At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged seven favorite book villains. One title on the list:
Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees BrennanRead about the other books on the list.
Be careful what you wish for — on the verge of death, this romantasy lover gets a second chance at life in between the pages of her favorite books. Loving this villain is a not-so-guilty pleasure you’ll want to tell all your friends about.
Tyler Wetherall is a journalist and author. Her first book, No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run, came out in 2018, following her childhood spent on the run with her fugitive father. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, British Vogue, The Guardian, National Geographic, LitHub, Vice, and Condé Nast Traveler, amongst others.
Chlorine by Jade SongRead about the other entries on the list.
Ren Yu is a mermaid. She tells you so on the first page. She doesn’t come from the tradition of red-haired shell-breasted singing mermaids;she is ripped, disinterested in humans, particularly men, and, by the climax of the book—she’s bloody. Ren narrates the story of her self-determined transformation starting from her life as a young competitive swimmer, so addicted to the water and the race that she licked the chlorine from her skin when she missed the pool. But as the pressure to win, and to prove herself by getting into an Ivy League college mounts, along with cruelties from her crew of fellow swimmers, she starts to pursue her longing to be a mermaid with a near holy embrace of physical pain.
Thriller Award for Best YA Thriller, the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Best YA Crime Book, and the 2021 Ann Connor Brimer Award, and is currently being adapted for television. His followup YA mystery I Hope You're Listening was the winner of the 2021 Lambda “Lammy” Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery. He was a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction.
Fingersmith by Sarah WatersRead about the other titles on the list at CrimeReads.
Fingersmith is one of my all time favourite novels, featuring a twist so delicious and elegantly orchestrated that I gasped out loud when it wassprung upon me. Set in Victorian-era England, Fingersmith is a crime novel centering on two young women, Sue Trinder and Maud Lilly, whose lives become entangled in a complex web of betrayal and deception. Sue, raised in a den of thieves, is recruited to help swindle Maud, a wealthy orphan, out of her inheritance by posing as her maid. As Sue integrates into Maud’s household, she discovers unexpected feelings for her, which complicates the plan. However, nothing is as it seems, and the novel is filled with twists and reversals, exploring themes of class, identity, and betrayal.
fleeing from danger, unraveling mysteries, and discovering unexpected secrets along the way." One title on the list:
Wallace Stroby’s "Heaven's a Lie" weaves a gritty tale of desperation and moral ambiguity. Joette Harper, a widow with mounting debts, sees a chance for a new start in the form of a briefcase filled with cash found at a crash site. However, the bag's origins tie her into a deadly game with its dangerous owner. Readers will find themselves enthralled in Joette's journey of survival as she navigates gang violence and the weight of her decisions.Read about the other entries on the list.
Kathleen DuVal is a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her field of expertise is early American history, particularly interactions among Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans on the borderlands of North America.
Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected PlacesRead about the other books on the list.
A professor at Harvard, Deloria (Yankton Dakota) wrote this book to directly counter the myth that Native Americans are people of the past rather than modern human beings, who have changed with the times, just like everyone else. He presents image after image of Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries doing the kinds of things that non-Natives at the time were insisting they couldn’t do: playing baseball, riding in automobiles, and singing opera.
Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of four novels that have been published in a total of twenty-one countries around the world: The Madwomen of Paris (2023), Wunderland (2019), The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (2012), and The Painter from Shanghai (2007).Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean RhysRead about the other entries on the list.
This is probably the most powerful example of literary pastiche novels I’ve read, not just because it takes on one of the most beloved novelsin English literature—Jane Eyre—but because it brutally turns that novel’s premises on their gentrified heads.
I am truly awed by how vibrantly Rhys inhabits Antoinette, Rochester’s doomed wife, weaving in themes of colonialism and gendered power into Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic romance and, in the process, making it a kind of subversive and gritty feminist and anti-colonial manifesto.
Rhys’s depiction of Antoinette’s descent into madness is so visceral and believable that you are (or at least I am) all but cheering as she literally burns the patriarchy to the ground. I also love that while it’s generally considered Rhys’s masterpiece, she wrote it in her seventies.
Megan Staffel splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and a farm in western New York State. Her new novel, The Causative Factor, is her sixth book of fiction. Her previous work includes two collections of short fiction, The Exit Coach and Lessons in Another Language, and the novels, The Notebook of Lost Things and She Wanted Something Else.
The Family Chao by Lan Samantha ChangRead about the other entries on the list.
Most of the action in this novel takes place in a large and successful Chinese restaurant in a small midwestern city where Leo Chao,owner and employer, maintains a tense environment, verbally abusing family and staff. The ominous is evoked not only by this tyrannical father and employer but also, and more dramatically, by an outdated freezer room in the basement of the restaurant. Bribes have allowed it to pass inspection, and the reader learns in the beginning of the novel that its major defect is a door that tends to lock the unsuspecting inside. That is why a key is always kept on an interior shelf. When tensions escalate and emotions run high, the reader suspects the freezer will become a weapon.
Alena Bruzas grew up in Seattle and currently lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her family. She is the author of the acclaimed novel Ever Since, and she hopes her writing will find the people who need it most. When she's not writing, Bruzas serves on the board for Ten Thousand Villages, Lincoln. She also occasionally cooks dinner, worries about commas, and wanders the prairie.
Richard Matheson, I Am LegendRead about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.
I am Legend by Richard Matheson is ostensibly about vampires, but really it’s a grandfather to zombie horror and the last man on earth trope. Robert Neville is a scientist, alone and surrounded by the infected, vampire-likecreatures which Neville hunts in the daytime, killing them in their beds and sometimes experimenting on them to “find a cure” or maybe just out of curiosity. Eventually he encounters a woman, Ruth, and (of course) they fall in love. But, alas, it turns out Ruth is a vampire and Neville is a bigot. The infected have formed a society and Neville, finally captured, is to be executed for his heinous crimes. As he faces the crowds, he reflects that he has become a legend, a horror story that the vampires will pass on to their children, like what vampires once were to humans. I love this book because it flips your expectation on its head, forcing you to consider what makes a monster, and if, under the right circumstances, you would be the horror story.
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (2022)Read about the other entries on the list.
Demon Copperhead is Barbara Kingsolver’s retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Instead of the institutional poverty of Victorian England, it is Appalachia, where Kingsolver is from, at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. In fact, she got the idea for the book sitting at the very desk where Dickens wrote much of David Copperfield in England. She thought about how she and Dickens were in the same boat, wanting to tell their own story–though it was a story people might not want to hear. Kingsolver claims that Dickens spoke to her, saying: “Let the kid tell the story. No one doubts the child” (NYT). And so she did. The book tells the story of Demon Copperhead’s life in his own “wise, unwavering voice,” (Pulitzer Prize) Demon’s narration is “one of the great virtuosic vocal performances” (Richard Powers, author of The Overstory). “Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient” (Beth Macy, author of Dopesick).
Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (2024). Her fourth poetry collection, West : Fire : Archive, was recently published by The Center for Literary Publishing. Dunkle writes a weekly blog called Finding Lost Voices, which revives the voices of women who have been forgotten or misremembered and serves as the Poetry and Translation Director at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. She’s on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van DuyneRead about the other entries on the list.
By the time I entered college and grad school, my mostly male professors told me that Slyvia Plath was just a young woman’s poet, as Emily Van Duyne writes in Loving Sylvia Plath, “a phase to pass through and grow out of in order to be taken seriously.” Van Duyne also reminds us how “Plath’s suicide is frequently presented as a capricious choice of a spoiled girl seeking revenge, rather than the culmination of a mental health crisis.” In her critical biography, Van Duyne fearlessly takes on the tired narrative that’s been cemented around Plath’s life and challenges it to include the sexual and physical violence Plath endured while married to Ted Hughes, along with how Hughes managed to control the narrative about Plath for decades after her death. This refreshing narrative takes on the immense task of finding our way back to the person Plath really was.
Book of the Year. Blind Search also won a Dogwise Award. The Hiding Place and The Wedding Plot both appeared on several “Best Of” lists. Home at Night, the fifth book in the series, was inspired by her volunteer work as a Natural Resources Steward of New Hampshire. Along with her love of nature, Munier credits the hero dogs of Mission K9 Rescue, her own rescue dogs, and a deep affection for New England as her series’ major influences. A literary agent by day, she’s also written three popular books on writing: Plot Perfect, The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings, and Writing with Quiet Hands, as well as Happier Every Day and the memoir Fixing Freddie: The True Story of a Boy, a Mom, and a Very, Very Bad Beagle.
Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?Read about the other entries on the list.
I love Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, and this entry is one of the very best. And its aspects inspired by The Odyssey are only part of the reason why.
published numerous books and dozens of academic articles and chapters on a wide array of authors, and she has given talks and keynote speeches about literature, pedagogy, and sexual violence at conferences and workshops throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Her first trade publication, Mad Wife uses these decades of work on literature and sexual violence to clarify her own dark past and illuminate clearer paths forward for other women.
Deborah Levy, Hot MilkRead about the other entries on the list.
Hot Milk imagines what a woman discovering her ferocity early, before being damaged by marriage, might look like. In a dusty seaside town in Spain, a woman in her twenties and dislocated in all ways, Sofia, finds her desires—sexual and otherwise—and begins to enact them while protecting herself from the emotional onslaughts of her parasitic mother, narcissistic father, and a manipulative lover.
Repeated encounters with “medusa” jellyfish transform her from meek subservience into audacity, rage, and appetite, refiguring her skin as they “sting her into desire” and make her” monstrous.” By novel’s end, Sofia has no need for Mad Wife. I love that about her.
children’s book National Monuments of the U.S.A. and the debut short story collection How to Capture Carbon.
Kitchen Surrealism or perhaps Domestic Fantastic for the charming consonance. Stories of this type can interweave fairytale with fixing a broken faucet, or find the uncanny in untangling the box of charger cords (one of my least favorite tasks), or tell a ghost story in which the haunting is less about horror and more of a way to understand the world of the living.One title on Walker's list:
Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah MarkRead about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.
This beautifully uncanny story collection is filled with mothers, fathers, stepmothers, brothers and grandmothers, all of them doing ordinarythings against a backdrop of the increasingly surreal. In one story, the narrator’s mother calls from the dentist every day—for ten years. “’I really wish you would get married already,’ she sighs. She sounds like her mouth is slowly filling up with mice.” In another, a mother who works to remove lice from other children’s heads finds that her own sons have turned into gigantic daughters with lice densely populating first their hair, then their knees, as rainwater slowly floods their house. These stories themselves create a slow flood of strangeness that helped me to see both the bizarre and the beautiful in domestic life.
Julia Dahl is the author of Conviction, Run You Down, and Invisible City, which was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, one of the Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2014, and has been translated into eight languages. A former reporter for CBS News and the New York Post, she now teaches journalism at NYU.
Emma Donoghue, RoomRead about the other entries on the list.
While not marketed as crime fiction, Room is the story of an ongoing crime, and its aftermath. The book is narrated by 5-year-old Jack, whose entire life has played out in a single room (a shed) where he is held with his mother, who was kidnapped two years before he was born. What is so astonishing about this book is the way, in the word’s of New York Times reviewer Aimee Bender, “Jack’s eyes remake the familiar.” By privileging the little boy’s voice, we see the world anew, and it is both beautiful and utterly terrifying.
One title on the list:
The Hunger by Alma KatsuRead about the other entries on the list.
Stephen King called it “deeply disturbing.” I call it horrifically delicious (no pun intended). Based on the true story of the Donner Party, a group of pioneers crossing the Nevada Sierras in the winter of 1847, The Hunger explores the gruesome depths of evil. Warning: Do not read this one after dark!
Amy Reading is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library. She is the author of The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker and The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. She lives in upstate New York, where she has served on the executive board of Buffalo Street Books, an indie cooperative bookstore, since 2018.
Avid Reader by Robert GottliebRead about the other entries on the list.
The late Robert Gottlieb indulged in a bit of self-mythologizing of his long editorial career at Knopf and The New Yorker, and here the editor is not gray and nondescript but a nerdy, quirky genius. There he is, in the photo insert, intensely conversing with Joseph Heller across his messy desk, brandishing a copy of The Power Broker next to a very young Robert Caro, laughing with Toni Morrison at the National Book Awards, leaning over a stack of pages with Bill Clinton at Chappaqua. He gleefully quotes a long passage from a review of The Journals of John Cheever which praises Gottlieb’s heroic editorial scalpel by way of a comparison to Max Perkins.
This fleet, gossipy memoir proves that the author found his métier in publishing—like Blanche Knopf, he was both a book- and a people-person. He chronicles his friendships among fellow staffers as well as his growing stable of authors, thoughthere are gaps. He has little to say of his colleague Judith Jones, for instance, calling her only “a calm and steady presence in the Knopf mix, unassertive except when pushed to the wall.” Nor does he provide much insight into the work of publishing, writing at one point, “I don’t keep track of my editorial interventions.” He does not add anything of substance to the much-chronicled story of his controversial—indeed, heavily protested—assumption of the editorship of The New Yorker after William Shawn retired or was forced out. But there are thumbnail portraits aplenty and lots of behind-the-scenes stories that make vaunted authors into real people. This is an important supplement to more staid accounts of the business of publishing. It was here that I learned, for instance, that Knopf as a literary powerhouse was fueled for decades by the runaway success of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, which sold as many as four hundred thousand copies a year without need of advertising, thus subsidizing the highbrow stuff and paying Gottlieb’s salary—which he spent on ballet tickets and an enormous collection of plastic handbags.
Matthew FitzSimmons is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling Gibson Vaughn series, which includes Origami Man, Debris Line, Cold Harbor, Poisonfeather, and The Short Drop, and the Constance series. Born in Illinois and raised in London, he makes his home in Washington, DC.
Nena Knight / Her Name is Knight / Yasmin Angoe / 2021Read about the other entries on the list.
Is there a difference between the Fixer and the Assassin? The line between the two is fine and likely comes down to the application of force.A great example of a character that straddles that line is Yasmin Angoe’s Nena Knight, an elite Ghanian assassin stolen from her village as a child who now works for a business syndicate known as The Tribe. While comfortable resorting to violence, it’s Knight’s intelligence that sets her apart. She’s always weighing all the options on her mission to topple a human trafficking ring while also avenging the death of her family. She’s a survivor. No mere blunt instrument, she believes it’s possible to bring order to a chaotic world but to literally fix the broken places as well.
Woman, Eating by Claire KohdaRead about the other entries on the list.
As a half-vampire, Lydia has been able to sate her hunger with pigs blood for her entire life. But she craves more: pizza and sausages and stir fry and other meals … maybe, even, other sources of blood.
After she moves to London to pursue an internship at an art gallery, pig’s blood is much more difficult to come by—and there are a lot more humans in close quarters. Now, Lydia has never been more tempted as she wrestles with her identity and her humanity.
Stern School of Business, where she earned an MBA. Woodruff spent nearly two decades working on the business side of media, primarily at Viacom’s Nickelodeon, before leaving corporate life to become a full-time mom. In her newfound “free” time, she took classes at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where she accidentally found her calling as a historical fiction author. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Writer’s Digest, Female First, Read 650, and more.
Hernan Diaz, TrustRead about the other entries on the list.
Probably the most lauded and currently well-known book in my round-up, this Pulitzer Prize winner expertly touches many of the same themes I hope to inThe Trade Off. On the surface it is the story of a Wall Street tycoon who foresaw the Great Crash of 1929 and made a fortune from it. (NB: I was already well into writing my new novel when this literary gem came out.)
Cleverly told in four separate fictional texts—a “novel,” an “autobiography,” a “memoir,” and a “diary,” each with a different narrator—Trust takes the classic tale of stock market excess and spins it like a globe, offering the reader a puzzle with an ambiguous solution. It is no surprise that this unexpected tale with an innovative narrative style has appeared on so many “best of” lists.
Lauren Ling Brown received a BA in English literature from Princeton University and an MFA in film production with a focus in screenwriting from the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Read about the other entries on the list.The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon
In this literary work, a young woman gets drawn into a religious cult and the violence it unleashes on innocent people. It is about how terrible people can hide behind religion, preying on the vulnerable. Kwon’s voice is poetic and captivating as she explores love, faith, and the loss of both.
At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged nine "thrillers that’ll make you think twice about booking your next stay, from themed hotels to haunted mansions and sinister ski trips." One title on the list:
The Hitchcock Hotel by Stephanie WrobelRead about the other books on the list.
Obsessions turn deadly in this propulsive locked-room mystery. A Hitchcock fanatic plans an elaborate weekend trip to the mountains where things get complicated when a corpse turns up…
Maggie Cooper is a graduate of Yale College, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Inch, and elsewhere, and her chapbook of short fiction, The Theme Park of Women's Bodies, is published in September 2024 from Bull City Press. She lives with her spouse in the Boston area and also works as a literary agent.
The Farm by Joanne RamosRead about the other entries on the list.
Not unlike Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, Joanne Ramos’s The Farm uses an institutional setting to dig into the complications and injustices of modern motherhood. The novel is centered on a commercial surrogacy outfit called Golden Acres, where women are paid big bucks to gestate under intense surveillance; the main character, Jane, is an immigrant from the Philippines who hopes carrying the child of a super wealthy client will be her ticket to financial security. The novel toes the line of realism and dystopia, offering a character-driven critique of the all-too-recognizable ways the economy of motherhood rests on the exploitation of low-income and BIPOC women.
Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator, and editor of Columbus Noir. His stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, the 2022 anthology Paranoia Blues: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon, and other magazines and anthologies.
Happiness Falls, by Angie KimRead about the other entries on the list.
In Virginia, the lives of a biracial Korean American family are changed forever when the father and his son don’t return from a walk at a park. Later, the son, Eugene—who has a rare genetic condition, Angelman syndrome, which prevents himfrom speaking—rushes home bloody and alone. Narrated by Eugene’s older sister, Mia, the novel follows the family’s efforts to understand what happened and the ensuing police investigation, all of which unfold beginning on June 23, 2020.
Kim started the novel during the pandemic and found it hard to get writing done. But the lockdown also produced a breakthrough, she told Jane Ciabattari of Literary Hub.
“Somehow, imagining a family dealing with a crisis during the same quarantine my family and I were experiencing gave me a way into the story and inspired specific scenes and situations,” Kim said, noting she had friends with autistic children having an especially hard time adjusting to the disruption.
“Once I was done,” Kim continued, “I realized how much elements like wearing masks, the racial tensions involving police interactions, and our society’s changing baselines and expectations not only added to the plot, but reinforced some of the themes I wanted to explore.”
Laird Barron, The Imago SequenceRead about the other entries on the list.
Another contemporary writer, Laird Barron works largely in the ‘cosmic’ horror realm—a kind of horror inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen and Robert Chambers, which looks at unknowable entities from other dimensions or from across the cosmos whose sheer existence so warps the state of reality that it will leave any human who encounters them permanently scarred. Barron’s stories often have a bit of noir to them as well (he’s since added crime novelist to his resume) and the blend of tough guys facing down mind-bending horrors provides a refreshing spin on both. His stories can often be mind-bending in their scope, but that’s part of the fun.
Lucy Ashe is the author of Clara & Olivia (shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger 2024), The Dance of the Dolls, and The Sleeping Beauties. She trained at the Royal Ballet School, before changing career plans and going to St. Hugh's College, Oxford University, to study English Literature. She is an English and Drama teacher and she reviews theatre for the website “Plays to See.”
They’re Going to Love You by Meg HowreyRead about the other entries on the list.
Set in both the present day and during the AIDS crisis, this is a psychologically powerful novel about longing for acceptance in a complicatedadult world. Carlisle Martin’s childhood holds secrets, some of which she will not admit even to herself. When, as an adult, she returns to New York City to visit her father, those memories cannot remain hidden any longer. She confronts her relationship with her ballerina mother and her father’s partner, James, learning what it is she needs to let go of in order to accept her past. The novel opens with a description of a ballet class, the fragile relationship between a teacher and student revealed: “He watches his words take shape in the boy’s body.” For this is the power of an adult mentor in the world of professional dance: every word can transform but also destroy.
Margot Harrison is the author of four young adult thrillers and the adult novel The Midnight Club.
Confessions of a Memory Eater by Pagan KennedyRead about the other entries on the list.
In this 2006 novel, a memory drug offers a washed-up academic an escape from midlife crisis into golden moments of his past. While former zine publisher Kennedy is technically (just barely) a boomer, this book shows she had her finger on the pulse of Generation X’s “retrophilia,” as I call it in The Midnight Club.
Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular HistoryRead about the other entries on the list.
Moses explores the historical development of utopian thought within African American intellectual traditions, tracing its roots from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. He examines how Black thinkers and leaders, fromMartin Delany to Marcus Garvey, constructed visions of a better future for African Americans, often blending utopian ideals with nationalist and diasporic aspirations.
Moses highlights the complexities of Afrotopian thought, revealing how it encompasses both the hope for a utopian future and the critique of present realities. By analyzing various political and religious movements—including Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Ethiopianism—Afrotopia uncovers how African American visions of liberation were often grounded in the desire for a separate, self-governing Black nation, whether in Africa or in the United States.
Through these historical explorations, Moses shows how Afrotopian dreams have been a driving force behind African American activism and cultural production.
for more than five years, with bylines in publications such as Hamilton Magazine and Beyond James, among others. She is also a two-time award-winning playwright, taking home the Best of Fringe award at the 2017 Hamilton Fringe Festival for the musical comedy This Is Not a Musical: The Musical! and the 2020 Torpedo Prize for her play Alone Together, a pandemic drama. Dara knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of seven, when she first fell in love with the written word. She also wanted to be a mermaid but has mostly focused on the writing side of things.
A Rip Through Time by Kelley ArmstrongRead about the other entries on the list.
It takes a pretty special detective to solve their own attempted murder—twice. After being strangled in an alleyway in modern-day Edinburgh, Scotland, Detective Mallory wakes up in the body of a Victorian maid who’d had the very same rope around her neck 150 years earlier. Now Mallory gets to put her 21st-century knowledge to the test and help her cute undertaker boss figure out who keeps trying to kill her across lifetimes. This book struck the perfect balance between pithy, macabre, and supernatural to keep me hooked (though it certainly didn’t hurt that I got to read it while traveling through Edinburgh myself, thankfully with no ropes involved).
published in numerous countries and has been nominated for many awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Macavity, Anthony, ITW Thriller and Strand Book Award.
Dayna Anderson (Kellye Garrett): Like your PI books with a side of humor and a large dollop of pop culture? I definitely do, which I why I devoured the Detective by Day books, which feature this resilient and clever actress-turned-apprentice PI. While there are only two books in this series (the first is 2017’s Hollywood Homicide) Dayna’s a stand-out leading lady, who navigates the glitzy and seedy world of showbiz with aplomb – making readers feel like true Hollywood insiders.Read about the other entries on the list.
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