Habits of the Sea

 

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A man out of time. An island that shouldn’t exist. And a girl who spent decades trying to convince herself she imagined both.

Clay Lockhart is a fable. Except he’s real.

Ellie Mills has one brief encounter with Clay and his impossible island when she’s twelve years old. Then she spends years telling herself it never happened, that it was a dream, a story she made up. Her heart knows better. Decades later there’s another sighting of the mythical island, and Ellie realizes she has to find out the truth about the timeless man and the place that vanished.

This is a beautifully written novel about grief, healing, and love. It's atmospheric and lyric. It’s about choosing love and choosing your fate even when it seems impossible.

There’s also a warning tucked inside the fable and the love story, and it’s about caring for and respecting our world. As the decades pass, Ellie and Clay notice small changes in the seas. They don’t understand what those changes mean until danger arrives at their shore and they realize the world and the water they knew is already gone.

Carlotta Brentan’s narration is marvelous. It reminded me of Julia Whelan narrating The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and since that’s my favorite audiobook of all time, that’s about the highest compliment I have to give.

Perfect for readers who love literary fiction, slow burning character driven stories, and impossible love stories. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you Simon Audio for the gifted listen. Habits of the Sea is out now. Grad a copy at Bookshop.org and help out an indie bookstore while you're at it.

If you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in Little Wild, another character driven love story with magical realism.

About the Author

Shea Ernshaw is a #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of The Wicked Deep, Winterwood, A Wilderness of Stairs, Long Live the Pumpkin Queen, and A History of Wild Places. Her books have been published in over twenty countries and repeatedly chosen as Indie Next Picks. She lives in a small mountain town in Oregon and is happiest when lost in a good book, lost in the woods, or writing her next novel. Follow Shea on Instagram or visit her webiste for more news and information about Shea and her books.

July Reading Wrap Up

 

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July was the month of solid reads. 📚

Not every month has a standout favorite, but July gave me 15 books with only two falling below 4 stars. I’ll happily take those odds.

⭐ 5-star favorites:

📖 Keep Them Close by David Ellis

📖 Brimstone Hollow by Archer Sullivan

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Standouts:

• Objects in Lakes

• Mrs. Shim Is a Killer

• James

• The Dead Husband Cookbook

• Habits of the Sea

• Cross My Heart, Hope You Die

• It Came from Neverland

• Death Meets Cute

• Buyer Beware

• Heart of Glass

• One Good Eye

⭐⭐⭐

• The Death Row Club

• Little Red Death

July by the numbers:

📚 15 books

🎧 10 audiobooks

📱 4 ebooks

📖 1 print book

⭐ Average rating: 4.1

I bounced between library books, ARCs, influencer copies, and even my book club pick, which made for a fun mix of thrillers, mysteries, horror, literary fiction, and a few books that completely caught me off guard. 

Thank you to Minotaur Books, Simon Audio, Macmillian Audio, Harper Perennial, Sourcebooks Audio, and Poisoned Pen Press for the gifted copies.

Grab a copy of any of these books at Bookshop.org and help and indie bookstore while you're at it.

Check out what I read last moth here.

IG Live | a conversation with Archer Sullivan

 

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Archer Sullivan spent time with me talking snake-handling preachers, small Appalachian towns, and her writing process. 

 Annie Gore is back, this time investigating whether a preacher's fatal snakebite was really an accident, and Archer told me things and Archer discussed growing up in small town s and books that have influenced her writing. We also got into the Annie's character and what's surprised her about writing mysteries.

Catch the replay of our conversation here. Brimstone Hollow is a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ read for me. It's out August 11 and you can preorder a copy from Bookshop.org and help an indie bookstore while you're at it.

If you missed my full review of Brimstone Hollow, you can read it here.

About the Author

Archer Sullivan is a ninth generation Appalachian. She's moved thirty-seven times and has lived everywhere from Monticello, Kentucky to Manhattan, New York and from Black Mountain, North Carolina to Beverly Hills, California. Her work has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Tough, Shotgun Honey, Reckon Review, Rock and a Hard Place, and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024. Follow Archer on Instagram for more news and information about her books.

Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die

 

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Three exes. One dead boyfriend. One very bad plan for revenge.

Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die by Mallory Arnold is a locked-room mystery that crashed into a slasher movie, and I am so here for it. Cham, Nora, and Ruby all find out they’re dating the same man, and that he’s swindled each of them too. So they do what any reasonable person would do: plot some harmless revenge at a secluded mountain cabin Ruby just inherited. A cabin that happens to sit on the old grounds of a cult that may or may not still have members wandering the woods. What could go wrong?

Everything. Everything goes wrong, and it's gory and ridiculous and so much fun. This is not a subtle book and it doesn’t want to be.

The multiple POV structure works because these three women are nothing alike, so I never lost track of who was who, even with the timeline jumping around a little. There’s real humor mixed in with the frights, which kept it from ever feeling too heavy.

The full cast narration seals the deal. Victoria Connolly, Stacy Gonzalez, Alexandra Hunter, and Gary Tiedemann all lean into the campy energy of this thing, and it makes the audio experience even better than reading it on the page would be.

Toss this in your beach bag or pool bag and binge it in a day or two. It’s popcorn thriller-slasher, and it knows exactly what it is. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you to Sourcebooks Audio for the gifted listen. Out now.

Grab a copy at Bookshop.org and help an indie bookstore while you're at it.

If you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in my review of another campy thriller-horror mashup How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates.

About the Author

Mallory Arnold is the USA Today bestselling author of How to Survive a Horror Story. She writes creepy, mysterious fiction and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband and three cats. Follow Mallory on Instagram for more news and information about Mallory and her books.

Buyer Beware

 

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Two women. One house. A whole lot of reasons to never trust a real estate listing again.

Buyer Beware by Catherine Ryan Howard is exactly the kind of layered thriller I can’t stop pushing on people. You’ve got Ellie, moving into 1 Delaney Row with one suitcase and a past she’s desperate to keep buried, except someone wants her out of that house fast, and that just screams something’s off. 

Then there’s Erin, a driven student with dreams of a virology career abroad until Jason enters the picture. And Hannah, an entrepreneur who built her business from nothing and is genuinely happy on her own terms, until she meets Jason too. 

You know these threads are heading somewhere. Howard just makes you wait for it, cranking the tension a little more with every chapter. When it all clicks into place your jaw will be on the floor. 

This is a full binge read. Atmospheric, unsettling, that creeping sense that the house is either haunted, cursed, or Ellie’s just losing it. I really couldn't tell which for most of the book. The multiple POVs and shifting timelines could’ve felt like a lot, but they kept me locked in trying to piece together where it was all going. 

Narrator Ayoola Smart brings each woman to life so distinctly you never lose track of whose head you’re in.

Underneath the twists, this one’s really about female rage, and how some men have a way of making women shrink themselves and hand over their own dreams without even realizing it’s happening.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Out today. Thank you to Simon Audio for the gifted early listen.

Grab a copy at Bookshop.org and help an indie bookstore while you're at it.

If you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in my review of Killer Vibes. A directionless stoner inherits a house in a swanky neighborhood from an uncle her barely knew and quickly finds himself in a mess of trouble.

About the Author

Catherine Ryan Howard is an award-winning, #1 bestselling thriller writer from Cork, Ireland. Her work has been shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel, the UK Crime Writers Association John Creasey/New Blood and Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Awards, and the An Post Irish Crime Fiction Book of the Year multiple times. Her novels have been included in The New York Times Best Thrillers of the Year, The Washington Post’s Best Mysteries and Thrillers of the Year, and The Sunday Times (London)’s Best Thrillers of the Year. She is published in twenty languages, and a number of her titles have been optioned for the screen. Follow Catherine on Instagram and visit her website for more news and information about her books.

Brimstone Hollow

 

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Buried in 24 hours. Why the rush?

A snake-handling preacher dies of a snake bite and gets buried within twenty-four hours. That's not a funeral. That's a cover-up.

Annie Gore is back. If you missed The Witch's Orchard last year, she's a former Air Force Special Investigator turned PI working out of Louisville, and she's exactly the kind of female detective I'm always hunting for and rarely find. This time her client is a woman who's been estranged from her father for twenty years. He was one of the last infamous snake-handling preachers in Appalachia. He's dead from a bite, he was in the ground inside a day, and his daughter wants to know who was in a hurry.

Sullivan is a ninth-generation Appalachian and it shows on every page. The gossip moves through that town faster than Annie does. The sulfur smell sits over the hollers the whole book. You can smell this thing.

The first book had witchy folklore running underneath it. This one doesn't lean on old stories. What's moving under the surface here is human and it's worse for it.

The writing is sharp. The pace rises and falls the way a real investigation does. Every townsperson Annie interviews is a full person, not a plot delivery device. It's a series book that reads perfectly well as a standalone, so don't let book two stop you.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Brimstone Hollow is out August 11. Thank you to Archer and Minotaur for the gifted ARC.

You can preorder a copy of Brimstone Hollow from Bookshop.org and help an indie bookstore while you're at it.

If you enjoyed this review, check out my review of The Witch's Orchard. It's the first book in the Annie Gore series.

About the Author

Archer Sullivan is a ninth generation Appalachian. She's moved thirty-seven times and has lived everywhere from Monticello, Kentucky to Manhattan, New York and from Black Mountain, North Carolina to Beverly Hills, California. Her work has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Tough, Shotgun Honey, Reckon Review, Rock and a Hard Place, and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024. Follow Archer on Instagram for more news and information about her books.

Keep Them Close

 

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Keep Them Close by David Ellis was one of my most anticipated books of the summer, and it delivered. I started with the ebook, then my Libby hold for the audio came in, and I ended up listening to about 75% of it. No regrets. Total binge.

Two siblings. One murder. A whole lot of secrets neither of them wants dug up. Allison is a high-powered defense attorney who has had it with her cheating husband, Finley. Her brother Luke is a good guy who has landed himself in real legal trouble. When Finley turns up dead, Detective Louise starts pulling threads, and the closer she gets, the more the family’s buried history threatens to come apart. Told across three points of view with timeline shifts, this one asks you to pay attention, and it rewards you for it.

Ellis’s writing is as sharp as ever and his plotting is diabolical. So many twists and turns, but he weaves every thread together without a single loose end. Masterful storytelling, plain and simple.

The full cast narration is a huge part of why the audio works so well. Kelli Tager as Allison, Sean Patrick Hopkins as Luke, and Robin McAlpine as Louise are all fantastic, and the distinct voices make the complex plot so much easier to track. Bonus points to whoever decided to note which character each narrator voiced up front. Small touch, big help.

Fast paced, complex characters, twisty, great writing, and narration that nails it. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ all the way. Do not miss this one. Out now.

Grab a copy at Bookshop.org and help an indie bookstore while you're at it.

If you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in my review of Ellis's book The Best Lies.

About the Author

David Ellis is a judge and a #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling, Edgar Award–winning author of twelve novels of crime fiction, including Look Closer, as well as ten books coauthored with James Patterson. He has served as a justice of the Illinois Appellate Court since 2014. Ellis lives outside Chicago with his wife and three children.