Look, I know I just posted about my Owned Books Challenge and how my physical TBR is out of control, and I should really just focus on reading books I already have instead of buying or borrowing more… but you know what? If I buy these books and then read them within the same year (LOL please) then what’s the problem? Right? RIGHT?
Get your “add to cart” finger ready! Here are my top picks for new releases for the first half of 2024!
🔪The Fury
ALEX MICHAELIDES
Genre: Thriller🔪
Pub Month: January
What the Fuck It’s About: This is a tale of murder. Or maybe that’s not quite true. At its heart, it’s a love story, isn’t it?
Lana Farrar is a reclusive ex–movie star and one of the most famous women in the world. Every year, she invites her closest friends to escape the English weather and spend Easter on her idyllic private Greek island.
I tell you this because you may think you know this story. You probably read about it at the time ― it caused a real stir in the tabloids, if you remember. It had all the necessary ingredients for a press a celebrity; a private island cut off by the wind…and a murder.
We found ourselves trapped there overnight. Our old friendships concealed hatred and a desire for revenge. What followed was a game of cat and mouse ― a battle of wits, full of twists and turns, building to an unforgettable climax. The night ended in violence and death, as one of us was found murdered.
But who am I? My name is Elliot Chase, and I’m going to tell you a story unlike any you’ve ever heard.
🔪The House of Last Resort
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN
Genre: Horror👻
Pub Month: January
What the Fuck It’s About: Across Italy, there are many half-empty towns, nearly abandoned by those who migrate to the coast or to cities. The beautiful, crumbling hilltop town of Becchina is among them, but its mayor has taken drastic measures to rebuild—selling abandoned homes to anyone in the world for a single Euro, as long as the buyer promises to live there for at least five years. It’s a no-brainer for American couple Tommy and Kate Puglisi. Both work remotely, and Becchina is the home of Tommy’s grandparents, his closest living relatives.
It feels like a romantic adventure, an opportunity the young couple would be crazy not to seize. But from the moment they move in, they both feel a shadow has fallen on them. Tommy’s grandmother is furious, even a little frightened, when she realizes which house they’ve bought. There are rooms in an annex at the back of the house that they didn’t know were there. The place makes strange noises at night, locked doors are suddenly open, and when they go to a family gathering, they’re certain people are whispering about them, and about their house, which one neighbour refers to as The House of Last Resort. Soon, they learn that the home was owned for generations by the Church, but the real secret, and the true dread, is unlocked when they finally learn what the priests were doing in this house for all those long years…and how many people died in the strange chapel inside.
While down in the catacombs beneath Becchina…something stirs.
🔪No One Can Know
KATE ALICE MARSHALL
Genre: Mystery🕵🏼♀️
Pub Month: January
What the Fuck It’s About: Emma hasn’t told her husband much about her past. He knows her parents are dead and she hasn’t spoken to her sisters in years. Then they lose their apartment, her husband gets laid off, and Emma discovers she’s pregnant―right as the bank account slips into the red.
That’s when Emma confesses that she has one more asset: her parents’ house, which she owns jointly with her estranged sisters. They can’t sell it, but they can live in it. But returning home means that Emma is forced to reveal her secrets to her husband: that the house is not a run-down farmhouse but a stately mansion, and that her parents died there. Were murdered. And some people say Emma did it.
Emma and her sisters have never spoken about what really happened that night. Now, her return to the house may lure her sisters back, but it will also crack open family and small-town secrets lots of people don’t want revealed. As Emma struggles to reconnect with her old family and hold together her new one, she begins to realize that the things they have left unspoken all these years have put them in danger again.
🔪A Step Past Darkness
VERA KURIAN
Genre: Thriller🕵🏼♀️
Pub Month: February
What the Fuck It’s About: There’s something sinister under the surface of the idyllic, suburban town of Wesley Falls, and it’s not just the abandoned coal mine that lies beneath it. The summer of 1995 kicks off with a party in the mine where six high school students witness a horrifying crime that changes the course of their lives.
The six couldn’t be more different.
• Maddy, a devout member of the local megachurch
• Kelly, the bookworm next door
• James, a cynical burnout
• Casey, a loveable football player
• Padma, the shy straight-A student
• Jia, who’s starting to see visions she can’t explain
When they realize that they can’t trust anyone but each other, they begin to investigate what happened on their own. As tensions escalate in town to a breaking point, the six make a vow of silence, bury all their evidence, and promise to never contact each other again. Their plan works – almost.
Twenty years later, Jia calls them all back to Wesley Falls—Maddy has been murdered, and they are the only ones who can uncover why. But to end things, they have to return to the mine one last time.
🔪Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead
JENNY HOLLANDER
Genre: Mystery🔪
Pub Month: March
What the Fuck It’s About: Nine years ago, with the world’s eyes on her, Charlie Colbert fled. The press and the police called Charlie a “witness” to the nightmarish events at her elite graduate school on Christmas Eve—events known to the public as “Scarlet Christmas”—though Charlie knows she was much more than that.
Now, Charlie has meticulously rebuilt her life: She’s the editor-in-chief of a major magazine, engaged to the golden child of the publishing industry, and hell-bent on never, ever letting her guard down again. But when a buzzy film made by one of Charlie’s former classmates threatens to shatter everything she’s worked for, Charlie realizes how much she’s changed in nine years.
Now, she’s not going to let anything—not even the people she once loved most—get in her way.
🔪End of Story
A.J. FINN
Genre: Thriller🕵🏼♀️
Pub Month: February
What the Fuck It’s About: “I’ll be dead in three months. Come tell my story.”
So writes Sebastian Trapp, reclusive mystery novelist, to his longtime correspondent Nicky Hunter, an expert in detective fiction. With mere months to live, Trapp invites Nicky to his spectacular San Francisco mansion to help draft his life story . . . living alongside his beautiful second wife, Diana; his wayward nephew, Freddy; and his protective daughter, Madeleine. Soon Nicky finds herself caught in an irresistible case of real-life “detective fever.”
“You and I might even solve an old mystery or two.”
Twenty years earlier—on New Year’s Eve 1999—Sebastian’s first wife and teenage son vanished from different locations, never to be seen again. Did the perfect crime writer commit the perfect crime? And why has he emerged from seclusion, two decades later, to allow a stranger to dig into his past?
“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”
As Nicky attempts to weave together the strands of Sebastian’s life, she becomes obsessed with discovering the truth … while Madeleine begins to question what her beloved father might actually know about that long-ago night. And when a corpse appears in the family’s koi pond, both women are shocked to find that the past isn’t gone—it’s just waiting.
🔪Murder Road
SIMONE ST. JAMES
Genre: Thriller 👻
Pub Month: March
What the Fuck It’s About: July 1995. April and Eddie have taken a wrong turn. They’re looking for the small resort town where they plan to spend their honeymoon. When they spot what appears to be a lone hitchhiker along the deserted road, they stop to help. But not long after the hitchhiker gets into their car, they see the blood seeping from her jacket and a truck barreling down Atticus Line after them.
When the hitchhiker dies at the local hospital, April and Eddie find themselves in the crosshairs of the Coldlake Falls police. Unexplained murders have been happening along Atticus Line for years and the cops finally have two witnesses who easily become their only suspects. As April and Eddie start to dig into the history of the town and that horrible stretch of road to clear their names, they soon learn that there is something supernatural at work, something that could not only tear the town and its dark secrets apart, but take April and Eddie down with it all.
🔪The Best Way to Bury Your Husband
ALEXIA CASALE
Genre: Mystery🔪
Pub Month: March
What the Fuck It’s About: A dark comedy about four women coming together to heal the damage their husbands have done––and hide their bodies once they’ve killed them
When Sally kills her husband with a cast-iron skillet, she’s more fearful of losing her kids than of disposing of a fresh corpse. That just wouldn’t be fair—not after twenty years of marriage to a truly terrible man. But Sally isn’t the only woman in town reaching the brink. Soon, Sally finds herself leading an extremely unusual self-help group, and among them there are four bodies to hide. Can they all figure out the perfect way to bury their husbands . . . and get away with it?
First to join is former nurse, Ruth, who met her husband as a single mom. Now her son is grown and her husband’s violence builds by the day until an attack on the stairs leads to a fatal accident—for him. A few doors down, Samira’s last straw comes when she discovers her husband is planning a campaign of violence against her eldest daughter, who has just come out. Janey, Sally’s best friend, has just had her first child at forty-two. Sleep-deprived Janey needs a hero to slay the monster in the fairy tales she whispers to her daughter each night . . . and as her husband’s violence escalates, it might just be her.
Together, fueled by righteous anger but tempered by a moral core, the four women must help each other work out a plan to get rid of their husbands for good. Along the way, Sally, Ruth, Samira and Janey rediscover old joys and embark on new passions in work, education, and life. Friendship and laughter really are the best medicine—and so is getting away with murder.
🔪We Ate The Dark
MALLORY PEARSON
Genre: Horror👻
Pub Month: March
What the Fuck It’s About: Five years after Sofia Lyon disappeared, her remains are found stuffed into the hollow of a tree bursting through the floorboards of an abandoned house in the woods. The women who loved her flock home to the North Carolina hills to face their grief.
Frankie, Sofia’s twin, is in furious mourning. Poppy is heartbroken. Cass has never felt more homesick. And Marya knows something the rest of them don’t. Determined to find Sofia’s murderer, they share more than a need to see justice done for their friend. Each woman is haunted, bound to the next by something both cruel and kind, and now stalked by a shadowy presence they’ve yet to understand. Only to question, and to fear.
As Sofia’s secrets unravel, so do those of the woods, and the women soon realize that Sofia might not be who they thought she was at all. And that whoever—or whatever—killed her is coming after them.
🔪How to Solve Your Own Murder
KRISTEN PERRIN
Genre: Mystery🕵🏼♀️
Pub Date: March
What the Fuck It’s About: It’s 1965 and teenage Frances Adams is at an English country fair with her two best friends. But Frances’s night takes a hairpin turn when a fortune-teller makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day, Frances will be murdered. Frances spends a lifetime trying to solve a crime that hasn’t happened yet, compiling dirt on every person who crosses her path in an effort to prevent her own demise. For decades, no one takes Frances seriously, until nearly sixty years later, when Frances is found murdered, like she always said she would be.
In the present day, Annie Adams has been summoned to a meeting at the sprawling country estate of her wealthy and reclusive great-aunt Frances. But by the time Annie arrives in the quaint English village of Castle Knoll, Frances is already dead. Annie is determined to catch the killer, but thanks to Frances’s lifelong habit of digging up secrets and lies, it seems every endearing and eccentric villager might just have a motive for her murder. Can Annie safely unravel the dark mystery at the heart of Castle Knoll, or will dredging up the past throw her into the path of a killer?
As Annie gets closer to the truth, and closer to the danger, she starts to fear she might inherit her aunt’s fate instead of her fortune.
🔪The Devil and Mrs. Davenport
PAULETTE KENNEDY
Genre: Dark Fiction😈
Pub Date: March
What the Fuck It’s About: Missouri, 1955. Loretta Davenport has led an isolated life as a young mother and a wife to Pete, an ambitious assistant professor at a Bible college. They’re the picture of domestic tranquillity—until a local girl is murdered and Loretta begins receiving messages from beyond. Pete dismisses them as delusions of a fevered female imagination. Loretta knows they’re real—and frightening. Defying Pete’s demands, Loretta finds an encouraging supporter in parapsychologist Dr. Curtis Hansen. He sees a woman with a rare gift, more blessing than curse.
With Dr. Hansen’s help, Loretta’s life opens up to an empowering new purpose. But for Pete, the God-fearing image he’s worked so hard to cultivate is under threat. No longer in control of his dutiful wife, he sees the Devil at work. As Loretta’s powers grow stronger and the pleading spirits beckon, Pete is determined to deliver his wife from evil. To solve the mysteries of the dead, Loretta must first save herself.
🔪Diavola
JENNIFER MARIE THORNE
Genre: Horror 👻
Pub Date: March
What the Fuck It’s About: Anna has only two rules for the annual Pace family destination vacations: Tread lightly, and survive.
It isn’t easy when she’s the only one in the family who doesn’t quite seem to fit. Her twin brother Benny goes with the flow so much he’s practically dissolved, and her older sister Nicole is so used to everyone—including her blandly docile husband and two kids—falling in line that Anna often ends up in trouble for simply asking a question. Mom seizes every opportunity to question her life choices, and Dad, when not reminding everyone who has paid for this vacation, just wants some peace and quiet.
The gorgeous, remote villa in tiny Monteperso seems like a perfect place to endure so much family togetherness–including Benny’s demanding new boyfriend (it’s Christopher, not Chris). That is, until things start going off the rails–the strange noises at night, the unsettling warnings from the local villagers, and, oh, the dark, violent past of the villa itself.
Jennifer Thorne skewers all-too-familiar family dynamics in this sly, wickedly funny vacation-Gothic. Beautifully unhinged and deeply satisfying, Diavola is a sharp twist on the classic haunted house story, exploring loneliness, belonging, and the seemingly inescapable bonds of family mythology.
🔪The Angel of Indian Lake (The Lake Witch Trilogy, #3)
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
Genre: Horror🔪
Pub Date: March
What the Fuck It’s About: It’s been four years in prison since Jade Daniels last saw her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho, the day she took the fall, protecting her friend Letha and her family from incrimination.
Since then, her reputation, and the town, have changed dramatically. There’s a lot of unfinished business in Proofrock, from serial killer cultists to the rich trying to buy Western authenticity.
But there’s one aspect of Proofrock no one wants to confront…until Jade comes back to town. The curse of the Lake Witch is waiting and now is the time for the final stand.
🔪What Grows in the Dark
JAQ EVANS
Genre: Horror😈
Pub Date: March
What the Fuck It’s About: Sixteen years ago, Brigit Weylan’s older sister, Emma, walked into the woods in their small hometown of Ellis Creek. She never walked out. People said she was troubled—in the months leading up to her death, she was convinced there was a monster in those trees. Marked by the tragedy, Brigit left town and never looked back.
Now Brigit travels around the country investigating paranormal activity (and faking the results) with her cameraman, Ian. But when she receives a call from Ellis Creek, she’s thrust into the middle of a search for two missing teenagers. As Brigit and Ian are drawn further into the case, the parallels to Emma’s death become undeniable. And worse, Brigit can’t explain what’s happening to trees appearing in her bedroom in the middle of the night, something with a very familiar laugh watching her out in the darkness and Emma’s voice on her phone, reminding Brigit to finish what they started.
More and more, it looks like Emma was right: there is a monster in Ellis Creek, and it’s waited a long time for Brigit to come home.
🔪A Better World
SARAH LANGAN
Genre: Thriller🕵🏼♀️
Pub Month: April
What the Fuck It’s About: You’ll be safe here. That’s what the greasy tour guide tells the Farmer-Bowens when they visit Plymouth Valley, a walled-off company town with clean air, pantries that never go empty, and blue-ribbon schools. On a very trial basis, the company offers to hire Linda Farmer’s husband, a numbers genius, and relocate her whole family to this bucolic paradise for the .0001%. Though Linda will have to sacrifice her medical career back home, the family jumps at the opportunity. They’d be crazy not to take it. With the outside world literally falling apart, this might be the Farmer-Bowens last chance.
But fitting in takes work. The pampered locals distrust outsiders, cruelly snubbing Linda, Russell, and their teen twins. And the residents fervently adhere to a group of customs and beliefs called Hollow . . . but what exactly is Hollow?
It’s Linda who brokers acceptance by volunteering her medical skills to the most powerful people in town with their pet charity, ActHollow. In the months afterward, everything seems fine. Sure, Russell starts hyperventilating through a paper bag in the middle of the night, and the kids have drifted like bridgeless islands, but living here’s worth sacrificing their family’s closeness, isn’t it? At least they’ll survive. The trouble is, the locals never say what they think. They seem scared. And Hollow’s ominous culminating event, the Plymouth Valley Winter Festival, is coming.
Linda’s warned by her husband and her powerful new friends to stop asking questions. But the more she learns, the more frightened she becomes. Should the Farmer-Bowens be fighting to stay, or fighting to get out?
🔪Granite Harbor
PETER NICHOLS
Genre: Mystery🕵🏼♀️
Pub Month: April
What the Fuck It’s About: In scenic Granite Harbor on the coast of Maine, life has continued on–quiet and serene–for decades. That is until a local teenager’s body is found brutally murdered and hung in The Settlement, the town’s historic archaeological site. The way the body is displayed, hung from a handmade wooden structure, and the singular gruesome clue left inside the corpse, signal that this might not have been the killer’s first victim.
Alex Brangwen is adjusting to life as a single father and the town’s sole detective after a failed career as a novelist. This is his first murder case, and as both a parent and detective, Alex knows the people of Granite Harbor are looking to him to catch the killer and temper the fear that has descended over the town. But his skills as a detective are rudimentary, and he worries that they are more novelist’s intuition than investigator’s expertise.
Isabel, a single mother attempting to support her family while healing from her own demons, finds herself in the middle of the case when she begins working at The Settlement. Her son Ethan, and Alex’s daughter Sophie, were best friends with the victim. When another teenager is found murdered, the body left with the same gruesome detail, both parents are terrified that their child may be next.
As Alex and Isabel race to find the killer in their midst, the town’s secrets, past and present, begin bubbling to the surface, threatening to unravel the tight-knit community.
🔪The Kill List (Inspector Anjelica Henley, #3)
NADINE MATHESON
Genre: Mystery🕵🏼♀️
Pub Month: April
What the Fuck It’s About: While an innocent man sits behind bars, a serial killer with a gruesome signature has started killing again. And only Anjelica Henley can stop him.
After twenty-five years behind bars, Andrew Kenan has just been exonerated. Newly discovered DNA evidence proves that he was not the cold-blooded serial killer the world thought he was, the one who sewed his victims’ eyes shut before burying them alive. Before Kenan can taste freedom, however, he is found dead in his prison cell. And Inspector Anjelica Henley, who worked the original investigation, is left in shock.
Henley never thought she’d have to revisit one of the most horrifying cases of her career. But now, after evading justice for twenty-five years, the true killer is back, and so is their gruesome signature. Can Henley stop them once and for all? Or has the Serial Crimes Unit finally met its match?
🔪My Darling Dreadful Thing
JOHANNA VAN VEEN
Genre: Horror 👻
Pub Month: May
What the Fuck It’s About: Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the only good thing in Roos’ life, which is filled with sordid backroom séances organized by her mother. That is, until wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop attends one of these séances and asks Roos to come live with her at the crumbling estate she inherited upon the death of her husband. The manor is unsettling, but the attraction between Roos and Agnes is palpable. So how does someone end up dead?
Roos is caught red-handed, but she claims a spirit is the culprit. Doctor Montague, a psychologist tasked with finding out whether Roos can be considered mentally fit to stand trial, suspects she’s created an elaborate fantasy to protect her from what really happened. But Roos knows spirits are real; she’s loved one of them. She’ll have to prove her innocence and her sanity, or lose everything.
🔪When She Was Me
MARLEE BUSH
Genre: Thriller🕵🏼♀️
Pub Date: May
What the Fuck It’s About: Ever since that night, twin sisters Cassie and Lenora have been inseparable. As the sole permanent residents of Cabin Two, their refuge on an isolated Tennessee campground, they manage to stay away from prying eyes, probing questions, and true crime junkies. Just the two of them, Cassie and Lenora against the world. The peace and quiet is almost enough to make them forget what happened all those years ago. Almost. Until a teenage girl camping at the neighbouring cabin goes missing, and the memories come rushing back. As the crime becomes ever more recognizable―they know better than anyone that so-called ‘happy families’ can be anything but―each sister suspects the other knows more than she’s letting on….
Trapped in the isolating, claustrophobic wilderness, Cassie and Lenora must piece together the truth of what happened―and the sinister truth lurking in their own pasts―before it’s too late.
🔪The House That Horror Built
CHRISTINA HENRY
Genre: Horror😈
Pub Month: May
What the Fuck It’s About: Harry Adams has always loved horror movies, so it’s not totally a coincidence that she took the job cleaning house for movie director Javier Castillo. His forbidding graystone Chicago mansion, Bright Horses, is filled from top to bottom with terrifying props and costumes, as well as glittering awards from his career making horror films that thrilled audiences—until family tragedy and scandal forced him to vanish from the industry.
Javier values discretion, and Harry has always tried to clean the house immaculately, keep her head down, and keep her job safe—she needs the money to support her son. But then she starts hearing noises from behind a locked door. Noises that sound remarkably like a human voice calling for help, even though Javier lives alone and never has visitors. Harry knows that not asking questions is a vital part of keeping her job, but she soon finds that the forbidding house may be home to secrets she can’t ignore.
🔪The Midnight Feast
LUCY FOLEY
Genre: Mystery🕵🏼♀️
Pub Month: June
What the Fuck It’s About: Welcome to the opening weekend of The Manor – A luxury resort built on top of old secrets in an ancient wood.
THE FOUNDER.
THE LOVER.
THE MYSTERY GUEST.
THE KITCHEN HELP.
THE DETECTIVE.
All have an agenda. All have a past. But not everyone will survive The Midnight Feast
🔪Shadowheart (UNSUB, #4)
MEG GARDINER
Genre: Thriller🔪
Pub Month: June
What the Fuck It’s About: In a Tennessee prison, Efrem Judah Goode draws haunting portraits of women he claims he has killed. Around the country, desperate families of the missing seek answers in his eerie drawings. And on darkened back roads and New York City streets, a new killer poses duct-taped bodies at the sites of Goode’s murders.
Two serial killers are locked in a twisted rivalry. To stop the brutal slayings, FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix must unravel the connection between Goode and the Broken Heart Killer. Their warped competition destroys anyone in their path. Caught between a manipulative psychopath and a ruthless UNSUB, Caitlin has to dive into not one, but two dark and twisted minds. She will risk everything, plunging into the depths of their depraved clash to hunt down an unstoppable killer.
🔪Horror Movie
PAUL TREMBLAY
Genre: Horror😈
Pub Month: June
What the Fuck It’s About: In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.
The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big-budget reboot.
The man who played “The Thin Kid” is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions—demons of the past be damned.
But at what cost?
🔪Middle of the Night
RILEY SAGER
Genre: Thriller🕵🏼♀️
Pub Month: June
What the Fuck It’s About: The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbour, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul de sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again.
Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul de sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle?
The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbours and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed monsters roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate.
The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it quiet forest or suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.
There are so many good novels coming! I mean, there are so many good ones already out and sitting on my shelves, too, but still…
✌️🔪
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