Category: Book Reviews

Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Witch’s Orchard by Archer Sullivan is a chilling Appalachian mystery

Mandy Webster

Sometimes the scariest stories aren’t about monsters at all—they’re about the damage people do to one another, and the shadows those wounds cast long into adulthood. That’s the heart of The Witch’s Orchard by Archer Sullivan, a gripping mystery set in the mountains of North Carolina.

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Private investigator Annie Gore, a former Air Force special investigator, takes on a case that pulls her back into a world she thought she left behind: the Appalachian hollers where she grew up. Ten years earlier, three young girls vanished from a tiny mountain town. One returned, but the others were never found. Now, the brother of one of the missing hires Annie to uncover the truth. The case is cold, the town is closed off to outsiders, and the mountains are filled with both folklore and secrets—but Annie needs the money, so she can’t turn down the job.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Made You Look by Tanya Grant turns influencer culture into a deadly game

Mandy Webster

A snowstorm, a retreat full of influencers, and a killer among them—Made You Look by Tanya Grant (on sale November 18, 2025) takes a sharp, unsettling look at what happens when image-driven lives collide with deadly reality.

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Sydney Kent is the star of the show—the influencer everyone wants to be or be with. But her friends and colleagues—Caitlyn, Lucy, Jeff, Nash, and Brent—aren’t just background players. They’re the professionals who make her shine, whether as photographers, stylists, or managers. When the group travels to a secluded Catskills retreat, it’s supposed to be an opportunity for fresh content and brand partnerships. Instead, a snowstorm traps them without Wi-Fi, cell service, or an escape route. That’s when the murders begin, and the real cracks in their “team” are forced into the open.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez is a haunting epic of grief, power, and inheritance

Mandy Webster

Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night is not an easy read—and that’s what makes it unforgettable. This sprawling, terrifying, and deeply layered novel moves through decades of Argentina’s history, entangling grief, family, colonialism, and the occult in ways that feel both intimate and vast.

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The novel begins with Juan and his six-year-old son Gaspar, reeling after the death of Rosario—Juan’s wife and Gaspar’s mother. They set out on a road trip to Rosario’s ancestral home, but this is no ordinary return to family. Rosario’s family belongs to The Order, a secretive cult that will stop at nothing in its pursuit of immortality. Their devotion is not to god or country, but to the Darkness, a supernatural force that demands unspeakable acts in exchange for power. Gaspar is their legacy, and Juan knows it.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

When a mother disappears, everyone’s a suspect: She Didn’t See It Coming by Shari Lapena

Mandy Webster

What if your spouse vanished in the middle of an ordinary day, leaving behind their car, keys, phone—and no trace of where they went? That’s the unsettling setup of She Didn’t See It Coming by Shari Lapena, a novel that blends true crime grit with domestic suspense.

Get your copy of She Didn’t See It Coming from my independent online bookstore today!

Lapena’s latest reads differently than her earlier thrillers. This one feels more like a police procedural with a true crime edge, pulling readers into the investigation from both the detectives’ perspective and the world of amateur sleuths. I was especially intrigued by the way she wove in the true crime ecosystem—neighbors rushing to post their theories in Facebook groups, family members consuming crime podcasts for clues. Bryden’s sister, Lizzie, is a true crime addict who inserts herself into the search, raising an uncomfortable question: do amateur sleuths actually help an investigation, or do they only spread speculation that leads investigators off track?

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Facing the long shadows: A review of Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker

Mandy Webster

Some novels get under your skin. Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker goes even deeper—straight into your bones—where it sits heavy, resonating with truths too often ignored.

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At its heart, Madwoman is a story about the devastating, lifelong impact of domestic violence, especially on children. Clove has carefully built a life meant to erase her past: a loving husband, two children, a safe home in Portland. She believes that with enough self-help tools, supplements, and daily gratitude meditations, she can outrun the terror of her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise.

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Facing the demons we inherit: a review of This Is My Body by Lindsay King-Miller

Mandy Webster

Shame is a demon—and sometimes it takes more than holy water to drive it out. In This Is My Body, Lindsay King-Miller delivers a gut-punch of a horror novel that fuses family trauma, queer identity, and religious extremism into a story that’s as unsettling as it is compulsively readable. At its core, this is a book about how the shame we inherit can twist us, haunt us, and, if left unchecked, destroy us.

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Brigid, a gay single mom, has spent years keeping her daughter Dylan far from the influence of her fanatically Catholic family. But when Dylan begins experiencing violent, terrifying fits that seem eerily familiar to an incident from Brigid’s childhood, she does the unthinkable—she goes back. Back to the home she swore she’d never return to. Back to her manipulative, self-righteous Uncle Angus, the priest who once “saved” a girl through exorcism.

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Finding power in the dirt: A review of The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt

Mandy Webster

In The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt by Chelsea Iversen, a woman’s solitude, survival, and subtle rebellion are rooted—quite literally—in the soil beneath her feet.

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Set in Victorian London, this gorgeously atmospheric novel tells the story of Harriet Hunt, a woman left to tend her crumbling family estate and the lush, almost sentient garden that surrounds it. Her father has mysteriously disappeared, and society has all but cast her aside. Her only companions are the magical plants she lovingly tends: wild vines, blooming plums, and a pulse of earth-bound power that seems to know her better than anyone else ever has.

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The Dead Husband Cookbook is a wickedly satisfying feast of justice

Mandy Webster

Some recipes call for salt, sugar, and spice—but in Danielle Valentine’s The Dead Husband Cookbook, the secret ingredient is retribution. When infamous chef and TV personality Maria Capello’s husband vanishes under suspicious circumstances, the whispers never stop. The media paints her as a murderer, a woman who cooked up her culinary empire on the bones of her missing spouse. But Maria never talks. Not for decades. Not until now.

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Thea Woods, an up-and-coming writer, gets the job of a lifetime: working with Maria on her explosive memoir. She’s whisked away to the Capello family’s secluded farm, where the air smells faintly of nostalgia—and something far more unsettling. It doesn’t take long before Thea realizes that Damien Capello isn’t the only man who has gone missing in this family’s orbit. And the deeper she digs, the more she begins to understand that Maria’s perfect “coastal grandmother” persona hides a recipe of equal parts love, loyalty, and something darker.

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The Witch of Willow Sound is a haunting tale of memory, superstition, and the danger of silence

Mandy Webster

If you lived beneath a rock that might crush you at any moment, would you believe in witches? In The Witch of Willow Sound, debut author Vanessa F. Penney weaves a chilling and fast-paced gothic tale that blends feminist themes with East Coast folklore, offering a story that’s as unsettling as it is poignant. When Fade returns to the shadowy forests of Willow Sound, Nova Scotia, in search of her missing aunt Madeline, she finds only a rotting cottage and a community eager to assign blame. The villagers of nearby Grand Tea have always called Madeline a witch—but now, as misfortunes pile up and a hurricane approaches, their fear is turning violent.

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The worldbuilding in this novel is both original and deeply atmospheric. At the heart of Grand Tea’s folklore and fear is a massive rock perched above the town, a looming presence that could fall at any moment. You can feel the weight of it as you read—how its threat presses down on the villagers, shaping their beliefs, their behaviors, even their cruelty. The psychological tension it creates is masterful. It makes perfect, eerie sense that a place so precariously positioned would invent scapegoats and spin stories about curses and witches. The mob mentality that develops is reminiscent of The Crucible, complete with paranoia and projection.

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Book Reviews

How to review a book (and how many stars to give it)

Mandy Webster

If you’ve ever stared at a review box after finishing a book and thought, I liked it… but was it a three-star read or a four-star one?, you’re not alone. Book reviews, especially those with a star rating attached, can feel deceptively simple—but they deserve some real thought. After all, your review might influence someone else’s decision to read (or skip) a book.

How do you decide which books merit five stars vs. three or even one?

So how do you decide what to say? And how many stars should you give?

Let’s start with the most important question: Why review books at all?

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