Nathan Jorgenson – Otto’s Portal
Nathan Jorgenson’s new novel, Otto’s Portal, begins with a metaphysical: if the soul leaves the body at death, what keeps it attached while we are alive?
R. John Dingle – Before the Devil Knows
The windows of his restored, two-hundred-year-old house on an island off the coast of Maine provides an appropriately unsettled headquarters for R. John Dingle’s stories of isolation, buried guilt, and the elaborate secrets of small towns.
Margaret Mizushima – Dying Cry
In Margaret Mizushima’s Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries, the mountains listen. Snow presses against the Colorado high country with the hush of an accomplice. Canyons conceal more than weather. And a dog’s lifted muzzle may be the first sign that civilization’s careful arrangements have begun to...
Dara Levan – Shaken to the Core
Dara Levan is interested in the moments when life reveals its stress fractures. The novel’s title suggests devastation, but the book, as she describes it, is not merely about being broken. It is about what a person does after the breaking.
Steven Rubin – The Unraveling of Michael Galler
Steven Rubin’s The Unraveling of Michael Galler begins not with a monster in the room but with an absence. Michael is eight years old when his mother dies of cancer. From that point forward the world becomes a place where invisible things gather strength in silence.
John Winn Miller – Miriam in the Shadows
John Winn Miller’s MIRIAM IN THE SHADOWS has found in historical fiction what journalism could not always permit: the emotional weather behind the documented fact.
Katie Rose Pryal – Your Kid Belongs Here
Some books arrive dressed as manuals, carrying the sturdy promise of advice. Others come as dispatches from the interior, written by someone who has survived the territory and returned with a map. Dr. Katie Rose Pryal’s Your Kid Belongs Here is both.
Caitlin Rother – Staged
What happens when an investigative journalist shifts from documenting true crime to crafting psychological suspense? Welcome to the multi-layered world of Caitlin Rother’s Katrina and Goode series.
Fons Burger – The Only Possible Solution
In Fons Burger’s new book, The Only Possible Solution, the question before him is not whether the world is broken. It is whether we can still imagine it whole.
MJ Dyer – We Are Monsters
There is something almost Victorian about the origin story of M.J. Dyer’s We Are Monsters. It begins not with a candlelit manor or a governess on the moors, but in a hospital room, where the author, recovering from brain inflammation, began seeing three identical sisters.
Lee Goldberg – Murder by Design
Lee Goldberg has spent much of his career turning murder into an oddly companionable profession. He’s the sort of writer who speaks about craft as if it were both a calling and a chronic illness.
Liz Lazarus – Dawn Before Darkness
The best suspense does not rely on shadows or sudden violence, but on the slow, suffocating realization that the systems meant to protect you may instead conspire against you. It is this more insidious terror that animates Liz Lazarus’s latest novel, Dawn Before Darkness.