Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Counting Game by Sinéad Nolan: A haunting debut where myth and fear blur in the Irish woods

Two children walk into the woods, and only one returns. From that chilling premise, The Counting Game by Sinéad Nolan unfolds into an atmospheric psychological mystery that lingers long after the final page. Releasing April 7, 2026, this debut crime novel turns a rural Irish legend into something far more unsettling: a story where the real danger might be human—or something else entirely.

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Set in southwest Ireland in 1995, the novel opens with the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Saoirse Kellough. She vanished while playing the so-called “Counting Game” in the forest with her younger brother, Jack. The rules are simple: go into the woods, count to ten, and stay hidden. The problem is that only Jack comes out. Worse still, he refuses to speak about what happened.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Love by the Book by Jessica George: A heartwarming story about friendship, growth, and unexpected connections

I’ll admit, when I first opened Love by the Book by Jessica George on my tablet, I paused. “Ew, a romance novel—why did I sign up for that?” I thought. Not that there’s anything wrong with romance, but it isn’t usually my cup of tea. I read the summary again and saw that it was about friendship—better, but still, what? Long story short, I was hesitant going in. But by the end, I was so glad I had given it a chance. There is so much more to this story than what the cover summary hints at, and once I got into it, I was fully invested.

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The novel follows Remy and Simone, two women at very different points in their lives. Remy, fresh off the success of her debut novel, finds herself suddenly adrift as her closest friends move away, start families, or return to toxic relationships. Her creative spark is gone, and with it, her sense of belonging. Simone, meanwhile, has long relied on her independence, enjoying her well-paying side gig and a close relationship with her family. But when a hidden aspect of her life comes to light, she faces isolation for the first time. When these two women collide in a bookstore, neither is expecting the connection that follows—but both may find the friendship they didn’t know they were missing.

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Writers on Writing

DIY High: A young adult novel about resilience, alternative education, and building your own path

DIY High is a young adult novel about a high school student forced to take control of her own education when both her school system and her family fail her. Inspired in part by real-life struggles with bureaucracy, poverty, and addiction, the novel explores what happens when traditional institutions stop working—and what young people can build in their place.

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I wrote this book during one of the hardest seasons of my life. My son was recovering from a traumatic brain injury after being hit by a semi truck while riding his bike. When he returned to school, it felt less like support and more like resistance. Instead of helping him get back on track, the system seemed to work against him. Eventually, when he turned seventeen, I made the decision I never imagined I would make: I let him drop out.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

A Killer in the Family by Amin Ahmad: Wealth, secrets, and a dynasty where no one is innocent

When Ali agrees to an arranged marriage with the daughter of a powerful New York real estate tycoon in A Killer in the Family by Amin Ahmad, he expects privilege, stability, and a glamorous life among the elite—but not the creeping suspicion that someone in his new family might be a serial killer.

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This sweeping drama follows Ali, a charming but somewhat naïve Mumbai party boy who decides it’s finally time to grow up. His arranged marriage to Maryam, the poised daughter of real estate mogul Abbas Khan, brings him into a world of unimaginable wealth in New York City: private helicopters, glittering skyscrapers, and lavish weekends in the Hamptons. At first, Ali seems to have landed in a dream version of the American immigrant success story. But as rumors begin to swirl about Abbas Khan—whispers of corruption, secret affairs, and something darker beneath the family’s rise—Ali starts to realize that joining the Khans may have come with a cost he never anticipated.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Too Close to Home by Seraphina Nova Glass: When suburban perfection starts to crack

The illusion of safety is a fragile thing—and in Too Close to Home by Seraphina Nova Glass, it shatters in the most explosive way possible when a Labor Day celebration turns deadly in an upscale lakefront neighborhood that suddenly doesn’t feel so safe after all.

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Set in the pristine community of Cloverhill Lakes, the novel leans hard into the familiar rhythms of the affluent suburban thriller: PTA politics, curated friendships, and the quiet competition simmering beneath polite smiles. Life here is carefully managed, right down to the image each family presents. That illusion implodes when Regan Hoffman’s car explodes at a neighborhood party—killing the wrong person and setting off a chain reaction of paranoia, suspicion, and buried secrets clawing their way to the surface.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Sorry for Your Loss by Georgia McVeigh: A deliciously twisted game of obsession, grief, and control

Grief can make people do strange things—but in Sorry for Your Loss by Georgia McVeigh, releasing March 31, 2026, grief is just the starting point for a psychological duel between two people who may be far more dangerous than they first appear. What begins as a chance meeting in a grief support group quickly turns into a tense, unsettling cat-and-mouse game where the real question isn’t whether someone is lying—it’s who’s manipulating whom.

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At the center of the story is Iris, a woman who is clearly out of touch with reality. She attends a local grief group to keep herself “grounded,” but from the start it’s obvious that Iris is holding onto far more than grief. Her childhood offers clues about how she became the person she is. Iris grew up in the shadow of her twin sister, Marcie—the golden child who their mother adored. Marcie’s birth came easily, while Iris reportedly took days to arrive, a story their mother never let her forget. Even after Marcie’s tragic death at seventeen, their mother openly wished it had been Iris instead. It’s the kind of emotional wound that never quite heals, and as an adult Iris is still searching for the love and validation she never received.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton: A haunting literary mystery about civilization, memory, and the stories we choose to tell

In Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton (releasing March 31, 2026), an ambitious archaeologist chases proof of a lost empire—and in the process, confronts the fragile architecture of her own world. After loving The Light Pirate, I could not wait to read this one. I was not disappointed. Ruins just catapulted itself to the number one spot on my best books of 2026 list.

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I read an advance review copy as an ebook, as I do with most ARCs. I usually prefer print, but you can’t argue with free. This, however, was one of those rare cases where I found myself wishing the book had already been released so I could run out and buy a physical copy. I wanted to hold it in my hands. I wanted the weight of it. The experience of immersion felt so complete that a screen almost seemed insufficient.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher: A gothic horror that burrows under your skin

In Wolf Worm, T. Kingfisher delivers a slow-burning gothic nightmare set in the woods of North Carolina, where scientific curiosity collides with something far older and far more feral. Releasing March 24, 2026, the novel follows Sonia Wilson, a scientific illustrator in 1899 who has been surviving on the borrowed credibility of her late father’s reputation. When she accepts a position with the reclusive Dr. Halder to illustrate his insect collection, she believes she’s securing stability. Instead, she steps into a story that opens with a chilling admission: “I saw the devil in these woods.”

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Kingfisher’s prose reflects Sonia’s artistic eye. Descriptions feel layered, as if applied with a brush—yellow ochre laid in for a dog’s fur and then lifted back out again along the face. The natural world is rendered with precision and technique, which makes the corruption creeping through it feel even more invasive. As animals begin behaving strangely and local whispers about “blood thieves” grow louder, the beauty of the environment becomes inseparable from the horror beneath it. This is a novel saturated with insects—some of them of the burrowing-into-flesh variety—and Kingfisher does not shy away from the visceral implications.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Mother Is Watching by Karma Brown: A dystopian horror that turns pregnancy into a battleground

In Mother Is Watching by Karma Brown, releasing March 17, 2026, a routine art restoration spirals into a chilling exploration of surveillance, bodily autonomy, and the quiet horror of a society that thinks it knows what’s best for women. What begins as the story of a haunted painting becomes something far more insidious—a dystopian nightmare hiding beneath a gothic veneer.

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Mathilde “Tilly” Crewson, a thirty-nine-year-old art conservator and mother, is hired to restore The Mother, a fire-scarred painting rumored to be the lost fourth work of a female surgeon-turned-artist. Not long after the canvas arrives in her home, Tilly discovers she is unexpectedly pregnant. Then the insects come. The whispers. The visions of her long-dead mother. The line between psychological unraveling and supernatural intrusion blurs as the painting’s influence tightens around her.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Plans I Have for You by Lai Sanders: A dark, seductive debut about revenge, race, and dangerous devotion

A viral video destroys one young woman’s future in The Plans I Have for You by Lai Sanders, and what follows is a gothic-tinged descent into revenge, obsession, and the perilous gap between justice and annihilation.

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Releasing March 17, 2026, Sanders’s debut has already been named one of Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Thrillers of 2026, but this novel resists easy categorization. It blends psychological suspense with sharp social critique and an undercurrent of supernatural ambiguity that keeps the reader unsettled from the first page.

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