Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Served Him Right by Lisa Unger: A witchy revenge thriller that breaks the mold

In Served Him Right by Lisa Unger, releasing March 10, 2026, a celebratory brunch spirals into suspicion, sickness, and secrets when Ana Blacksmith’s ex-boyfriend becomes the center of shocking news—and Ana, the obvious suspect.

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Ana has gathered her sister Vera and closest friends to toast her recent breakup from Paul. But when disturbing developments about Paul surface, the narrative shifts fast. Ana already has a reputation. She’s already angry. And when one of the women at the brunch falls deathly ill, it doesn’t take much for whispers to turn into accusations. What follows is a twisty, pacy thriller—apt praise from Nita Prose—but this is not your average Lisa Unger novel.

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This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum: A twisty thriller about love, loyalty, and coercive control

What happens when your best friend—the person who helped build your life and career—vanishes, and you’re the one everyone thinks killed her? In This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum, releasing March 10, 2026, a wildly popular podcast duo built on survival stories faces a mystery they might not survive themselves.

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Best friends Benny Abbott and Joy Moore have made a career out of telling “against all odds” survival stories on their beloved podcast. From Joy’s experience with severe narcolepsy to countless near-death tales told with irreverent humor, they’ve turned trauma into connection—and connection into a carefully managed empire, thanks largely to Joy’s husband, Xander.

Then Joy disappears.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Medium Rare by A. Natasha Joukovsky: An Icarus retelling weighed down by its own ambition

In Medium Rare by A. Natasha Joukovsky, the author of The Portrait of a Mirror returns with what’s billed as a modern tragicomedy reimagining the myth of Icarus through bureaucracy, B-list fame, and college basketball. It’s a high-concept premise: a middling Washington lobbyist goes viral-adjacent after predicting a near-perfect NCAA March Madness bracket, while a woman named Cassandra—yes, that Cassandra—watches it unfold with prophetic detachment and literary ambition. The execution, however, is far less aerodynamic.

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Phil is the novel’s Icarus stand-in: an ordinary, faintly dissatisfied man who stumbles into the possibility of a billion-dollar perfect bracket during the 2019 tournament. As his predictions hold, attention snowballs. The media circles. The money looms. The ego inflates. You don’t have to be an oracle to see where this is headed. Phil will fly too high. He will burn. The arc is obvious from the start, which might have worked if the journey there had felt sharp or surprising.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Missing Sister by Joshilyn Jackson: A twisty Southern thriller about sisterhood, guilt, and revenge

What if the person avenging your sister’s death isn’t you—but someone who knows more than you ever did? In Missing Sister, Joshilyn Jackson delivers a chilling, character-driven thriller that explores the razor-thin line between justice and obsession. The novel follows Penny Albright, a rookie cop still reeling from the tragic death of her twin, Nix, five years earlier. Born three minutes apart, the sisters were inseparable—until Nix’s sudden death and a cryptic voicemail left Penny drowning in guilt and unanswered questions.

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Now working in law enforcement to honor Nix’s dream of making the world safer, Penny is called to her first murder scene and comes face-to-face with Danny Bowery, one of the three men she’s long blamed for her sister’s death. He’s sprawled in a pool of blood outside an upscale Atlanta shopping center, as if conjured by Penny’s long-harbored anger. And then there’s the blonde woman in blood-soaked clothes gripping a box cutter—a woman who hints that Bowery’s murder is only the beginning of a larger story about sisters before vanishing into thin air.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

I Did Not Kill My Husband by Linda Keir: A modern fugitive thriller fueled by hashtags, headlines, and wildfire

What happens when a social media influencer becomes America’s most hated wife and then vanishes into the mountains? I Did Not Kill My Husband, by writing duo Linda Keir, delivers a slick, high-concept thriller about reputation, perception, and what it takes to survive when the entire world thinks you’re guilty—and it hits shelves March 3, 2026.

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Cara Campbell built her brand on curated luxury and unapologetic ambition. Married to plastic surgeon Karl Campbell, she seemed to be living the rags-to-riches dream—until she was convicted of his murder and sentenced to life in prison. The evidence is stacked against her: a failing medical practice, a million-dollar life insurance policy, and a social media persona that leans hard into the gold-digger stereotype. The internet convicts her long before the jury does.

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Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward: A brutal, brilliant thriller about survival in the ashes

A lot of thrillers pretend to be gritty—Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward actually earns it, dragging readers into the Colorado Rockies and refusing to let them look away. Releasing February 24, 2026, Nowhere Burning is a harrowing, genre-blurring novel that folds the dark myth of Peter Pan and the feral desperation of Lord of the Flies into something uniquely Ward: unsettling, intimate, and psychologically razor-sharp.

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Riley and her younger brother Oliver flee their troubled home in the middle of the night, chasing rumors of Nowhere—an abandoned ranch once owned by a reclusive movie star and now whispered about as a refuge for runaways. What they find is a scorched sanctuary with its own rules, its own hierarchy, and its own buried horrors. It promises freedom. It demands a price.

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The Ghost Women by Jennifer Murphy: Tarot, witchcraft, and the ghosts patriarchy tried to bury

On a sweltering August morning in 1972, a young art student is found hanging from a tree, posed like the Hanged Man from a tarot deck—and that image sets the tone for Jennifer Murphy’s The Ghost Women, a lush, angry, and often mesmerizing novel about power, vengeance, and the women history tried to erase. Releasing February 24, 2026, this is a book steeped in atmosphere: a remote art academy housed in a former monastery, whispers of witch trials, ancient tarot cards, and long-dead women who may not be finished speaking.

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When Detective Lola Germany arrives at St. Luke’s Institute of the Arts to investigate the death of Abel Montague, she quickly realizes this is no straightforward suicide. An ancient Hanged Man tarot card tucked into his pocket—and his body arranged to mirror it—points toward ritual. As more students are discovered staged like figures from the deck, Lola finds herself navigating a campus brimming with secrets, ambition, and a self-proclaimed coven of young women who may know more than they’re willing to say.

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How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson: A police procedural that refuses to play by the rules

How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson, out February 24, 2026, starts with a wink and a dare—“If you picked up this book because you truly want to get away with murder…”—and initially feels like it might settle into familiar police-procedural territory. It doesn’t. What begins as a fairly standard investigation quickly mutates into something sharper, stranger, and genuinely hard to put down.

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Detective Inspector Samantha Hansen returns to Scotland Yard after a six-month medical leave, determined to prove she hasn’t lost her edge. Her reentry point is grim: the murder of fourteen-year-old Charlotte, whose backpack contains a copy of a self-help book titled How to Get Away with Murder. The book’s author, Denver Brady, claims to be a serial killer so successful no one knows his name—and as its contents go viral, it becomes disturbingly clear that someone is taking its lessons to heart.

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Crown City by Naomi Hirahara: A cozy mystery steeped in California history and cultural collision

What if a cozy mystery also sent you down historical rabbit holes you didn’t even know existed? That’s the quiet magic of Crown City by Naomi Hirahara, a genre-bending historical mystery set in Pasadena at the turn of the twentieth century that releases February 24, 2026.

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Set in 1903, Crown City follows eighteen-year-old Ryunosuke “Ryui” Wada, newly arrived from Japan and eager—if a little overwhelmed—to reinvent himself in America after the deaths of his parents. He finds work as an apprentice to an art dealer, moves in with a photographer roommate named Jack, and begins to piece together a life amid Pasadena’s booming prosperity. When a painting is stolen from the studio of celebrated Japanese artist Toshio Aoki, Ryui and Jack are hired to investigate, pulling them into a mystery that quickly turns more dangerous than either expects.

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Author Interview

Author interview: Jennifer van der Kleut on The Better Mother, Nancy Drew, and writing thrillers with real stakes

From childhood Nancy Drew notebooks to a debut thriller that asks hard questions about motherhood, loyalty, and what we owe one another, Jennifer van der Kleut’s path to publication has always been rooted in curiosity and emotional stakes. Her first novel, The Better Mother, released February 10, 2026, and introduces readers to a protagonist at her lowest point—then dares her to fight her way back. In this interview, van der Kleut talks about the books and writers who shaped her, why community matters on and off the page, the rituals that keep her grounded at the keyboard, and how remembering what’s truly at stake drives every story she tells.

Jennifer van der Kleut’s debut novel, The Better Mother, released February 10, 2026.

Q: What/who were your early literary influences, and how do you think their writing has shaped you as a storyteller today?
A: As a child, my number-one favorite mystery series was Nancy Drew. I wanted to be Nancy Drew. So much so, that I got a blank notebook, and as I read each book, I took notes of the clues and suspects in the story as though I were the detective myself, and tried to come to my own conclusion before the culprit was revealed.

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