Seven thrillers that mine the depths of confession and revenge

Christine Carbo is a recipient of the Women’s National Book Association Pinckley Prize, the Silver Falchion Award, the High Plains Book Award, and has been a finalist for the Barry Award. She has an MA in English/Linguistics and taught college-level courses for over a decade. She still teaches, in a vastly different realm, as a Pilates instructor. She lives in Montana where she finds inspiration from the wild beauty surrounding her.

Carbo's new novel is The Confession Artist.

At CrimeReads the author tagged seven thrillers that let "us imagine someone taking matters into their own hands and then asks what it cost them to do so." One title on the list:

Alison Gaylin, The Collective

Revenge as identity is also carefully crafted by Alison Gaylin in The Collective (2021), where a grieving mother is drawn into an underground network of women whose children were killed by men the courts let walk. Gaylin is shrewd about how the seductiveness of finally being accepted can quietly transform into permission, and how easily a movement built on grief can curdle into something harrowing.

Read about the other entries on Carbo's list at CrimeReads.

The Collective is among Sian Gilbert's nine novels featuring complex female friendships and Wendy Corsi Staub's six top twist endings in contemporary fiction.

The Page 69 Test: The Collective.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles about the thrilling dynamics of girls’ friendship

Sonia Feldman lives in Cleveland, Ohio. She won the PEN America PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and Waxwing. She also runs Sonia’s Poem of the Week, a popular email newsletter.

Girl’s Girl is her first novel.

At Lit Hub Feldman tagged six "excellent books about girl friendship, all of which invite you into a dynamic, the feeling of being among—a thrilling place to be." One title on the list:

Andrea Abreu, translated by Julia Sanches, Dogs of Summer

This short novel about feral ten-year-olds gave me permission to write a book about teenage girls for an adult literary audience that doesn’t bother justifying its interest in exactly the things the girls themselves are most interested in.

Set in the Canary Islands, Dogs of Summer has Gameboys and frantic masturbation, song lyrics and eating disorders. Isora and Shit—the moniker given by Isora to the novel’s unnamed narrator—melt into and out of one another in an exhilarating depiction of the boundarilessness of friendship at that age. Their relationship vibrates with power imbalance and unarticulated desire. This novel’s depiction of sapphic friendship and the pleasures and miseries of that infinite summer feeling have remained with me since I read the book in a single, rapt sitting.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Eighteen titles that explore the complexity of motherhood

The editors at Oprah Daily featured a list of eighteen books to help explore the complexity of motherhood. One title on the list:

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung

Despite loving—and feeling deeply loved by—her white adoptive parents, Chung always wondered about the Korean strangers who, in a narrative that was repeated to her endlessly growing up, made the ultimate sacrifice to give her a better life. In her overwhelmingly white community in Oregon, she faced prejudice that her adoptive family could neither see nor relate to. It wasn’t until she was pregnant, expecting a child that would be “connected to me in a way no one else had ever been,” that she decided to pry open the black box of her biological family and peer inside. This memoir is at once an account of her search, a nuanced critique of “colorblind” adoptions, and an exploration of what happens when the tidy “legends” that supposedly keep a family together finally break down.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six notable thrillers about marriage

At Book Riot Addison Rizer tagged six thrillers about marriage, including:

Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson

Thom and Wendy have been married nearly three decades, childhood sweethearts who managed to find their way to each other after Wendy’s first husband died. Despite infidelity and fighting, they stay married because of a secret binding them together. Told in reverse chronological order, you’ll trace their love story back all the way to its secretive beginning.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see Courtney Rodgers's nine chilling thrillers about marriage and L.K. Bowen's top ten marriage-gone-bad thrillers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top thrillers set in the near future

A former white water kayaker who competed on the World Cup circuit, Perrin Pring is now a park ranger. She has worked and lived across the U.S., riding horses in the Rocky Mountains, driving Jeeps in the wilds of the desert, greeting the sunrise in Hawaii, and running chainsaws in the Sierra Mountains. She holds an MFA in creative writing and screenwriting from UC Riverside Palm Desert and a BA from Tufts University. Her writing has appeared in Backcountry Journal, the Coachella Review, and Kelp Literary. She lives in the Rocky Mountain West.

Pring's new novel is Cash and Gravity.

At CrimeReads the author tagged ten "page-turning, edge of your seat, near-ish future thrillers that span the gambit of tastes." One title on the list:

Mason Coile, Exiles

Novella. Horror. Sci-Fi. What happens when the robots sent to Mars to build the base for the first humans go offline? Dive into Exiles and you’ll find out.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles centered around art that doesn’t actually exist

Melissa Albert is the New York Times and indie bestselling author of The Bad Ones, Our Crooked Hearts, and the Hazel Wood series.

Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and included in the New York Times list of Notable Children’s Books.

The Children is her first adult novel.

At Lit Hub Albert tagged "six books I’ve loved that have made-up art inside them." One title on the list:

Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

A slender, riveting oral history about the disappearance of Julian Blake, lead singer of an invented 1970s acid-folk band. In order to finish their second album, the band takes up residence in a creaky old house in the British countryside. Decades after Julian’s vanishing there, the band and various hangers-on recall eerie incidents both in and out of the house—rooms full of occult literature; pub full of haunting photographs—as well as the glimmering stranger circling the Orpheus-esque Julian. As an appreciator of freak folk and tolerator of mandolins, I want to hear the album made in this pressure cooker.

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

Wylding Hall is among Sam Reader's nine top modern SFF rock mythologies, Robert Brockway's five weird books for the jaded reader, and Meghan Ball's eleven top fictional bands in sci-fi & fantasy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six romance reads for book lovers

At Book Riot Nikki DeMarco tagged six "romance reads for book lovers, featuring librarians, booksellers, and writers." One title on the list:

Kiss Me, Maybe by Gabriella Gamez

Angela Gutierrez is a librarian who has never been kissed—and after accidentally going viral for coming out as an asexual lesbian, she decides to do something about it. Her plan: a scavenger hunt where the winner earns her first kiss. Her problem: pulling it off requires the help of Krystal Ramirez, the bartender she’s had a crush on for five years and who is absolutely, definitely not interested in love. Except, the more time they spend together planning Angela’s romantic future, the harder it gets to pretend there’s nothing between them. This book has the very specific joy of watching someone who has spent years organizing other people’s stories finally get to star in her own.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten titles about African Americans reclaiming the South

Kortney Morrow is a poet and writer creating from her studio in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has received support from 68to05, The Academy of American Poets, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Transition Magazine.

Her debut poetry collection, Run It Back, was the winner of the 2024 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

At Electric Lit Morrow tagged ten books that "guided my thinking around place-based liberation, the hopes we put into geography, and the complexities of reclaiming an ever-changing place in search of freedom." One title on the list:

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Broom’s debut memoir, The Yellow House, recounts the post-Katrina transformation of New Orleans East through the material history of her titular family house. On and off again, Broom returns to, journeys away, against, from, and towards the mythology of her city, her family, and the South. When Hurricane Katrina displaces Broom’s family—going from 24 family members in New Orleans to two brothers in all of Louisiana—her family’s house receives a letter from the city government announcing its demolition. Broom is forced to come to a new understanding of home beyond materiality. The Yellow House ends with the line “the story of our house was the only thing left.” In doing so, it becomes clear that the stories we hold and share can act as an embodiment and a transference of memory, of foundation, and shelter.

Read about the other books on Morrow's list at Electric Lit.

The Yellow House is among Juliet Patterson's eight titles that tackle the subject of ancestral legacy, J.R. Ramakrishnan's seven New Orleans books that go beyond Mardi Gras, and Lit Hub's ten best memoirs of the decade.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six mysteries featuring miniatures, effigies, and tiny scenes

Diane Josefowicz is the author of Guardians & Saints: Stories, L’Air du Temps (1985), and Ready, Set, Oh: A Novel. She is also the author, with Jed Z. Buchwald, of two histories of Egyptology: The Zodiac of Paris and The Riddle of the Rosetta. She serves as managing editor of the Victorian Web, the internet’s oldest and largest website devoted to Victoriana. A graduate of Brown University, she holds a PhD in History of Science from MIT and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Josefowicz's new novel is The Great Houses of Pill Hill.

[Q&A with Diane Josefowicz]

At CrimeReads the author tagged six favorite mysteries featuring miniatures, effigies, and tiny scenes. One title on the list:

Elise Hooper, The Library of Lost Dollhouses

The Belva Curtis Lafarge Library is a landmark Beaux Arts building that conceals many secrets about its founder and her collections of books and art. One morning Tildy Barrows, the head curator, stumbles into one of these secrets: a hidden room where she discovers a collection of spectacular and perfectly preserved dollhouses—in which Tildy is shocked to find a miniature framed portrait of her own mysterious mother.

As Tildy unravels the connection between the artist who made the dollhouses, the wealthy benefactress who tucked them away, and her own family’s history, Hooper takes the reader on a whirlwind tour from fin-de-siècle Paris to the hospital wards of shellshocked soldiers returning from World War I. Through it all, author Elise Hooper shows women quietly keeping explosive secrets, shunning the limelight while holding everything together.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue