• Best Offer Wins, Marisa Kashino
• The Red Winter, Cameron Sullivan
• The Infinite Blue, Kevin Wignall
• A Land So Wide, Erin Craig
• A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Marriage, M.K. Oliver
• This Story Might Save Your Life, Tiffany Crum
• I Bet You’d Look Good in a Coffin, Katy Brent
• Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala
• The Piper’s Story, Wendy Isaac Bergin

Best Offer Wins has me in a ticklish situation. It’s a brilliant portrait of the internal machinations of a truly terrifying woman. Publicist Margo Miyake has a picture of the way her life should go, the way her marriage should be, the way she should get the house she must have to make the picture true. This is not only scary, but funny.

I read on the book jacket that The Red Winter is Cameron Sullivan’s first book. I can’t wait to see what he does next. This is a historical novel, a horror novel, a love story, and features possession by an evil(?) spirit. Sebastian Grave, a learned man, is called to the search for the Beast of Gevaudon in the France of 1785. He has hunted the Beast before, with no success. And it may arouse suspicion that Sebastian looks exactly the same as he did twenty years before. Nonetheless, he sets out on his journey with the son of the man Sebastian once loved. This is truly an epic, and it’s marvelous.

The Infinite Blue is one of Kevin Wignall’s YA novels. His teen characters have some things in common with the characters of his adult books: they are clearly individuals, neither all good nor all evil, capable of calm good nature and rational thinking . . . and sometimes just the opposite. A group of teens who have competed for a place on board the scientific research ship wake up to find the adults have almost all vanished. One of the remaining adults commits suicide in a terrible way, and the other is drug ridden for most of the cruise. How will the kids cope?

A Land so Wide turned into a completely different story than I felt I was going to read. In a settlement surrounded by magic boundary stones, a small community struggles to thrive when almost all outside contact is limited. Greer, whose mother has died, is in love with the town baker, but her father has other plans for her. Greer has a longing to see outside the boundaries, to travel the world, despite the terrible dangers outside the boundary stones. I thought at several points I could see how the story would play out, but I was wrong.

This has been a month of reading about murderous and determined women. A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Marriage succeeds in making Lalla Rook someone you’ll root for, somewhat reluctantly. In her pursuit of her perfect life, Lalla is ruthless if not always competent. Her house in London is in an area that isn’t her ideal. Her children aren’t cooperating with the ideal she’s established. And her husband might not make partner in his firm. But Lalla comes out swinging, and you have to admire that.

This Story Might Save Your Life has a heroine far more sympathetic, if not always as perceptive as we might wish. Benny and Joy are close friends and podcast partners. Joy has narcolepsy, so her life has to revolve around the medications and schedule necessary to support her. Her husband is their manager. But one day Joy vanishes, Benny is under suspicion of making her disappear, and their podcast theme of survivorship may be all that can save them. Really enjoyed this book from beginning to end.

Katy Brent’s first book about serial killer Kitty Collins, influencer and ruthless murderer, got the great balance between presenting a truly heinous character in such a way that it feels great to root for her. I Bet You’d Look Good in a Coffin is just as successful. Kitty is in love, and trying to control her baser instincts . . . but it’s a losing battle. Some men just need to be dead. I just realized I skipped a book, and I am definitely going to remedy that.

Wave is Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir about surviving a tsunami on the coast of Sri Lanka that killed her children, her husband, and her parents. It’s deep reading, and parts of it are surprising, since recovery from such a blow is long-lasting and jagged. This is well worth the plunge into the depths of unimaginable loss.

Wendy Isaac Bergin’s The Piper’s Story was an accidental read. I was caught without a book when I didn’t expect to have free time, and Bergin was selling her novels at the convention. Set in two time periods, there’s a past history of the Piper’s experiences in World War II, and the current Piper who’s facing a marital crisis and a haunting. I enjoyed this book all the way through.  It’s good to step outside your reading boundaries!

Blog:

Later this month I’ll be traveling to NYC to the Edgars Banquet, held annually by Mystery Writers of America. I’ve been a longtime member, and this year a nominee for Best Short Story. I’ll have a meeting with my editor while I’m there. But it’s quite a quick trip: I’m flying home for about a week and then returning to NYC (but a different hotel) for ThrillerFest, which is a really super convention with interesting panels, great writers at the top of their game, and a Craftfest event before the convention opens that (if I were a starting writer) I would attend in a heartbeat.

In the same time frame, I have not one, but two, Celebrations of Life to attend with all the emotional baggage engendered.

So I’ll be all over the place, literally and figuratively.

I just finished going through my copy-edited manuscript for Hold My Spellbook, my novel coming out in February 2027 in both the USA and the UK. Copy editors earn their money, and I know the book is much improved, but for this writer the process is akin to having your fingernails pulled out. But now it’s done, starting through the publication process, and I can hardly wait to see the cover. I’m already working on another book with the same characters.

You can see by the above book list of things I’ve been reading that there’s a definite trend toward emotionally disturbed women killers. I’m riding high on that, though some books are definitely skewed toward the snarky (root for this murderer, he deserves to die!) to the devastation left in the wake of such a killer. I don’t know what to think about this trend, except that it makes for good reading and some thoughtful moments.

Charlaine Harris