Eight thrillers in which the characters actually get to have fun

Rachel Koller Croft is an author and screenwriter in Los Angeles, where she has scripted projects for Blumhouse, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Comedy Central, among others. She lives by the beach with her husband, Charles, and their rescue pitbull, Juniper. Stone Cold Fox is her first novel.

Croft's new novel is We Love the Nightlife.

At CrimeReads she tagged eight favorite thrillers "that let their characters actually have some fun amidst the drama, backstabbing, murder and all that other good stuff we readers and writers love about this genre." One title on the list:

The Next Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine

There is just something about the Mrs. Parrish universe that screams fun and I think it’s because Constantine lets the characters’ be nefarious and naughty in such splashy fashion. You can just tell they get as much of a kick out of themselves as the readers do. If you have a Desperate Housewives-sized hole in your fun-loving heart, this book will fill it.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books translated from Polish

Antonia Lloyd-Jones graduated from Oxford University in 1983 with a degree in Russian and Ancient Greek, and has been teaching herself Polish ever since. She has translated works by many of Poland's leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children's books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators' Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

Lloyd-Jones is the translator of Warsaw Tales, a short-story anthology.

She tagged five of the best books translated from Polish, including:

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Jennifer Croft

The Nobel laureate’s historical epic fictionalises the life of Jacob Frank, the bizarre but influential self-proclaimed messiah whose dedicated worshippers followed him around 18th-century Europe. This visionary novel re-creates his world in vivid, sensual detail, and can be read on many levels: as a history book exploring the development of Europe’s religions and philosophies, as a scrapbook of esoteric arcana such as alchemy and the Kabbalah, or the story of a rebel and his bewitched associates.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about youthful mistakes that come back to haunt you

Elizabeth Staple is an attorney. Prior to law school, she worked in media relations for the New York Giants, New England Patriots, Frankfurt Galaxy, and Syracuse University Athletic Communications. She was a member of the NFL media relations staff at three Super Bowls, and has also worked in events for Madison Square Garden, the PGA, and the NCAA Men's March Madness tournament. Staple lives in Connecticut with her husband and three children.

Staple's new novel is The Snap.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight "books about youthful mistakes that come back to haunt you," including:

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

This book is a car crash you desperately want to look away from but can’t, careening forward as the tension ratchets up and up to the point where you’re literally begging the protagonist to make any other choice. June Hayward is a frustrated middling author. She watches bitterly as her sometimes-friend Athena rockets to literary stardom, attributing Athena’s ability to break out of a crowded marketplace to her Chinese-American background. June knows her talent is on par with Athena’s; the deck is simply stacked against her as a dime-a-dozen white girl in publishing. When the opportunity comes to step into Athena’s shoes, June takes it, because it’s no less than what she’s owed. The magic trick of this book is that June’s delusion is so complete she has no idea her comeuppance is coming, although the reader unbearably feels it page by unbearable page.

Read about the other books on the list.

Yellowface is among Lauren Kuhl's eight top novels about toxic relationships, Elly Griffiths's top ten books about books, Toby Lloyd's seven books that show storytelling has consequences, Sophie Wan's seven top titles with women behaving badly, Leah Konen's six top friends-to-frenemies thrillers, and Garnett Cohen's seven novels about characters driven by their cravings.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen top Appalachian stories

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged fifteen "favorite Appalachian stories, from the poignant to the magical and beyond." One title on the list:

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll

This is a thorough history of Appalachia from its first settlers to pioneers and modern-day citizens. Steven Stroll delves into the past to get to the root of why our country sees Appalachia as a backward region, and what we can do to better understand the land and its people.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Ramp Hollow is among Lorraine Berry's eight books that offer a more honest approach to America's working class than Hillbilly Elegy.

Also see: fifteen top books about Appalachia; seven eye-opening books about Appalachia; and Katie Pickard Fawcett's five favorite books of Appalachia.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six psychological suspense stories that feature young protagonists

M. M. (Marjorie) DeLuca spent her childhood in the beautiful cathedral city of Durham in North-Eastern England. She attended the University of London, Goldsmiths College, studied psychology, then became a teacher. She immigrated to Canada and lives in Winnipeg with her husband and two children. There she also studied writing under her mentor, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Carol Shields.

She loves writing for all ages and in many genres—suspense, historical, sci-fi for teens. She's also a screenwriter with several pilot projects in progress.

DeLuca enjoys teaching workshops in Creative Writing and the writing process.

Her latest novel is The Night Side.

[My Book, The Movie: The Night Side; The Page 69 Test: The Night Side; Writers Read: M.M. DeLuca (January 2024)]

At CrimeReads DeLuca tagged six "gripping stories of psychological suspense that feature young protagonists struggling with the legacy of growing up in the chaos of a toxic family." One title on the list:

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

This sinister Gothic drama digs deep into the seemingly pink and perfect facade of ballet to reveal the gory truth behind it: mangled feet, blackened toenails and injured joints. Darkness also lingers in the lives of Dara and Marie Durant who have been dancers since they can remember. Growing up, they were homeschooled and trained by their glamorous but unstable mother, founder of the Durant School of Dance. After their parents’ death in a tragic accident nearly a dozen years ago, the sisters began running the school together, along with Charlie, Dara’s husband. As the story progresses, the twisted truth about their childhood and adolescence surfaces; memories of parents, constantly at war with each other, of the unrelenting mother who drove them to view pain as their friend, and who forced them to live a sheltered life in which nothing but dance mattered. Who groomed her beautiful and prized student Charlie, then introduced him into Dara and Marie’s sexually-charged adolescent world. As adults, Dara and Marie are still emotional adolescents, shaped by their mother’s twisted legacy. It’s no wonder this fragile façade can’t hold together when a cunning and determined outsider infiltrates their flimsy gingerbread house of a life and threatens to expose the truth and destroy it all.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Turnout is among Lynn Slaughter's five memorable mysteries for performing arts lovers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight titles that will leave you questioning if your memories are real

Lindsay Starck is a writer, editor, and professor based in Minneapolis. She studied at Yale, Notre Dame, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first novel, Noah’s Wife, was published in 2016 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Her short prose has recently appeared in the New England Review, Ploughshares, the Bellevue Literary Review, The Cincinnati Review, and the Southern Review. Her academic articles have been published in Modern Fiction, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Adaptation.

Starck's newest novel is Monsters We Have Made.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight books that are concerned with:

What is real versus what is imagined? What is remembered and what is crafted? How do we know when to trust our perception, what do we do when our memories or our senses fail us, and what does “evidence” even mean in a world as slippery and shifting as we are?

One title on Strack's list:

The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be by Shannon Gibney

“The literature of adoption,” writes Shannon Gibney, “is a fictional genre in itself.” In The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, Gibney leans into this argument by weaving together her own actual adoption story (including documents and photographs) and the story of what might have happened if she had remained with her birth mother. By intentionally combining memoir with speculative fiction, the book illuminates the multiple pathways that exist between the past and the present. Gibney’s fictionalization of memory liberates the narrator from the impossible project of perfectly reconstructing the past, provides her a new angle on the present, and reminds us that the boundaries between inside and outside, truth and dream, fact and fiction are much more permeable than they appear.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen titles about the impact of Black music on pop culture

At Teen Vogue Jaelani Turner-Williams tagged fifteen books about the immense impact of Black music on pop culture, including:

Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women In Pop by Danyel Smith

Legendary journalist, editor and author Danyel Smith gives new life to her podcast Black Girl Songbook in Shine Bright, a memoir which intimately captures the impact of Black women in pop music. Beginning with a portrait of Phillis Wheatley, an 18th century enslaved woman who wrote and sang poems of freedom, Shine Bright retells the iconic careers of Aretha Franklin, Stephanie Mills, Mariah Carey and more, with Smith highlighting her own experiences while interviewing a number of the vocalists featured. While recounting her upbringing in Oakland, Smith gives reverence to Black women singers who laid the groundwork for the rising generation of modern pop acts.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four cabin-oriented crime & horror titles

Molly Odintz is the managing editor for CrimeReads and the editor of Austin Noir. She grew up in Austin and worked as a bookseller before becoming a Very Professional Internet Person. She lives in central Texas with her cat, Fritz Lang.

At CrimeReads Odintz tagged four "recent and upcoming novels in which everything is already terrible and then the cabin makes things worse," including:

TJ Klune, The Bones Beneath My Skin

Klune has crafted a moving story of found family in this X-Files-influenced thriller perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World. The Bones Beneath My Skin follows Nate, a journalist at loose ends, who finds a mysterious girl and her hunky bodyguard hiding out in his family’s summer cabin. He soon joins them in their dangerous quest to reunite her with her family, as her former captors follow in hot pursuit. As fast-paced as it is warm-hearted!

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about trees

Callum Robinson makes all manner of things from all manner of woods for some of the most influential brands in the world. He is creative director at Method Studio, the company he established with his wife, designer and lecturer Marisa Giannasi, almost fifteen years ago. Taught by his father – now one of the UK’s foremost “Master Woodcarvers” – his work has been exhibited widely. He works and writes from a studio and workshop in a forest, beside a loch, nestled in the Scottish hills.

Robinson's first book is Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman, a memoir of his unorthodox creative education.

At the Guardian he tagged "five very different books about trees." One title on the list:

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting

Evocatively set in rural Norway and the remote Shetland Islands archipelago, Mytting’s gripping mystery gradually works away at the knotty family secrets of Edvard Hirifjell – the untimely death of his parents, a bitter wartime feud and a priceless missing inheritance – ultimately revealing a history swirling with all the tension, drama and beauty of the unique grain that’s hidden inside every tree.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see: seven books that celebrate trees in all of their glory.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles to steam up your thriller reads list

Michelle Cruz is a seventh-generation native Texan that allegedly writes suspense. In a previous life, she served as a commissioned Air Force officer and a congressional staffer. These days, she resides in the Texas Hill Country where she can often be found lurking at Summer Moon or stuffing her face with BBQ or Tex-Mex. Even When You Lie is her debut novel. She particularly enjoys tormenting her critique partners with plot bunnies and first drafts she has no intention of revising. When her children annoy her, she retreats to her office and spite reads to escape the realities of life, yet somehow she still has a TBR pile.

At Shepherd she tagged five favorite books to steam up your thriller reads list, including:

What Still Burns by Elle Grawl

Growing up in rural East Texas, some of my earliest memories center around the fire station where my father was a volunteer firefighter.

Although this book is set in Northern California, it manages to render the small town and its politics familiar enough that I can almost smell the smoke. Lex’s reluctance to return to where everyone else in her immediate family died is tempered by the romance igniting between her and an old flame, but everyone has secrets here—and some can be deadly.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about Argentina’s “Disappeared”

Rebecca J. Sanford is the author of The Disappeared, recipient of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Rising Star Award. She studied at a lycée in southern France and earned a degree in French and creative writing from Loyola University. Sanford holds an MA from the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School in NYC and conducted research for her master’s thesis in Buenos Aires with the Identity Archive of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. This work inspired The Disappeared.

At Electric Lit she tagged "seven books that center the lives, experiences, and long wakes of grief left behind by those taken during Argentina’s so-called 'dirty war'." One title on the list:

Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loedel

As a medical student in 1976, Tomás Oriilla would do anything for his childhood crush, Isabel—even if her ideological fervor puts them both at risk. Ten years later, Tomás is in exile, living in New York as Thomas Shore. He is called back to Buenos Aires, where ghosts of the disappeared force him to confront the choices he once made in the name of love. A haunting journey into the past, Hades explores love and complicity through the distorted and surreal lens of individual and collective memory.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best books about the Olympics

Emily Burack is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects.

At Town & Country she tagged ten of the best books about the Olympics, including:

Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water

The title of Vicki Valosik's mesmerizing new history of synchronized swimming comes from a quote from Esther Williams, the "godmother" of the sport: "If you’re not strong enough to swim fast, you’re probably not strong enough to swim 'pretty.'" Valosik, herself a competitive synchronized swimmer, traces the origins of aquatic performance, from vaudeville stages to the Olympics.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue