The Neighbors Are Watching

 

If you love rich people behaving badly in a picture-perfect suburb, Aggie Blum Thompson is your author. The Neighbors Are Watching is set in Eastbrook, Bethesda, one of those leafy DC-area neighborhoods that looks flawless on the surface and is absolutely rotten underneath.

Caren blacks out shortly after leaving a graduation party and wakes up with a head wound near the house where a nanny was murdered a year ago. She thinks she was drugged. Her husband and the police aren't so sure. When she teams up with Finn, a new neighbor desperate to solve his best friend's murder, the two start pulling at threads that the whole neighborhood wants left alone.

This one has multiple POVs, a dual timeline, gaslighting, unreliable narrators, and characters making the worst possible decisions at every turn. It's a lot. And it works. The dual timeline was a smart structural choice; it let Thompson weave in the backstory of the original murder without it ever feeling like a detour.

The only two characters in this book NOT actively scheming or covering something up are Finn and his sassy landlord, which tells you everything you need to know. Oh, and Finn is a librarian. So he was automatically my favorite. 😄 There's also a diverse cast and solid LGBTQ+ representation woven throughout.

Narrator Alex Picard handles a large, chaotic cast with real skill. I never once lost track of who was who, which is genuinely impressive given how many people are up to no good here.

My only quibble: the big reveal of who the killer was fell a little flat for me. Not a dealbreaker, but I wanted more of a gut punch at the end.

Still, if you need a perfect pool or beach listen this summer, this is your book. It's entertaining, twisty, and I wanted to yell at Caren to run from the toxic bougie neighborhood the entire time. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

🎧 Thank you Macmillan Audio for the early listen! The Neighbors Are Watching by Aggie Blum Thompson is out June 30.

If you liked this review, you might be interested in The Dead Girls Book Club by Zia Rayyan.

About the Author

Before turning to fiction, Aggie Blum Thompson covered real-life crime as a newspaper reporter for a number of papers, including The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Aggie is a member of Mystery Writers of America. She lives with her family in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

Follow Aggie on Instagram or visit her website to keep up with news and information about her books.

Molka

 

This is all feminine rage and I’m here for it.

Molka is the Korean word for a spy camera, the kind secretly and illegally installed to record women without their knowledge. That alone tells you what kind of book you’re walking into.

Dahye is still grieving her older sister and buckling under a mother who makes her feel like she’ll never measure up. Then she falls into a fast, dizzying romance with a wealthy, charming man, and for a minute it feels like things are finally turning her way. Until a hidden camera captures one of their private moments and it ends up all over the internet.

What she doesn’t know is that an IT guy in her building has been quietly spying on women for a long time, and he’s fixed his attention on her.

When Dahye finally grasps the full scope of what’s been done to her, she stops absorbing it and starts fighting back. Hard.

I felt for her on every single page. This is a dark, disturbing, modern horror story about terrible men and the women they violate, and it does not flinch. Monika Kim writes with a blade. She refuses to look away from the daily reality so many women live with.

On audio, Rosa Escoda is fantastic. She carries Dahye from the giddiness of new love to the gut-punch of public humiliation to full-blown rage, and never drops a beat.

Not an easy listen. But a necessary one. Out now. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 

If you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack, another novel about an unhinged woamn looking for revenge.

About the Author

Monika Kim is an acclaimed, Sunday Times bestselling author of “violent, smart, gruesome and wildly original” (The New York Times Book Review) horror novels. Her debut, The Eyes Are the Best Part, was a TIME Magazine, New York Times, B&N, and Kobo Best of the Year, as well as a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist and a Bram Stoker Award nominee. A second-generation Korean American, she learned about eating fish eyes and other Korean superstitions from her mother, who immigrated to California from Seoul in 1985. She lives in Los Angeles’s Koreatown.

Follow Monika on Instagram and visit her website for more news and information.

The Last Time We Drowned

 

A thriller where the main character is a bookstagrammer? Reader, I never stood a chance.

Charlie is broke, down on her luck, and nursing a betrayal from her former best friend when she gets offered the kind of gig that sounds too good to be true: live on a luxury yacht with a handful of famous influencers, learn to grow her following, and make life changing money promoting the boat. So of course she says yes.

But the women onboard are nothing like their feeds. Everyone has secrets, Charlie included. And when she starts asking what happened to the influencer she replaced, she gets the sinking feeling the answer is something very bad. Then a hurricane rolls in, traps the whole group at sea with their billionaire boss, and the dream curdles fast. Communications get sabotaged. Supplies run low. Everyone turns paranoid. Is there a ghost haunting this boat, or a killer who wants the secrets to stay buried?

This is a fun popcorn thriller, exactly what you want for the pool or the beach. I loved having a bookstagrammer at the center of it, and the locked room (locked yacht?) setup really worked for me. The pace never dragged. Once the storm hit and the group was stuck onboard, the whole thing tightened up and got claustrophobic. I kept waiting for the hurricane to do real damage, but that was never where the threat was. The danger was already onboard.

One honest note: the title and that moody cover set you up for a heavier, sadder book than you actually get. The real pull here is the trapped-on-a-boat tension, not the melancholy the packaging promises. Go in expecting a twisty beach read and you’ll have a great time.

Stephanie Németh-Parker narrates and does a lovely job. She had several women in the same age range to voice and kept every one of them distinct, which is harder than it sounds.

A quick, satisfying listen and a solid pick if you love a locked room mystery or you’re a little nosy about what really goes on behind the influencer curtain. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you to Sourcebooks Audio for the gifted listen. The Last Time We Drowned by Saratoga Schaefer is out now.

If you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in You Are Fatally Invited, a locked room mystery by Ande Pliego.

About the Author

Saratoga Schaefer (they/them) is the USA Today Bestselling and Indie Press Bestselling author of Serial Killer Support Group, Trad Wife, The Last Time We Drowned, and A Thousand Monstrous Forms. Their books have been featured in Variety, People Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour, and their writing has appeared in Writer’s Digest, CrimeReads, and more.

For more news about Saratoga's book, visit their website and follow them on Instagram.

7 Queer Thrillers I’ve Read & Loved

 

Hot take: the best thrillers out right now are the queer ones.

Seven I’ve read and loved, from a gay 007 to literature’s original sociopath.

If you want your Pride reading with a body count, this stack is for you. Seven crime novels where the queerness isn’t a subplot, it’s the whole engine. I split them into two moods.

For when you want to laugh: The Tuxedo Society is a campy, action-packed spy caper with an elite gay secret society that’s licensed to kill. The Disaster Gay Detective Agency drops four messy twenty-somethings into a murder they’re spectacularly unqualified to solve. And The Long Con is the sapphic Miami heist you’d get if Ocean’s 8 finally admitted what it was.

For when you want something darker: Scorched Grace follows a chain-smoking, tattooed queer nun chasing an arsonist through New Orleans. The Dime puts a sharp-tongued lesbian detective up against a Dallas cartel. A Beautiful Crime traps two con men in Venice with no clean way out. And The Talented Mr. Ripley is where the whole charming queer antihero blueprint started, all the way back in 1955.

Twenty years as a librarian and I still think a good crime novel is the easiest book to put in someone’s hands. These seven make it even easier.

ps: Scorched Grace’s author, Margot Douaihy, is a Scranton native, so that one’s a hometown pick for me. always rooting for a northeastern PA writer.

Looking for more thrillers you won't be able to put down? Check out these 5 Books that Made Me Cancel Everything.

The Disaster Gay Detective Agency

 

This is what happens when a hopeless romantic refuses to take the hint.

Brandon works the night shift at a hotel and falls in love at the drop of a hat, so when a handsome guest named Jon invites him up, he ignores every warning from his friends and goes for it. They hook up, Jon promises to text, Jon ghosts. Classic. But when Jon checks out early and leaves his phone behind, Brandon sets out to return it and find his happy ending, and instead witnesses a murder, with Jon fleeing the scene.

This one is all about the characters, and that’s exactly why it works. Brandon just wants to be loved and keeps dragging everyone into trouble chasing it. Ian is so over romance that stalking their ex and keying his car has become a hobby. Nicole is a workaholic lawyer who’s put her whole life on pause until she makes partner. And Ollie is floating through grief over his dad with the help of some edibles and his dog-walking gigs, just wishing the group still had time for each other.

The full-cast narration is fantastic. Four narrators meant the alternating POV chapters each got their own distinct voice, which gave the whole thing extra pop. It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s occasionally sweet, and it never pretends to be more than a good time. If you love a found-family mess, a queer mystery with real laughs, and a thriller that comes with a side of chaotic friendship, this is your pick.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Thank you to Sourcebooks Audio for the gifted listen. The Disaster Gay Detective Agency by Lev AC Rosen is out now.

If you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in The Tuxedo Society by Paul Rudnick.

About the Author

Bestselling author Lev AC Rosen writes books for all ages, including the Evander Mills series, which began with the Macavity Award-winning Lavender House and continues with The Bell in the Fog and Rough Pages. His most recent young adult novels are Emmett, Lion’s Legacy, and Camp. Rosen’s books have been nominated for Anthony and Lambda Awards and have been selected for best-of lists from the Today show, Amazon, Library Journal, Buzzfeed, Autostraddle, Forbes, and many others. He lives in NYC with his husband and a very small cat.

For more news and information about Lev's books, visit his website and follow Lev on Instagram.

Last, Now, Next

 

From a murdered nanny to a baby penguin to center court at the US Open. My reading life has no theme and I've made peace with it.

Last, now, next is back after I let my reviewing slide for a bit. No apologies, just catching up.

LAST: The Neighbors Are Watching by Aggie Blum Thompson. A slow burn suburban thriller set in a too-perfect neighborhood outside DC. Empty nester Caren blacks out after a graduation party and becomes convinced someone drugged her. She teams up with a new neighbor who is obsessed with solving the murder everyone else wants to forget. Rich people behaving badly, manicured lawns hiding ugly things. My kind of mess.

NOW: How the Penguins Saved Veronica by Hazel Prior. My book club pick. An eighty five year old woman who is wealthy, cranky, and estranged from her family decides to fly to Antarctica to see the penguins she watched on TV, whether the scientists want her there or not. She is exactly the kind of difficult old lady I hope to become. Family, second chances, and yes, a baby penguin. I am not made of stone.

NEXT: The Open Era by Edward Schmit. My library hold finally is in. It follows the first openly gay man to compete in a Grand Slam as he handles the spotlight, an anxiety disorder, and a slow burn thing with his biggest rival, all during two weeks at the US Open. A tennis romance is nowhere near my usual lane and that is the whole point.

That is the range. Murder, penguins, tennis. Tell me your brain works any differently.

Indie Darling

 

Kelly Williams might be my favorite new PI in ages, and I'm already hoping this turns into a series.

She's a Dolly Parton-loving, sports-car-driving private investigator in Nashville who only takes cases helping women, and her own past gives her real empathy for the women who walk through her door. Her newest client is Sarah Owens, better known as Seraph, the magnetic lead singer of an indie band with a cult-like following, witchy stage presence, and cryptic lyrics fans love to decode. Someone's been stalking her, and it's escalating. Then Seraph gets shot on stage mid-concert and the ambulance carrying her vanishes.

What pulled me in was the peek behind the curtain of the music industry, where all that glitter hides a lot of grit. Seraph's orbit is full of suspects, the pace never lets up, and the twists and red herrings kept me guessing. Amara Jasper's narration is so good. She juggles a big cast and balances Kelly's go-go-go energy with her tenderness, and gives Seraph the sympathy a complicated woman deserves. The easter egg lyrics running through the story and the actual songs at the end add to the whole atmosphere and really pull you in. Stay for the author's note too. It's worth it.

Twenty years of handing books to reluctant readers taught me that the right thriller can convert almost anyone, and this is one of those. If thrillers aren't usually your thing, this one still works for the strong women at its center, the questions about staying true to yourself, and the real cost of fame. Music lovers especially, this is your book.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for the early listen. Indie Darling is out July 28. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

If you enjoyed this review, you might be interested in The Future Saints by Ashley Winstead. It's a novel centered around the music industry.

About the Author

Lauren Nossett is a former professor turned novelist with a PhD in German literature. Her debut, The Resemblance, won the ITW Thriller Award for Best First Novel. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

For more news and information about Lauren and her books visit her website or follow her on Instagram.