Seven great stories of suspense in a house by the sea

Peter Swanson is the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year; and Eight Perfect Murders, a New York Times bestseller, among others.

[My Book, The Movie: The Kind Worth Killing; The Page 69 Test: The Kind Worth Killing; Writers Read: Peter Swanson (February 2015)]

Swanson's new book is Do You See What I See?: A Chilling Holiday Mystery Novella of a Celebrity Writer's Christmas Party Gone Wrong.

At CrimeReads the author tagged seven great stories of suspense featuring seaside houses. One title on the list:

Slam the Big Door by John D. MacDonald

Another book in which the ideal house by the sea (this time on the Gulf Coast of Florida) hides multiple secrets and marital disfunction. This standalone novel by one of my all-time favorite writers has the perfect set-up. Widower Mike Rodenska is invited by his oldest friend to visit him and his wife at their mid-century beach house in Florida. Once there, Rodenska naturally discovers that all is not well. But between the twists and violence MacDonald paints such a perfect picture of beach-side living, with its constant crashing waves and near-constant cocktail parties.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top books about haunted houses

Lorna Wallace has a PhD in English Literature and is a lover of all things science fiction and horror. She lives in Scotland with her rescue greyhound, Misty.

At Mental Floss Wallace tagged eight of the best books about haunted houses, including:

How to Sell a Haunted House (2023) // Grady Hendrix

Grady Hendrix had wanted to write about a haunted house for a while, but he knew he needed a good answer to the vital question that is often asked about such stories: “Why don’t people leave?” He finally cracked it with How to Sell a Haunted House, which follows siblings Louise and Mark as they clash after their parents die in a car crash. Not only can they not agree on how best to clear out the house, but they also fight over the will—which keeps them trapped when spooky things start to happen. But How to Sell a Haunted House isn’t just a haunted house story; it’s also a haunted doll and puppet story. And even though the novel dives into the complex emotions of grief, it’s still laced with Hendrix’s trademark campy humor.

Read about the other entries on the list.

How to Sell a Haunted House is among Lisa Zhuang's top ten spookiest haunted house novels and Meredith R. Lyons's six stories featuring ghosts with unfinished business.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight witchy mysteries and thrillers

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 books that "are either intriguing mysteries or absorbing thrillers, and they’re all brimming with magic." One title on the list:

A Familiar Tail (Witch’s Cat Mystery #1) by Delia James

Annabelle acquires an unexpected familiar when she arrives in Portsmouth. She also acquires a question, since Alistair the cat’s owner died in mysterious circumstances. When somebody else dies, it’s up to her, her magic, and her cat, to find out who did it and why.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five essential books for understanding Chinese American history

Beth Lew-Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

Her latest book is John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law.

At Lit Hub Lew-Williams suggest five books if "you want to know more about the history of Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, and the discriminatory laws their presence inspired." One title on the list:

Gordon Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

Chinese workers played an important role in America’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century. Most famously, they helped to build the transcontinental railroad, which connected California to the eastern states. Gordon Chang captures the scale of this awesome feat, as well as the sacrifices made in attaining it. He carefully mines the scant historical record to find the stories of Chinese railroad workers who laid track through the Sierra Nevada Mountains and across the Utah desert.

Read about the other books on the list at Lit Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five revenge and eat-the-rich thrillers

L.M. Chilton is a journalist with fifteen years of experience working on TV shows for the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 in the UK, as well as writing columns for magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour, and reporting for national newspapers across the world, everywhere from Doncaster to Delhi. He lives in London, procrastinating.

Chliton's new novel is I Think We Should Kill Other People.

At CrimeReads he tagged five revenge and eat-the-rich thrillers about the 1 Percent, including:

Ellery Lloyd, The Club

For the truly rich, money buys the most valuable thing of all: somewhere the rest of us can’t get in. Ellery Lloyd’s pacy, sun-soaked thriller is set in the most exclusive members’ club in the world, housed on a private island where celebrities can party away from the likes of us. But behind the velvet rope, the VIP guests are not quite as protected as they think. By the end of the opening weekend, plenty of them will wish they’d never made the list.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight literary science fiction books

Susie Dumond is a queer writer originally from Little Rock, Arkansas. She is the author of Queerly Beloved, Looking for a Sign, and Bed and Breakup, and she also talks about books as a senior contributor at Book Riot and a bookseller at her local indie bookstore. Dumond lives in Washington, D.C., with her spouse, Mickey, and her cat, Maple. When she’s not writing or reading, you can find her baking cupcakes or belting karaoke at the nearest gay bar.

At Book Riot Dumond tagged eight "literary science fiction books [that] tell engaging stories set in futuristic worlds, but they’ll also make you think about humanity and your own life from new perspectives." One title on the list:

Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty

Weaving sci-fi elements into our contemporary world, Jaclyn Moriarty’s Time Travel for Beginners deeply explores the lives of three people in Sydney who patronize a new time travel agency to go looking for answers to today’s problems in the past. But the more they look into the agency’s methods and start experimenting with time travel, the more the ripple effects of their actions begin to change everything. It’s a bit whimsical and playful for some fun haters to call it “literary”, but who among us couldn’t use a little more (cleverly written) whimsy these days?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eighteen of the best romantasy books

Sofia Lodato is a staff writer at Oprah Daily. Aside from reading, writing, and wellness, she is a lover of all things media-related, and can usually be found overanalyzing her latest favorite show, album, or video game.

One title on Lodato's list of the eighteen best romantasy books:

A Court of Thorns and Roses, by Sarah J. Maas

No romantasy list would be complete without the BookTok sensation. Impoverished Feyre kills a wolf in the forest, only to learn that the animal was actually a shape-changed fae. Now, Fae High Lord Tamlin requires her life as recompense, and she agrees to live out her days in the faery realm of Prythian. Deeply suspicious at first, eventually Feyre finds herself enjoying her comfortable existence at Tamlin’s estate… and her growing attraction to its lord. But his court is under a curse, and a sinister, more powerful noble is threatening to take over. This twist on Beauty and the Beast is high-pitched romantic drama at its fantastical best, and just the first volume in an ongoing series—the latest of which releases at the end of this month.

Read about the other titles on the list at Oprah Daily.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is among Jenny Kawecki's five top YA love triangles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top books featuring bogs

Anna North is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick Outlawed, America Pacifica, and Lambda Literary Award winner The Life and Death of Sophie Stark. She is a senior correspondent at Vox. She lives in Brooklyn.

North's latest novel is Bog Queen.

[The Page 69 Test: The Life and Death of Sophie Stark; The Page 69 Test: Outlawed; Q&A with Anna North]

At Lit Hub the author tagged seven "books [that] will satisfy your bog witch cravings, while also reminding you of the real-world importance of bogs as bulwarks against climate change, cradles of biodiversity, and keepers of ancestral memory." One title on the list:

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister

An eerie fable that seems to take place across and outside of time, The Bog Wife is already a classic of the modern bog-core genre. This story of a West Virginia family with a very unusual tradition has notes of Edward Gorey and Rebecca, but Chronister creates a world all her own, its mossy darkness illuminated by flashes of humor.

Read about the other entries on North's list at Lit Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five campus mystery novels

At Book Riot Julia Rittenberg tagged five titles that "provide the perfect backdrop for diving headfirst into research in musty libraries and sorting through the clues," including:

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

I read this book back during the doldrums of 2020, and it broke my anxiety-induced reading slump, so I still highly recommend it. A secretive institution called Catherine House only takes and produces the best of the best. When Ines arrives, she expects rigorous academia, but gets a much more exploratory, experimental, hippie-ish education. The longer Indes spends there, the darker the school becomes.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five horror novels set in the art world

Faith Gladwin grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, and studied Political Science at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She now works at a museum, and in between research work and writing, she tries to keep her houseplants alive and safe from her cat, Cleo. She is the author of The Finalist.

At CrimeReads Gladwin tagged "five chilling novels set in the world of the arts, from theatre to isolated artistic retreats." One title on the list:

Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

From the past to the cutting-edge future of art, Ling Ling Huang’s Immaculate Conception follows two women in art school, caught in an obsessive, toxic friendship, as the public release of a tool that generates AI art instantly throws the scene into chaos. Mathilde is marked as a prodigy while Enka is struggling to keep up with her. In a drastic move, Enka throws herself into a new technology that allows the user to inhabit another person’s mind and absorb their emotions and memories, kicking off a twisted, addictive downward spiral between Enka and Mathilde.

Psychological and speculative, Immaculate Conception covers everything from trauma, the intersections of technology, capitalism, and art, to the way generative AI erodes creativity and community. It’s a sci-fi dystopian horror that’s only becoming more timely.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top speculative thrillers

At Book Riot Rey Rowland tagged six must-read speculative thrillers, including:

Bang Bang Bodhisattva by Aubrey Wood

Moving on to another sci-fi, this one is set in a dark cyberpunk future. Bang Bang Bodhisattva follows Kiera, who takes on any job she can find just to survive. Things take a turn when the person she was looking for is found murdered. The killer left behind a stick of incense and nothing else.

When her crush goes missing and another stick of incense is found at the scene, Kiera is blamed for both crimes. Her only chance to clear her name is to work with Angel Herrera, a private investigator. From here, the story becomes a buddy comedy that you won’t be able to put down!

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine suspense titles with unforgettable settings

Hallie Shepherd is a screenwriter, actor, and producer. She is a Pacific Northwest native who now lives in LA with her filmmaker husband.

Call Off the Dark is her debut novel.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "nine suspense novels with unforgettable settings." One title on the list:

Attica Locke, The Cutting Season

The story takes place at Belle Vie, a fictional antebellum sugar plantation in rural southern Louisiana. When a female migrant worker is found dead at the edge of the property, Belle Vie’s Black manager is drawn into the plantation’s history of slavery and her own family’s connection to the land.

The inspiration behind the setting comes from a real place: Oak Alley. The author attended a wedding there and describes feeling a mix of rage and revulsion as well as longing and love toward the pre-Civil War landmark. I visited Oak Alley myself during a 2007 trip to New Orleans, and I can see how it inspired such a beautiful but deeply unsettling place for the story.

Locke’s prose draws you into the lush, dreamy landscape, with its terrible history pulsing beneath the surface.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Cutting Season is among Stacy Willingham's eight top mysteries with southern swampy settings, Karen Dietrich's eight top red herrings in contemporary crime literature, T. Marie Vandelly's top ten suspenseful horror novels featuring housebound terrors and Wil Medearis's seven favorite novels that explore real estate swindles.

--Marshal Zeringue