Books You May Have Missed This Year
Don’t let these titles slip past you! Scroll to find your next nightstand staple.
From internationally bestselling author Louise Candlish, a witty psychological suspense novel in which an older woman’s suspicions about her charming new neighbor ignite a dangerous spiral in their luxury apartment building.
In Columbia Mansions, secrets don’t stay behind closed doors for long.
It’s rare for a room to open up in London’s storied Columbia Mansions, and lonely Gwen is thrilled when her neighbor’s new subletter, Pixie, brings a friendly breath of fresh air to its stuffy halls. Their unexpected bond soon becomes the bright spot in Gwen’s quiet life. But Gwen can’t help noticing cracks beneath Pixie’s cheerful surface—especially when it comes to her questionable financial arrangement with her live-in landlord, Alec.
As suspicions mount, Gwen’s protective instincts go into overdrive, triggering a dangerous chain of events no one is prepared for. The last thing Columbia Mansions wants is a scandal on its hands … Let alone a murder.
Seven ballerinas. One fallen primadonna. The audition of a lifetime. And a mysterious house that swallows the weakest one by one …
There is no performance art as punishing as ballet—and no top-tier ballerina is as punished as Eden. While others practice their steps over and over, Eden waits, knowing her body can perform only so many times before it breaks. But Eden will need to be perfect—or even better—at Deveraux Manor, secluded amid snowy mountains, where she and six other hopefuls are sequestered in a month-long audition for the mysterious, alluring, tragic former ballerina Leanora Karagianni.
Only one finalist will join Leanora’s company and dance the lead. Eden wants it more than anything, but not more than anyone. Her competitors will take every advantage they can. And the cursed house twisting around them will push each ballerina to the bloody edge—and over it. As Eden fights her attraction to the seductive Leonora and the stakes turn lethal, she’ll discover that only the dancer who pays the house’s terrible price can become the finalist.
“Spellbinding.” —Maria Hummel, author of Still Lives and Goldenseal
“Audacious and dazzling.” ―Jedediah Berry, author of The Naming Song
One fateful night in the 1990s, Dinah, a small-town Vermont teen, sneaks out on a mission to jump on the neighbor’s forbidden trampoline. There she comes upon a handsome, seductive boy named Rex, who leads a group of underground vigilante teenagers who call themselves “Nobody.” Dinah falls under Rex’s sway and joins the group. She’ll do anything to impress him, even when it’s dangerous. After an incident orchestrated by Rex results in steep repercussions for herself and others, Dinah leaves the town and her adolescent years behind.
Now, twenty years later, Rex has long vanished. Dinah is married with a baby and a job at the local zoo. But she is not at peace, and it seems as if someone from the past won’t let her go quietly. When mysterious clues start appearing, animals at the zoo go missing, and an old conspirator barely survives a suspicious fire, Dinah’s paranoia gets the best of her, and she takes the baby and drives back to her hometown to investigate. Although Dinah reunites with old friends, the forces out to get her make it painfully clear: Dinah must repent and face her enemies alone.
“The Nobody Code is that rare feast: a novel that astonishes on every page, twists and turns with wildness, beauty, and delight, and makes you, ultimately, question the stories you’ve been told about your life. A mystery that is also about adolescence, fairy tales, friendship, and love; I read this book with wonder and pleasure and finished it in tears—in awe of this strange, sublime, and haunting masterpiece.” ―Robin MacArthur, author of Half Wild
The Golden Girls meets Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise in this thrilling novel about two elderly women who go on the run to cover up a double murder they committed four decades ago.
Ida and Jean got away with murder. Settling into their golden years in late ’90s Rockaway, New York, Ida and Jean’s biggest problems are HOA squabbles, grown kids who don’t visit enough, and staying in the closet as a lesbian couple for fear of being ostracized. But when the electrical lines in their backyard need replacing, the women know that digging up the ground will unearth their long-held secret: the bodies of their late husbands buried under the rosebushes.
After their attempts to keep the electrical company from digging take a deadly turn, the lovers go on the run, launched into a cross-country adventure—with their cat, Frankie, in tow. To escape the law, they’ll need to outwit quirky midwestern locals, mend frayed relationships with their adult children, and shake off the detective that’s hot on their trail. But if Ida and Jean can pull it off, they’ll find their freedom in the place that has always represented their best shot at coming out and finally living their authentic lives together: San Francisco, California.
A Katie Couric Book Club Pick
“Part mystery, part coming-of-age tale, Night Objects will keep readers guessing all the way through, but it’s the book’s emotional center—a daughter in deep mourning for her late mother—that elevates this novel into something truly memorable.” ―Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The God of the Woods
This suspenseful novel transports readers to the windswept coast of Washington State and a boarding school steeped in privilege and deadly secrets—a remarkable story of grief, power, and the dangerous price of belonging.
It is true that I wished him dead dozens of times. Hundreds, even. But I, Lenny Winter, did not kill that boy.
Lenny Winter is fifteen years-old when she moves with her parents to an aging houseboat off the rugged coast of Washington. She imagines a quiet life spent charting constellations and chasing her dream of becoming an astronomer. Instead, a sudden tragedy shatters her world and catapults her to Blanchard, a renowned boarding school for the Pacific Northwest’s elite, where wealth and tradition rule.
Blanchard is dazzling, insular—and haunted by its own legends. At its heart lurks the Pascalianum Club, a secret society known to shape the school’s greatest and most notorious students, and whose influence stretches far beyond campus walls. Hungry to belong, Lenny is drawn into its orbit, even as she senses that the club feeds on the very vulnerabilities she is desperate to hide.
As privilege collides with grief and loyalty warps into obsession, Lenny’s choices will lead to an unforgettable reckoning—and a murder investigation that will test every story she tells herself about guilt, power, hope, and who she is becoming.
Sweeping, thrilling, and deeply moving, Night Objects is both a gripping mystery and a profound coming-of-age story—asking what we risk, what we become, and who we hold dear when the need to belong eclipses everything else.
“Night Objects is one of those rare novels that is somehow both a bingeable mystery and a literary work of art.” ―Stacy Willingham, New York Times bestselling author of Forget Me Not
“Riveting … she delivers more than thrills, probing potent themes of grief, classism, and the slippery nature of memory.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Devotees of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History will thrill to the dark academic glamour and sinister secret society Raphael creates in this mesmerizing novel.” ―Library Journal (starred review)
