glory once the woman who broke up her marriage walks in to CC’s Coffee House and asks for help finding her missing husband. It doesn’t take long before Glory finds him . . . with a knife impaled in his chest.

No one knew the man—and his dark side—better than Glory Broussard, who would rather let the local authorities take the lead. But Glory’s daughter, still reeling from problems of her own, insists on her involvement. Glory’s search for the murderer takes her deep inside the seedy world of Louisiana casinos and racetracks, from their high roller VIP rooms with chatty dealers to stables filled with thoroughbred horses and shady dealings.

As if solving a murder and sparring with the woman who had an affair with her ex-husband isn’t enough, Glory has to get to the bottom of her daughter’s secrets, and there are a few members of her church group who would love to see her fail in her Mardi Gras responsibilities.

I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong

A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.

Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion that he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 a.m. fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night’s pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, too: that of romantic interest to the nurse who took care of him, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.

There is value in the joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.

Why do we run from those we love, and why do we still love those who run from us?

Red Dog Farm by Nathaniel Ian Miller

Growing up on his family’s cattle farm in western Iceland, young Orri has gained an appreciation for the beauty found in everyday things: the cavorting of a newborn calf, the return of birdsong after a long winter, the steadfast love of a good (or tolerably good) farm dog. But the outer world still beckons, so Orri leaves his no-nonsense Lithuanian Jewish mother and his taciturn father, Pabbi, to attend university in Reykjavík.

Pabbi is no stranger to cycles of life and death, growth and destruction. He is pursued by the memory of a volcanic eruption and its aftermath, and so many years of hardscrabble farming have left their mark. Jaded, and no longer able to find joy in his way of life, Pabbi falls into a depression soon after Orri goes away to school. Orri, feeling adrift and aimless at the end of his first semester, comes home.

For the first time, Pabbi allows Orri to help him run the farm. Despite their conflicting attitudes, Orri and Pabbi must learn to work together. Meanwhile, Orri meets a kindred spirit on the internet: Mihan, a part-time student. Over time—and countless texts and phone calls—their connection deepens. By year’s end, Orri must decide whether he wants to—or should—return to university, and what a future with Mihan would hold, if she’ll have him.

Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement by Elaine Weiss

In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.

Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.”

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

The Good Samaritan by Toni Halleen

Sociology professor Matthew Larkin is barely holding on. After the death of his toddler son, his wife divorced him, his teenage daughter abandoned him, and he lost a job he loved. Landing a rare tenure track position at a small college in southern Minnesota, he’s trying to cope with the disaster his life has become.

While driving down an empty highway in the middle of nowhere one gloomy Sunday evening, Matthew gets caught in a hailstorm. Pulling off the road to find shelter, he spies a disturbing sight. Caught in the car’s headlights is a child curled up beneath a plastic tarp. The boy is alive but unconscious, soaked to the bone and possibly hypothermic. Knowing an ambulance would take too long to reach them, Matthew impulsively puts the boy in his car, intending to get medical help.

On the way, the boy awakens and becomes agitated, begging Matthew not to take him to a hospital or to call the police. Matthew sympathizes with the panicked boy, who looks to be the same age his son would have been. Overcome by longing, grief, and a need to make sense of everything that’s happened to him, Matthew makes a dangerous choice—risking everything for a chance to face his past, move on from the pain, and forgive both his family and himself.

The King’s Messenger by Susanna Kearsley

It is the year 1613, and King James is sending his messenger Andrew Logan into Scotland with secret orders to arrest Sir David Moray, close friend and advisor of the late Prince Henry. Secrets are second nature to Andrew, who must hide his Second Sight to stay alive. Joined by a court scrivener and the scrivener’s spirited daughter Phoebe, Andrew slowly untangles the true purpose of his mission―to frame Sir David for Prince Henry’s murder. But Andrew is unwilling to betray an innocent man.

Phoebe Westaway dislikes Andrew, and their history makes it hard for her to trust him. But as their journey draws them deeper into the dark web of court intrigue, Phoebe begins to suspect that she might have more need of the King’s Messenger and his unusual gifts than she could ever have foreseen.

The Last Days of Kira Mullan by Nicci French

Nancy North is ready to put her life back together. After suffering a psychotic break that ruined friendships, stalled her fledgling restaurant, and forced her to move out of her comfortable flat, she’ll do anything to get back to normal. She and her partner Felix—who has been a saint through her recent troubles—move into a new flat for a fresh start.

Nancy is taking her pills, seeing her therapist, and avoiding unnecessary stress. She’s doing absolutely everything right, but something is still very, very wrong. On the first day in the new flat, she hears them again; the mysterious voices that triggered her first episode. It could just be the unfamiliar sounds of water in the pipes, or the screaming baby across the hall, but deep down she knows something more sinister is going on. Her fears are confirmed when the young woman in the downstairs flat, Kira, is found dead. Felix, her neighbors, and even the police insist it’s a tragic suicide, but the pieces aren’t adding up for Nancy. Can she trust her own instincts, or is it all in her head?

Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Maud O’Connor has misgivings about her colleagues’ investigation of Kira’s death. The boys club at the top seems intent on closing the case as quickly as possible, especially since the only person who thinks it could be anything other than suicide is known to be unreliable. But Maud knows what it’s like to be dismissed as an overemotional woman and isn’t so quick to discount Nancy’s claims. As tensions reach an explosive breaking point, the line between fact and delusion becomes dangerously blurred, but Maud will stop at nothing to ensure that the truth comes to light.

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji

First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose who stayed in Tehran during the revolution. She lives in a shabby apartment, paranoid and alone. Except when she is visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter who takes her debauchery with a side of purpose, and yet somehow manages to survive. Elizabeth’s daughters left for America in 1979: Shirin, a charismatic yet outrageous event planner in Houston who considers herself the family’s future, and Seema, a dreamy idealist-turned-housewife languishing in the chaparral-filled hills of Los Angeles. And then there’s the other granddaughter Bita, the self-righteous but lost law student spending her days in New York City eating pancakes and quietly giving away her belongings.

When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by Bita, the family’s brittle status quo is cracked open. Shirin embarks upon a grand but half-baked quest to restore the family name. But what does that even mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Will they ever realize that life is more than just an old story?

These are five women who are pulled apart and brought together by revolution. Here is their past, present, and future. By turns satirical and philosophical, traveling from the 1940s Iran into a splintered 2000s, The Persians is a mordantly funny, heartbreakingly sad, and profoundly searching portrait of a family in crisis at the turn of the century, an American family saga reinvented.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.

There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk.

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown

“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace―the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from one another, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late―and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.