⭐⭐⭐⭐✨ (4½ stars) Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Readers’ Favorite Mystery & Thriller (2025) Holly Jackson makes a seamless leap from YA powerhouse to adult thriller with Not Quite Dead Yet, and wow — what a hook. Thirty-six hours after a brutal Halloween attack, Jet Mason wakes in a Vermont hospital to devastating news: a bone fragment is pressing against a vital artery, and within a week she’ll suffer a fatal hemorrhage. Surgery offers only a slim chance. So Jet makes a choice that sets this story on fire — she’ll spend her last seven days finding her killer. Jet, the sharp-tongued, restless daughter of one of Woodstock’s wealthiest families, has […]
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Chasing Ghosts of the Third Reich
⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’ve wanted to read The Odessa File for years and finally got around to it. I’m glad I did. In this gripping Cold War thriller, Frederick Forsyth follows journalist Peter Miller as he uncovers evidence of ODESSA, a clandestine network protecting former SS officers. What starts as a personal investigation soon becomes a dangerous descent into a web of power, loyalty, and buried atrocities. The novel is full of facts interwoven into the story, giving it a documentary feel without losing narrative drive. Forsyth’s background as a foreign correspondent shows in the meticulous detail and procedural authenticity. The moral weight of postwar Germany hangs over every chapter, adding depth to the suspense. At […]
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An Ordinary Man, an Extraordinary Reckoning—A Powerful New Series Begins
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is the 33rd book I have read by David Baldacci, and I envision reading many more. Nash Falls is a real winner—and the launch of a brand-new series. Walter Nash is a smart, fair, relentlessly hardworking executive at Sybaritic Investments, with a loving wife and daughter and a life that looks polished and secure. That illusion shatters after his estranged father’s funeral, when the FBI pressures him to expose a global money-laundering operation inside his own firm, led by the ruthless Victoria Steers. Nash agrees, even knowing previous informants have died. When his cover is blown, the retaliation is brutal and deeply personal. His world implodes, and the transformation that follows—from […]
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A Sequel That Leaves New Readers Behind
This novel makes one thing clear pretty quickly: it was written with prior knowledge in mind. Having never read The Woman in Cabin 10, I often felt unmoored, as if I’d walked into the second half of a conversation and was expected to keep up. Key relationships and emotional stakes are taken for granted instead of built on the page, which makes it hard to fully invest. The setup should work. Travel journalist Lo Blacklock, sidelined by motherhood and a changing media landscape, jumps at the chance to attend the opening of a luxurious Swiss hotel on Lake Geneva. The owner is a reclusive billionaire, the setting is glamorous, and a […]
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The Neighbors Look Nice. They’re Not.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Other People’s Houses turned out to be a great way to stumble into a series. This was my first time reading a DC Morgan novel, and I’m officially in—now I want to read the rest. Set in a glossy UK suburb where everyone appears successful, the story peels back the carefully curated lives of neighbors who are desperate to keep up appearances. When a wealthy couple is murdered in their pristine home, the investigation exposes tangled relationships, financial secrets, and resentments that have been quietly festering for years. Mackintosh does a nice job juggling multiple perspectives, keeping you guessing about who’s lying, who’s hiding something, and who’s capable of […]
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A Horrific Thriller That Goes Way Too Far
⭐⭐⭐ Pretty Girls is a book I finished out of stubbornness, not enjoyment. I like a solid thriller. I can handle dark subject matter. But this one pushed straight past dark into twisted, gory, gruesome, and deeply disturbing territory. The violence is graphic to an almost numbing degree, with explicit depictions of torture, sexual assault, and murder that felt excessive rather than necessary. Instead of heightening suspense, it often pulled me out of the story. That said, Slaughter can write. The novel is complex, the characters are well developed, and the emotional fallout within the family feels authentic. There’s a strong foundation here, even if it’s buried under layers of brutality. […]
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Gripping and Gloomy, With a Few Rough Edges
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy is an intense, often gripping novel—but not one I’d personally put in starred-review territory. The story follows Dominic Salt and his three children, the last caretakers of Shearwater, a remote island near Antarctica that safeguards the world’s largest seed bank. Cut off from the rest of the world and battered by violent storms and rising seas, their fragile existence is upended when a mysterious woman named Rowan washes ashore. Her arrival brings hope, suspicion, and a cascade of unsettling revelations—sabotaged radios, buried grief, long-kept secrets, and a grave that raises more questions than answers. I’ll be honest: the climate change theme turned me off, and it’s […]
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Don Winslow Bows Out with a Bang
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I literally couldn’t put down City in Ruins. Don Winslow caps off both his Danny Ryan trilogy and his career with a knockout of a finale that’s equal parts brutal, beautiful, and heartbreaking. Former dockworker and Irish mob soldier Danny Ryan has transformed into a Las Vegas casino mogul, swimming in wealth and respectability. Life finally seems golden—he has a son he adores, a woman he might love, and enough money to last several lifetimes. But when Danny tries to buy a prime piece of real estate to build his dream resort, he stirs up a hornet’s nest of corrupt Vegas power brokers, a ruthless FBI agent bent on revenge, […]
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Rapp in the Crosshairs of Love and War
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Denied Access wraps up the early Mitch Rapp arc with full force. We’re back to his rookie assassin days, right where Kill Shot left off. The CIA is wobbling after the fall of the Soviet Union, Congress is circling with budget scissors, and interim director Thomas Stansfield is trying to keep the whole agency from sliding into the ash heap. Meanwhile, a major Moscow sting has blown up in spectacular fashion, costing the CIA its most valuable Russian asset. And guess who gets called in to clean up the mess? But Rapp isn’t just fighting for the flag here. When his girlfriend Greta’s family is targeted and a chilling package arrives […]
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Office Politics Turn Deadly in This Twisty Psychological Thriller
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Freida McFadden’s The Coworker takes a simple setup—a missing employee—and turns it into a devious psychological maze. Dawn Schiff is the office oddball: awkward, punctual to a fault, and obsessed with routines. When she suddenly vanishes, her bubbly coworker Natalie Farrell is the first to notice—and the first to realize something’s very wrong. As police and colleagues start digging, Natalie’s version of events begins to crack, and the truth becomes far murkier than anyone expected. McFadden keeps the tension high with alternating points of view and short, punchy chapters that make it nearly impossible to stop reading “just one more.” The twists land hard, especially the mid-book reveal that flips everything […]
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