Ten literary thrillers set in the artworld

Laura Leffler is a writer and art historian who builds stories within the gorgeous, strange, and sometimes terrifying art world. After receiving a master’s degree in post-war and contemporary art, she spent more than a decade working in commercial galleries, doing everything from art fair sales to condition reporting and logistics. Along the way, she witnessed more of that glittering world’s dark underbelly than she thought possible. Laura currently lives in Colorado with her family.

Tell Them You Lied is her first novel.

At Tertulia the author tagged ten favorite literary thrillers set in the artworld. One title on the list:

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand

The title of this book refers to the deterioration of an image each time it is reproduced–think of zooming in on a digital image of an old photograph reproduced in a black and white newspaper. Hand’s novel is a seriously dark and gritty tale of a photographer of a certain age who embarks on a journey to the remote islands of Maine to interview her once-upon-a-time artistic idol—only to find herself embroiled in a missing person’s case.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Generation Loss is among Caroline Wolff's six female characters who defy traditional archetypes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top speculative books for fans of "Pluribus"

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged "five great speculative books, chosen for various similar aspects as Pluribus" [the sci-fi show that’s the brainchild of Vince Gilligan, the writer-producer-director behind shows like Breaking Bad and Better Caul Saul]. One title on the list:

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

In Pluribus, Carol is one of the few people left on the planet who are not infected by the alien virus. In this inventive novel, Laura Byrd is the only person left alive on Earth. She’s a scientist at an isolated Antarctic research station, so when the killer virus spreads across the globe, it doesn’t reach her. But the other layer to this story is the City, a liminal space where the dead reside as long as someone alive on Earth remembers them. So when everyone dies on Earth except Laura, the City is then only populated by people she remembers.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Brief History of the Dead is among Tim Thornton's top ten books about the afterlife.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels about living near serial killers

Amy K. Green is a contemporary American author from New England who made an unconventional journey to becoming a writer. Originally pursuing a career in accounting, her transition to writing came after years of working in corporate finance and film production.

Growing up as an only child in a small New England town, Green credits her active imagination to solitary hours spent playing in the woods and her enthusiasm for pop culture. Her debut novel, The Prized Girl, published in 2020, was written during downtime between film productions. The novel showcased her skill in crafting complex narratives.

Green’s new novel is Haven't Killed In Years.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "five books that hinge on living in the close proximity of a serial killer." One title on the list:

Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer

Korede is bitter. She’s sick of cleaning up after her little sister, literally. Ayoola kills her victims and relies on Korede to handle the aftermath. From the first page, My Sister, The Serial Killer contrasts the complexities of family loyalty with morality.

Korede’s loyalty is tested when her longtime unrequited love asks for her sister’s phone number. Korede knows what it means to be one of the men in Ayoola’s life, or more accurately, how it ends.

I love how this story weaves in glimpses of the past to explain Korede’s mindset. She was her sister’s protector from a very young age and that relationship does not dissipate after one murder…or two…or maybe three? Korede’s struggle is a fascinating conundrum and an unnerving story.

Read about the other titles on Green's list at CrimeReads.

My Sister the Serial Killer is among Anna Barrington's six social thrillers that will make you question who you can trust, Kate Alice Marshall's six great thrillers featuring sisters (and murder), Margot Douaihy's four novels that show the power of siblings in mysteries & thrillers, Francesca McDonnell Capossela's seven books about women committing acts of violence, Tessa Wegert's five thrillers about killer relatives, Catherine Ryan Howard's five notable dangers-of-dating thrillers, Sally Hepworth's top five novels about twisted sisters, Megan Nolan's six books on unrequited love and unmet obsession, Sarah Pinborough's top ten titles where the setting is a character, Tiffany Tsao's top five novels about murder all in the family, Victoria Helen Stone's eight top crime books of deep, dark family lore, and Kristen Roupenian's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten brutal survival thrillers

At Fully Booked Laura Tarallo tagged ten books like The Running Man, including:

Vertical Run by Joseph R. Garber

One morning, you show up at work and suddenly everyone is trying to kill you. That’s Vertical Run, a claustrophobic thriller that trades game shows for office buildings and contestants for conspiracies.

While less grand in scale, the paranoia is thick enough to slice. It’s a game of corporate cat-and-mouse, and it never stops moving.

Why we recommend it: Sometimes, claustrophobia is the deadliest enemy. Perfect for fans of paranoid, high-stakes chases where every shadow could be your last. It’s the kind of thriller that keeps your pulse pounding long after the final page.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books about forbidden desire

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor for Medium, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Oprah, Coastal Living, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, and many other publications.

Shearn has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Her latest novel is Animal Instinct.

[The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here; Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013); Q&A with Amy Shearn; My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane; The Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane; The Page 69 Test: Animal Instinct; Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2025); My Book, The Movie: Animal Instinct]

At Tertulia Shearn tagged "nine great works of fiction about characters who lust after what they’re not supposed to." One title on the list:

Panpocalypse by Carley Moore

One of the first great pandemic novels to appear, this initially serialized book tells the story of Orpheus, who is queer, disabled, poly, and searching the city for her long lost love, Eurydice. What she finds is a portal that takes her to a lesbian bar in 1930s Paris. I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted to live inside of a fictional world as much as I do this one.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four academia-centered mysteries

Peggy Townsend is an award-winning journalist and author. Her work has appeared in Catamaran literary magazine, Santa Cruz Noir, The Boston Globe Magazine, Memoir, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. Twice she lived for seven weeks in her van, traveling to Alaska and along the back roads of the U.S.

Townsend's new novel is The Botanist's Assistant.

At CrimeReads she tagged four favorite academia-centered mystery novels, including:

Katy Hays, The Cloisters

While this delicious novel is set at The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden in New York City, academic research is at its core. Art-history student Ann Stilwell is a summer hire at the museum and is thrilled to dig into the history of fortune-telling as her research project.

When Stilwell, however, discovers a fifteenth-century deck of tarot cards that may or may not tell the future, she is pulled into a world of obsession, secrets and greed. Smartly written and wonderfully plotted, The Cloisters is one of those novels you won’t soon forget.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten titles that refuse to dramatize or sanitize mental illness

Fredrik deBoer is a writer and academic. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Playboy, and Harper’s among many others. His nonfiction books include The Cult of Smart (2020) and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023). He holds a PhD in English with a concentration in writing assessment and higher education policy from Purdue University.

The writer's new novel is The Mind Reels.

At Electric Lit deBoer tagged ten books

that make a noble attempt at negotiating the gap between interior illness and exterior narrative. They don’t sanitize the disorientation, the self-doubt, the breakdowns that follow breakdowns; they resist turning mental illness into a metaphor or exotic spectacle.

One title on the list:

Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Few memoirs have ever been more willing to make the memoirist look unsympathetic than Prozac Nation; three decades after its release, the book’s critics still don’t understand its self-awareness. A raw memoir of depression lived in excess—an excess of shame, despair, and spectacularly fractured ambition. Wurtzel writes of growing up bright, sensitive, full of promise, then gradually being undone by an illness that induces acute panic, long stretches of exhaustion, and humiliations she feels she can’t escape. Wurtzel’s language is blistering, grandiose, and often unbearably earnest. Long passages feel (and are) performative, as critics have charged, but with a purpose: Wurtzel understood that depression makes you pretentious, selfish, and myopic—and that the most unlovable parts of her are the parts she must learn to live with. Prozac Nation doesn’t offer tidy lessons, only a voice that says, this is what it was like. In that willingness to be ugly, the book is an act of great bravery.

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

Writers Read: Elizabeth Wurtzel (June 2008).

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight notable true stories from history about survival

Carolina Ciucci is a teacher, writer and reviewer based in the south of Argentina. She hoards books like they’re going out of style. In case of emergency, you can summon her by talking about Ireland, fictional witches, and the Brontë family. At Book Riot she tagged eight compelling true stories from history about survival. One title on the list:

Into Thin Air by John Krakauer

Mount Everest seems tailor-made for survival stories… that is, if you survive it. That’s what Jon Krakauer did, barely, when a deadly snowstorm unleashed during his descent. One of the only two survivors, this book explores the allure of such a lethal mountain, on top of recounting Krakauer’s story.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Into Thin Air is among Amy McCulloch's eight thrilling books about mountaineering, four books that changed Rupert Guinness, Jeff Somers's five best books where nature is the antagonist, Nicole Dieker's top nine books even non-readers will love, James Mustich's five top books about mountaineering, and Ed Douglas's ten best survival stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 15 best "Frankenstein" retellings

Emily Burack is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site.

At Town & Country she tagged fifteen of the best Frankenstein retellings, including:

Eileen M. Hunt’s Artificial Life After Frankenstein is not a retelling; rather, it uses Shelley’s work as a lens to understand the “ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.” Hunt is a professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame; Publishers Weekly reviews that her book “succeeds as an impressive and resounding challenge to technology-driven doomsday scenarios, replacing these with a vision of a gentler, kinder future in which humankind preserves both its existence and its best, most humane qualities.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see seven great horror novels inspired by Frankenstein.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine divorce memoirs about the empowering potential of endings

Heather Sweeney is a Virginia-based writer whose essays and creative nonfiction work about life as a military spouse, divorce and relationships, parenting, and women’s health have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, The TODAY Show, Newsweek, Business Insider, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere.

Sweeney's new memoir is Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage.

At Electric Lit the writer tagged nine books that "speak to the universal truths and personal trials that accompany the end of a marriage." One title on the list:

We Are Too Many by Hannah Pittard

No relationship or friendship is perfect. Sometimes love runs its course. Sometimes we outgrow people. In Hannah Pittard’s case, everything happens all at once. This genre-bending memoir cleverly combines fact and fiction as Pittard tells the story of her discovery that her husband is having an affair with her best friend, which results in the end of her marriage and her long friendship with a woman she trusted. With humor and candor, Pittard shares real exchanges and fills in the blanks of her knowledge with speculation as she analyzes what went wrong. We Are Too Many pulls readers into a fast-paced, time-jumping narrative about the demise of a marriage, betrayal, broken trust, and starting over while coping with heartbreak. The fact that this memoir is told through dialogue creates the illusion that we’re part of the conversations, experiencing the emotions right alongside the author. But even as it shows how complicated relationships and female friendships can be, this book also reminds us that it’s possible to find humor in dark times.

Read about the other entries on the list.

We Are Too Many is among Fran Littlewood's nine stories and folktales featuring sisters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven mystery novels that explore the power of rumors and gossip

Lauren Oliver is an author, screenwriter, and media entrepreneur. Her works include multiple New York Times bestselling novels for teens, including Before I Fall (which spent seventeen weeks on the list and was adapted into a feature film released by Open Road), the Delirium trilogy (a two-million-copy-selling dystopian series translated into thirty-five languages), and Panic, which she later adapted into the streaming TV show on Amazon Prime of the same name, for which she wrote every episode and served as Executive Producer.

Oliver's new novel is What Happened to Lucy Vale.

At CrimeReads the author tagged eleven novels in where "the truth is hidden not under a rock but concealed in the rumors passed between neighbors." One title on the list:

Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

This novel masterfully uses the small-town gossip mill to drive its narrative. The story unravels through the perspectives of several women, with their interconnected lives and the rampant speculation about their secrets and relationships ultimately leading to a shocking event at a school trivia night.

The gossip is both a red herring and a crucial tool for revealing character and motive.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

Big Little Lies is among Jennifer Jabaley's six novels where competitive parenting goes off the rails, Sandra Chwialkowska's five books where bad things happen in beautiful places, Jamie Day's seven crime books featuring special events going off the rails, Ashley Audrain’s six great thrillers featuring manipulative mom-friends, Nicole Hackett's six top mysteries about motherhood & crime, Janice Hallett's five notable gripping mysteries set in small towns, Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman's six riveting titles of ultra-competitive parents, Pamela Crane's five novels featuring parenting gone wild, Michelle Frances's eight top workplace thrillers, and Jeff Somers's ten novels that teach you something about marriage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five contemporary mysteries for those who love the classics

Dana Johnson Vengrouskie is a writer, copy editor, and general creative who’s passionate about storytelling, art, and language. She writes fiction and poetry as Wendelyn Vega. When she’s not writing, editing, or daydreaming, she enjoys reading, doodling, trying out new recipes, spending time with her husband, and playing with the three mini tigers she keeps in her house.

At The Nerd Daily she tagged "five contemporary mysteries to read if you enjoy the classics," including:

Body and Soul Food by Abby Collette (2021)

If you enjoy your murder mysteries with memorable characters and a healthy dose of small-town coziness along the lines of Miss Marple, Abby Collette’s Body and Soul Food will be right up your alley. A pair of fraternal twins is pulled into a mystery when a friend/former foster brother is murdered in public on a light rail. After they are labeled as suspects, the siblings determine to discover the culprit, beginning their first foray into detective-work.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue