Staff Picks: Books We Loved This Year
This year has been packed full of thrilling murders, twisty mysteries, and edge-of-your-seat suspenseful reads. Discover the books that had our jaws dropping this year.
She flies to Tuscany for answers. There, Julia learns that Rossi suffered from delusions of grandeur, believing herself to be a descendant of Caterina Sforza, a powerful Renaissance duchess. Julia doubts that is true, but she can’t deny the uncanny resemblance between her, Caterina, and Rossi. She starts to unearth eerie parallels between them—and disturbing secrets. Before long, Julia suspects she’s being followed and experiences disorienting delusions of her own. Even meeting a romantic Florentine doesn’t quiet her unease. Then events turn deadly, and Julia finds herself in a harrowing struggle for sanity and survival.
Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life: She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it’s too late.
Jet never thought of herself as having enemies. But now, in the one week she has left, she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend. As her condition deteriorates, she reconnects with her childhood friend Billy, the only one willing to help her. With Billy at her side, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something:
Jet is going to solve her own murder.
Martha is a florist living in a neighboring town with her infant daughter and her devoted husband, Alistair. But lately, Alistair has been traveling more and more frequently for work, disappearing for days at a time. When Martha questions him about his frequent absences, he always has a legitimate explanation, but Martha can’t share the feeling that something isn’t right.
Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life. Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there…but his wife has disappeared. A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible-a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.
Twenty-two years ago, Claire Campbell’s older sister, Natalie, disappeared shortly. Days later, her blood was found in a car, a man was arrested, and the case was swiftly closed. However, an unexpected call from her father forces her to come back home and face it all anew. With the entire summer now looming ahead, Claire decides on a whim to accept a seasonal job at Galloway Farm, a muscadine vineyard in coastal South Carolina less than an hour away from where she grew up. However, as soon as Claire starts to settle in, she stumbles across an old diary written by one of the vineyard’s owners, and what at first seems like a story of young rebellion and love turns into something much more sinister as it begins to describe details of various unsolved crimes. As the days stretch on, Claire finds herself becoming more and more secluded as she starts to obsess over the diary’s contents… as well as the lingering feeling that her own sister’s disappearance may be somehow tied to it all.
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