The Secrets We Hide offers what is for me the perfect blend of character development, layered interpersonal issues, and mystery twists and turns that never feel convoluted, plus other favorite Bossy elements: a small-town setting, a family legacy of police work, and a condensed, healthily paced timeline from the story's beginning to end. I was hooked on this novel. I love a story driven by a female investigator main protagonist, and in book one of this small-town mystery seri

In Mandel's newest dystopian novel she presents two worlds, one lawless and one bound by constant surveillance, and she drops characters and their doppelgängers in and out of each. I was fascinated by this melancholy, layered story and its irresistible main protagonist. It's the year 2030 and the United States has collapsed. Ari Waker has just been released from prison after serving a decades-long sentence, and she emerges to a nation in turmoil where many scrape and scramble

Bannister's psychological mystery sets up an imminent death on the tracks, then takes the reader back and forth in time to share characters' back stories, faults and failings, and interconnectedness. An omniscient narrator turns the mirror back on the reader at times. The structure of Five is key to its impact. While the human condition is fragile and while everyone does have a story and while we do not know what goes on behind closed doors while we are judging books by their

Fitzgerald recounts various scenes from his gritty, disrupted childhood, shares the chosen family he forms working long-term at a bar, explains his body dysmorphia, and tells the reader how he tries to be a good person in the world. I found his stories intriguing, but for me the essay format made the book feel somewhat disjointed. In his memoir-in-essay-form Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Isaac Fitzgerald traces his life from his unlikely conception (his parents were married...but t

Cline crafts a poignant, darkly funny, and uncomfortably, beautifully spot-on-feeling novel about a man with dementia as the clock runs out. He increasingly loses his grasp on the facts but urgently reconnects with pivotal figures from his past and considers his rapidly unraveling, impenetrable reality while revealing to the reader powerful, universal truths. Leave the party right when you think, I'm having such a nice time at this party. David is on a private plane headed fo

This slim work of nonfiction packs a punch; Alexander (also the author of the exquisite memoir The Light of the World) delves into matters of race, inequality, history, art, and the power of poetry. I found myself wishing for more pages and deeper explorations of these pivotal issues. We send signals across vast distances, hoping to connect. Dr. Elizabeth Alexander draws her book's title from the quote above, which is from a 1968 poem by Muriel Rukeyser. In this slim work of

The third and final installment of Bardugo's Ninth House dark fantasy series offers more gritty corruption, seemingly insurmountable challenges, the threat of the entirety of hell's wrath, wonderfully morbid humor, some hard-won romance, and a ragtag group of loyal allies bent on thwarting the spread of evil. This was friendship, he supposed. You learned the rhythms of hurt and apology. You crashed through each other's lives and hoped for grace in the final tally of the damag

Benjamin's speculative fiction sets two members of a heartbroken couple in an unforgiving climate, facing an unexplained phenomenon, and seeking the impossible: to turn back time and undo a tragedy that upended their lives. This is intriguing--as well as science-heavy, unique, patiently paced, and without a neat and tidy ending. In Chloe Benjamin's haunting, beautiful novel Under Story, Laurel is a biologist who studies fungi and is running from her past. She's hurting, and s

The Taipei sights, sounds, heat, and tastes are the stars of Kuang's novel. Much of the study-abroad language immersion program felt expected; I most appreciated Lily's eventual examination of her own family's history and heritage and how she fits into it. Lily Chen is a college student who travels to Taiwan to study in an intensive language program along with many other Chinese American students. Lily and her roommate misjudge their living arrangements and suffer through unr

Clytemnestra is often depicted as a villain. Here, her layered, sympathetic motivations are revealed. Trained as a warrior and now a queen, she must cope with brutality and frustrating circumstances in this tale of power, love, and vengeance. “You can’t have justice and everyone’s approval.” Clytemnestra was born a Spartan princess (sister of the beautiful Helen--later "of Troy") who married for love, then was married off against her will by her father to cruel Agamemnon, who

In book two of Gillig's great gothic fantasy series, main characters go through satisfying arcs and development, a great love story persists, gargoyle Bartholomew yet again steals the show, and a struggle between political power and faith continues. In The Knight and the Moth, the first title in Gillig's Stonewater Kingdom series, a shadowy, eerie tone gave way to heartwarming, sometimes funny moments as an unlikely pack of allies set out on a journey of discovery, complete w

The first mystery in King's 19-book series builds an irresistibly layered professional partnership and personal, friends-like-family bond between Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. The story's detail, pacing, plot, and character development are all fantastic. I look forward to reading more titles in this series. It's 1915 and Sherlock Holmes is bored out of his mind and languishing in retirement...until he happens to meet 15-year-old Mary Russell on the Sussex Downs. She's cur

In this dual-timeline historical fiction-fantasy-magical realism-witchy story, Martin explores the Suffolk witch trials of 1645 and builds a link between one of the accused and a modern-day woman coming into her own mysterious powers--who just might be able to save both women, within their own times. "All women have magic in them." In Madeline Martin's dual-timeline novel A Time of Witches, Lilith lives in present-day Savannah, Georgia, and Sybil lives in 1645 Suffolk, Englan

I love a sci-fi story about a ragtag space gang trying to salvage a desperate situation. The first in Thorne's series delivers charming, heartwarming adventure and a cast of characters I can't wait to spend more time with in book two. In Rebecca Thorne's cozy sci-fi adventure Moss'd in Space, it's sometime after the year 90,000, and Torian's years of saving have finally allowed her to buy a spaceship. Now she will finally be able to take her sister to a distant planet where t

I was most interested in the fascinating premise and the exploration of guilt and responsibility after a terrible accident. I didn't enjoy the peeks into the future, which for me took the drama out of the fraught events that drive the story. And I was disappointed to have easily guessed the facts at the heart of the minor mystery. But I love Chris Bohjalian and many of his other books, so I'll happily read his next novel. Mira Winston is 18 years old in 1978, hitting golf bal

Walls uses a journal structure to draw the reader into a singular story I can't stop thinking about. In Field Notes from an Extinction, we witness the innermost thoughts of a grumbly hermit ornithologist who is thrust into a parenting role, then must face a pirate queen out for revenge on British colonial rulers amid the Irish Potato Famine. Eoghan Wells's Field Notes from an Extinction is a novel told in journal form from the perspective of a stodgy, single-minded 19th-centu

Cash crafts a delightfully campy, oddball novel around a family of characters who for various reasons abandon social acceptability as they aim to find fulfillment, solve a mystery, discover compatibility, seek purpose, and coexist together. This is a darkly humorous, sometimes quirky tale that's edgy and provocative. In Madeline Cash's darkly funny, oddball novel, the reader can tell what Catherine and Bud Flynn cannot: their open marriage is either directly or indirectly fur

At times this debut novel about an octogenarian and mistaken identity was too cloyingly sweet for me, but Fred's stumbling through life after grief and loss is poignant, and the story of mistakes and redemption is undoubtedly heartwarming. Frederick Fife is a widowed octogenarian living in Australia whose spark for life has dwindled significantly since the death of his beloved wife. He's a day away from being kicked out of his apartment (his wife's long cancer treatment bankr

The premise of this novel hooked me, and the relatively slow pacing throughout felt suited to an insular island life that exists outside of time. It's ultimately romantic to the nth degree, with damning climate-change effects that felt somewhat abrupt. The stormy night Clay Lockhart's wife and children die, he flies into a raging grief, and seemingly as a result of the power of his pain, his home and the land beneath it break from Scotland and float into the sea. When Ellie M

The tone of this historical fiction novel was at first too earnest for my taste, but ultimately I was intrigued by the real-life basis of the Halifax Explosion and the intersecting stories of two women coping with the local accident and crisis, the effects of World War I, societal limitations placed on women, judgment around single motherhood, finding and losing love, and more. I thought I understood what love was, but now I know what it’s not. It’s not being swept off my fee