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Dirty Metal by Allison LaMothe: A gritty debut that barrels ahead, even when logic struggles to keep up

Mandy Webster

Dirty Metal by Allison LaMothe drops readers into pre-Giuliani New York City with a pill-popping, rule-breaking tabloid reporter at its center—and it does so with real confidence for a debut. Set in 1992, the novel follows Parker Snow, a 27-year-old crime reporter whose last big story went spectacularly wrong. Now sidelined onto organized crime coverage, Parker is desperate to prove she still belongs on the streets, no matter how questionable her methods become.

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LaMothe’s biggest strength is atmosphere. The city feels grimy, volatile, and alive, especially as Russian organized crime begins asserting power in Brighton Beach. Parker herself fits this world: reckless, sharp-tongued, and driven more by obsession than good judgment. She steals, trespasses, manipulates sources, and self-medicates her trauma, all while insisting she’s chasing the truth. It’s not hard to see how she landed in professional trouble—and why her boss tries to keep her on a short leash.

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Heap Earth Upon It by Chloe Michelle Howarth: Obsession, family loyalty, and the danger of loving too much

Mandy Webster

Heap Earth Upon It by Chloe Michelle Howarth is a gothic, psychologically rich literary novel that burrows under your skin and stays there. Set in 1965 in the quietly watchful town of Ballycrea, the story opens with the arrival of the O’Leary siblings, whose carefully guarded past and tightly bound loyalty to one another immediately raise questions no one is quite asking out loud.

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Following her acclaimed novel Sunburn, Howarth once again writes with precision and restraint, layering unease rather than rushing toward easy answers. At its heart, this is a novel about grief and survival, and about what happens when sibling devotion turns inward and begins to do real harm. The O’Learys have lost their parents and, in the absence of any other safety net, have clung to one another so fiercely that none of them are truly allowed to grow.

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The Pōhaku by Jasmin Iolani Hakes: An epic, indigenous saga about land, memory, and survival

Mandy Webster

Jasmin Iolani Hakes’s The Pōhaku is the kind of novel that reminds you why sweeping, multi-generational storytelling can feel so immersive and necessary when it’s done well. Spanning from the 1800s into the 1990s, this ambitious saga follows generations of women from one Hawaiian family, all bound by their responsibility to protect an ancient stone—the pōhaku—and by the land that shaped them.

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The novel opens in 1992 as Hurricane Iniki bears down on Hawaiʻi. A young woman lies comatose in a hospital after a mysterious fall from a cliff, watched over by her estranged grandmother. Did she jump, was she swept away by a wave, or was something else at play? The grandmother believes the answer lies not only in the pōhaku itself, but in a devastating omission: her granddaughter was never told about the stone, nor about the family’s sacred responsibility to protect it. As the storm approaches, the grandmother begins telling her the story anyway, hoping that restoring this broken line of knowledge might be enough to bring her back.

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The Exes by Leodora Darlington: A wickedly fun debut that doesn’t quite stick the landing

Mandy Webster

Who hasn’t fantasized—purely figuratively—about exacting a little revenge on an ex? The Exes by Leodora Darlington leans hard into that universal impulse, opening as an explosive, darkly entertaining thriller about love gone wrong, bad men getting what they deserve, and the stories women tell themselves to survive heartbreak. Natalie wants what she’s always wanted: the perfect partner, the stable family she never had, a life that finally feels settled. Instead, she’s left with a growing list of exes, each crossed out for reasons that grow more unsettling as the novel unfolds.

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After the mysterious “Big Fallout” leaves Natalie more isolated than ever, she meets James—handsome, charming, seemingly everything she’s been waiting for. Their relationship feels like a second chance, a reset. But as Natalie tries to perform the role of a “normal” wife, unsettling truths begin to surface, forcing her to question not just her marriage, but her own identity. Are her dead exes connected by coincidence, by guilt, or by something much darker? And is Natalie the monster in this story—or is someone else pulling the strings?

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The Room in the Attic by T.M. Logan: A domestic thriller powered by male entitlement and bad decisions

Mandy Webster

The Room in the Attic by T.M. Logan arrives with a premise that should be irresistible to fans of domestic suspense: a struggling family stretches itself to buy a rambling Victorian villa, only to uncover a hidden room filled with unsettling clues to someone else’s life. Secrets buried in the walls, secrets inside a marriage, and danger creeping closer with every chapter. On paper, it works. In practice, the novel hinges on a protagonist whose greatest flaw isn’t malice—but an unshakable belief that he knows best, even as he proves again and again that he doesn’t.

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Adam and Jess move into their new house with their three young children, already under financial strain. Almost immediately, Adam discovers a concealed door hidden behind a fitted wardrobe. Inside the secret room are several random items, including a wallet, an expensive watch, and an old mobile phone. Jess’s reaction is sensible and adult: get rid of them and move on. Adam, however, becomes fixated. He needs to know who they belonged to and why they were hidden, and that curiosity becomes the engine that drives the entire story.

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Such Sheltered Lives by Alyssa Sheinmel: Celebrity rehab, buried secrets, and a thriller that finds its footing late

Mandy Webster

Such Sheltered Lives by Alyssa Sheinmel opens inside an ultra-exclusive Hamptons rehab center built on discretion, money, and the promise that no one on the outside will ever find out what happens within its gates. From the opening pages, we know a body will be found on a nearby beach—and that inevitability hangs over Rush’s Recovery like a threat the staff can’t quite contain.

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I’ll be honest: this book gets off to a rough start. The early writing feels tentative and occasionally amateurish, and there are factual errors that pulled me sharply out of the story. One in particular made me stop and reread in disbelief: a character’s academic background is described in a way that suggests someone earned—or was earning—a PhD through night classes at a community college. That’s not a minor slip in phrasing; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how higher education works. No one is getting a doctorate that way. Errors like this made me question the author’s lived experience and research, and they chipped away at my trust in the narrative early on.

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No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot: Grief, motherhood, and the quiet violence of being blamed

Mandy Webster

No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot is one of those novels that quietly proves how wrong first impressions can be. I’ll admit it: I almost passed this one by because the cover looks oddly amateurish, the kind of design that suggests something lightweight or underbaked. I’m genuinely glad I didn’t. What’s inside is a sharp, unsettling literary debut that digs far deeper than its packaging suggests.

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Set in the Hudson Valley, the novel opens on what looks like a carefully curated life. Kate is a successful realtor and momfluencer with a devoted husband, Ethan, and a close relationship with her teenage daughter, Indie. That surface-level perfection shatters when Indie’s best friend, Maddy, is killed by a drunk driver right in front of her. From that moment on, Tourtelot is less interested in the tragedy itself than in the slow, corrosive aftermath—the way grief destabilizes families, marriages, and entire communities.

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Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer: A ferocious horror novel about motherhood, patriarchy, and the cost of being “good”

Mandy Webster

Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer is a horror novel that knows how to tell a gripping story while quietly dismantling the cultural myths propping it up. Scheduled to release on February 10, 2026, it’s the rare book that makes you start mentally planning your year-end “best of” list before you’re even finished reading. Trad Wife is an unsettling, deeply intelligent literary thriller that uses horror not just to disturb, but to say something urgent about womanhood, motherhood, and the performance of femininity in the age of social media.

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Camille Deming presents herself online as the ideal #tradwife: cooking from scratch, tending her homestead, centering her life around her husband and home. The problem is that she’s missing the one thing her followers—and the ideology she’s bought into—demand most: a baby. When Camille discovers a mysterious well behind her farmhouse and makes a wish, her desire is answered in ways that are grotesque, intimate, and impossible to undo. Her pregnancy brings skyrocketing engagement and validation, even as her body begins to change in frightening ways and her marriage quietly continues to rot.

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The Better Mother by Jennifer van der Kleut: A new mom’s nightmare of gaslighting, obsession, and control

Mandy Webster

There’s a particular kind of suspense novel that feels less like escapism and more like a psychological endurance test—and this is very much one of them. The Better Mother by Jennifer van der Kleut falls squarely into the latter category, delivering a fast-paced, anxiety-inducing suspense novel that taps into very real fears about boundaries, manipulation, and what happens when someone decides they know what’s best for your life better than you do.

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Savannah Mitchell is 34, freshly recovering from a devastating breakup, and finally feeling like she has her life back on track when a brief fling with a man named Max leaves her pregnant. When Savannah reaches out to tell him the news, he explains that he’s just reconciled with his ex-girlfriend, Madison, and needs time to break it to her. The twist comes quickly: Madison isn’t angry or resentful—she’s thrilled, eager to be involved, and insistent on helping Savannah through the pregnancy.

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A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage by Asia Mackay: Domestic bliss, but make it murderous

Mandy Webster

What happens when the thing that bonded you as a couple is the one thing you’re no longer allowed to do? A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage by Asia Mackay takes that question and runs with it—through marriage, parenthood, suburbia, and the quiet, suffocating boredom that sets in when two people stop working as a team. Readers who enjoyed This Girl’s a Killer will feel immediately at home here, thanks to the same blend of dark humor, moral ambiguity, and sharp observations about womanhood and rage.

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Hazel and Fox once believed they were made for each other. Not in a meet-cute, rom-com way, but in a far more specific sense: they are serial killers who take pleasure in killing objectively bad men, saving future victims while satisfying their own darker impulses. Before pregnancy and playdates, their greatest joy came from killing—and from doing it together. Their intimacy was built on absolute trust, shared secrets, and a kind of moral clarity that only made sense to the two of them (and me, to be honest).

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