Tag: Set in England

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Honey by Imani Thompson: A sharp, unsettling debut that turns rage into something intoxicating

Mandy Webster

There’s a moment early in Honey by Imani Thompson—out May 5, 2026—when a tiny, impulsive act spirals into something irreversible, and from that point on, the novel never loosens its grip. This is a dark, provocative debut that knows exactly what it’s doing, luring you in with something almost playful before revealing just how far it’s willing to go.

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Just like its title, this book is delicious. Yrsa’s first kill is so sweet in its construction—unplanned, quick, and disturbingly easy. What makes it even more compelling is that it’s not really the act itself that kills the man, but her decision not to intervene once things go wrong. It’s petty. It’s spiteful. And it’s chilling in the way Yrsa immediately recognizes the opportunity in front of her and simply… lets it happen. That moment sets the tone for everything that follows.

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Five by Ilona Bannister: A tense moral experiment that puts the reader on trial

Mandy Webster

There’s something quietly unsettling about the opening premise of Five by Ilona Bannister—five strangers on a train platform, one of whom will be dead in minutes—and the novel wastes no time making you complicit in that outcome. From the first pages, you’re not just observing these characters; you’re weighing them.

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Set against the ticking clock of an approaching train, the novel stretches a matter of minutes across its entire length. It’s an ambitious structural choice, and at times, a challenging one. Bannister intersperses the present-moment tension with flashback chapters that unpack each character’s history—the struggling gambler, the abrasive elderly woman, the overwhelmed mother and her volatile child, the polished yet fractured businessman. These glimpses into their lives are essential to the book’s central question: who deserves to live?

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Dark is When the Devil Comes by Daisy Pearce: A chilling, slow-burn horror that burrows under your skin

Mandy Webster

I knew exactly what I was getting into when I picked up Dark Is When the Devil Comes by Daisy Pearce—or at least I thought I did. After how deeply Something in the Walls unsettled me (to the point that I had to stop reading it before bed), I expected dread. I expected unease. What I didn’t expect was just how suffocating this story would feel once it took hold.

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Set in the English countryside, the novel follows Hazel, who returns to her hometown of Idless after a traumatic divorce, intending to quietly rebuild her life. But when she fails to reconnect with her sister Cathy as planned, concern quickly turns into something darker. The town whispers. The woods loom. And the sense that something has gone very, very wrong settles in almost immediately.

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Harmless Women by Rebecca Sharpe: A twisty thriller with a rebellious Thelma & Louise vibe

Mandy Webster

What happens when a professional con artist finishes a job—only to walk straight into a murder scene that turns everything upside down? Harmless Women by Rebecca Sharpe, releasing April 7, 2026, is a fast-paced thriller built around a clever premise. Avalon Dale is a skilled grifter who targets wealthy victims, sedates them, drains their bank accounts, and alters their appearance so they can’t easily prove who they are when they wake up. Her latest victim is Primrose Meath, a wealthy workaholic whose chaotic personal life makes her seem like an ideal target.

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By the time the story really kicks into gear, Avalon has already completed most of the job. She returns to Prim’s house to tie up loose ends and instead finds Prim’s cheating husband dead. The situation quickly spirals when a witness reports seeing a suspicious bald woman at the house, suggesting Prim may have been kidnapped. As the investigation unfolds, however, the police begin to suspect that Prim may have been involved in the scheme all along.

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

Mandy Webster

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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Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen: Grief, bog bodies, and the quiet horror of what we carry

Mandy Webster

Grief doesn’t arrive on a schedule, and it doesn’t leave when it’s inconvenient. In Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen, an adult debut releasing February 17, 2026, that truth sits at the center of a haunting, lyrical novel about loss, memory, and the unsettling ways the past insists on being seen.

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Anna is a London-based novelist who can no longer write, eat, or sleep in any meaningful way. Her mother is slipping deeper into dementia, her father is already gone, and Anna herself is reeling from a recent loss so destabilizing it has fractured her sense of self. Still, her literary agent wants pages. Progress. A new book. So when a winter writer’s retreat in rural England offers “space,” Anna takes it—less to finish a novel than to escape her own mind.

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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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Death and Other Occupational Hazards by Veronika Dapunt: The darkly funny mystery that proves even Death needs a vacation

Mandy Webster

The wildest thing about Death and Other Occupational Hazards by Veronika Dapunt is that the most relatable character in the entire book is Death herself—and honestly, she deserves better hours, better benefits, and definitely better coworkers.

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This darkly comedic, genre-bending mystery follows a woman-personified Death who is overworked, exhausted, and ready for a sabbatical on Earth—only to discover that the universe has absolutely zero intention of letting her rest. Someone is killing people who are not on her list, which is sort of like messing with the cosmic spreadsheet of all cosmic spreadsheets. Naturally, the whole thing spirals toward chaos.

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What boys learn: A tense, unsettling dive into the stories we tell about boys, mothers, and the damage we inherit

Mandy Webster

When harmful behavior can be traced to both inherited traits and toxic social conditioning, how do we decide what someone is accountable for—and what they never had a fair chance to escape? In What Boys Learn, Andromeda Romano-Lax drops readers straight into a suburb reeling from the deaths of two teenage girls—an event that quietly but steadily unravels high school counselor Abby Rosso’s sense of safety, certainty, and trust. As whispers begin to circle her son, Benjamin, Abby finds herself confronting the possibility she’s spent years refusing to consider: that the child she loves might be capable of terrible violence.

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The novel builds its tension through the push and pull between nature and nurture, a question Abby can’t escape. She recognizes in Benjamin flashes of the same coldness and manipulation she once saw in her brother—signs she’s tried to explain away, signs she hoped wouldn’t repeat themselves in the next generation. But Benjamin’s childhood looked nothing like the one she and Ewan endured. If something darker is taking root in him, Abby wonders whether it comes from genetics, from the world around him, or from the places in her parenting where she turned away instead of looking closely.

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