Killer Vibes

 

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I think I found my favorite new detective of the year, and he’s a broke, bisexual stoner who trips into the case completely by accident.

Meet Peter Key. When we first find him, he’s a charming, aimless weed dealer living about an hour away from being either homeless or dead. Then a lawyer tells him he’s inherited a big rundown house in one of Austin’s swankiest neighborhoods from an uncle he barely knew. Good news, right? Except the uncle borrowed half a million dollars right before he died, the money’s vanished, and now the debt lands squarely on Peter. 

Everyone from the lawyer to a very intense real estate broker next door wants him to sell, pay up, and disappear. But Peter wants to keep the house. His only shot is finding the missing money before someone else does, and before he becomes the next body.

This one is a total romp and I loved every second, especially Peter’s laid-back charm, the quirky supporting cast, and the twisty hunt for the cash. It went places I never saw coming and stayed fun the whole way through. John Fram, writing here as Jack Friday, keeps the plot moving and the Keep Austin Weird energy cranked all the way up. On audio, narrator Max Meyers is fantastic. He runs the full range of Peter’s emotions and gives every character in the cast their own distinct voice.

If you like your mysteries offbeat, with great lgbtq+ representation and enough twists to keep any armchair detective guessing, bump this to the top of your summer list. It’s already one of my favorite reads of the year, and I’m thrilled it’s the first in a planned series. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for the gifted early listen. Killer Vibes is out July 14.

One more thing: come hang out with us live. I’m interviewing Jack Friday himself this Thursday, July 9 at 4pm EST / 3pm CST. Join us!

Killer Vibes is out now — grab a copy on Bookshop.org and support an indie store while you're at it.

Jack Friday is a new pen name for horror writer John Fram. Check out my review of his previous book The Midnight Knock.

About the Author

Jack Friday is the pen name of John Fram, the author of several queer supernatural thrillers such as The Bright Lands and The Midnight Knock. He lives in Austin. Follow John on Instagram and visit his website for more news and information about hsi books.

The Neighbors Are Watching

 

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

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.

7 Queer Thrillers I’ve Read & Loved

 

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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.

Any of these books sound good to you? Grab copies from Bookshop.org and help an indie store while you're at it.

The Tuxedo Society

The Disaster Gay Detective Agency

The Long Con

Scorched Grace

The Dime

A Beautiful Crime

The Talented Mr. Ripley

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

 

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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. Grab a copy on Bookshop.org and hekp an indie store while you're at it.

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.

Give Me Everything You've Got

 

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Every book has its reader. This one's reader just isn't me, and I want to tell you why.

Back in the 1930s, a librarian named S.R. Ranganathan wrote a set of guiding principles for library science. Two of them have stuck with me for 20 years: every reader their book, and every book its reader. The idea is simple. Every person can find books they love, and every book will find the people who love it.

That's my roundabout way of telling you I'm not the reader for Give Me Everything You've Got. And that's genuinely fine.

The premise: Ruby is a young filmmaker just starting to taste success when she's invited to spend the summer at the country house of Ellen, the feminist director she idolizes and who's promised to mentor her. The retreat sours fast. Ruby gets pulled into the mind games between Ellen and her magnetic daughter Lara, and the house itself starts to feel haunted by the sense that she isn't the first promising young woman brought there.

On paper that's gothic Rebecca territory, and I wanted to love it. I just didn't feel it. The characters stayed vague and hard to root for, the pace crawled, and the whole thing is written in long unbroken blocks with no quotation marks around the dialogue. If the goal was to read like one long stream of consciousness, the writing pulls it off. I found it tough to follow.

But not connecting with a book isn't the same as a book being bad. The prose is doing something deliberate, and there are readers who will fall hard for exactly that. If you love literary fiction that asks you to sink into a mood instead of a plot, this could be your summer obsession.

Thank you to Henry Holt for the gifted copy. Give Me Everything You've Got is out July 21. Grab a copy from Bookshop.org and help an indie store while you're at it.

If you enjoy literary fiction, James Grady's coming of age novel American Sky might interest you.

About the Author

Imogen Crimp’s debut novel A Very Nice Girl was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize, selected for Malala Yousafzai’s Fearless Book Club and chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times and Grazia. She lives in London.

Little Wild

 

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Literary fiction, but make it gothic, witchy, and gay.

I don't read literary fiction often, but Laura Evans’ debut Little Wild pulled me in anyway. The setting is 1937 Suffolk, England during a historic heat wave that won't break. There's a crumbling estate called Snare House, owned by the Winther family. Margaret lives with the family, but she's not part of the family. She narrates the whole story. She's sharp, watchful, and funny.  And she's hopelessly in love and obsessed with her best friend Joanie, even though she knows every one of Joanie's careless rich-girl flaws (big Daisy Buchanan energy).

Margaret has survived a lot. Her mother died young. Her father came back from the war hollowed out and neglectful. She was raised at the edge of the Winther family's world just enough to taste a life that was never really hers. She and Joanie make a plan to run off to London together as lovers. Then they're discovered, and everything breaks. Margaret is banished to a falling-down cabin in the woods with her father, grieving and alone. There in the woods, something old and strange starts waking up in her - a power that might have come from her mother.

What kept me turning pages was that I was never sure how much to trust Margaret. Was this grief and isolation bending her mind, or was she actually tapping into something real? She has this ethereal quality, and apparently her mother did too, and Evans never tidily answers it. 

The story touches on  love, friendship, grief, poverty, mental illness, and society's expectations and rolls of women. The writing is gorgeous without ever trying too hard. It’s immersive and  atmospheric, just flat-out good. 

I went back and forth between the ARC and the audiobook. Tamaryn Payne's narration is wonderful. She nails every character's tone and pours all of Margaret's longing straight into your ears.

If you love historical fiction, queer love stories, magical realism, gothic vibes, or a family drama, this blends all of it and somehow makes it sing. I could not stop rooting for Margaret.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for the gifted listen and Henry Holt for the gifted ARC. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Out June 23. Grab a copy on Bookshop.org and help an indie store while you're at it.

Different genre, same wound: both Little Wild and The Three Lives of Cate Kay are about how the great love of your youth reshapes who you turn into when it falls apart.

About the Author

Laura Evans was born in the north of England and grew up in the Midlands. She studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge before coming in a roundabout way to journalism, where she became a magazine editor specializing in travel and nature. A lifelong city dweller who romanticizes the countryside, she spent several years in both London and Bristol before making her way to the medieval city of Norwich, where she lives with her family.

Visit Laura's website to keep up with news about Laura and her work. Follow Laura on Instagram.

The Tuxedo Society

 

Be gay. Do espionage. Save the world.

A down-on-his-luck actor thinks he’s going to a fancy dinner. He’s actually being recruited into America’s most fabulous covert operation.

The Tuxedo Society by Paul Rudnick is the most fun I’ve had with an audiobook in a long time, and I need everyone to know about it.

Andrew, a struggling actor and candle shop employee, is invited by his best friend Brock to what he assumes is just a really nice dinner with a group of very gay, very stylish guys. What it actually is? An introduction to the Tuxedo Society: a secret government intelligence network made up entirely of LGBTQ+ members. Licensed to kill. Impeccably dressed.

From the White House to the Vatican to the Summer Olympic Games, Andrew ends up tackling spies, thwarting assassinations, and facing off against oligarchs, crooked senators, and a smarmy televangelist with sinister plans for world domination.  Oh, and at one point he has to pose as a US Olympic diver and actually dive in competition. It’s exactly as chaotic and hilarious as it sounds.

This book is completely over the top, and it knows it. That’s the whole point. The characters are all wildly likable: Andrew, Brock, Reggie the Navy SEAL with a black-tie obsession, and a First Lady who also happens to be a world-leading archaeologist. The pace never lets up. The wit is sharp. The social commentary sneaks up on you in the middle of all the absurdity.

Narrator Daniel Henning is pitch-perfect. There are a lot of characters to track and I never lost a single one. That’s not easy to pull off.

If you’ve been looking for a summer read that’s pure, unapologetic fun, this is it. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thank you to Simon Audio for the gifted early listen. The Tuxedo Society is out today!

For more laughs with an LGBTQ+ lead, check out my review of I Might Be in Trouble.

About the Author

Paul Rudnick is the author of What Is Wrong With You? and Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style. His plays have been produced on and off Broadway and include Jeffrey, I Hate Hamlet, Regrets Only, and The New Century. He is the author of eight books, and he’s a frequent contributor to The New Yorker; his writing has also appeared in Vogue, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and more. His screenplays include Addams Family Values, Coastal Elites, In & Out, Sister Act, and the film adaptation of Jeffrey. Find more information about Paul and his work at his website.

The Long Con

 

Two rival con artists.

One Miami heist.

Ocean's 8, but make it sapphic. Chloe Bly has been quietly stealing from Miami's rich and careless to pay off her late mother's medical debt by using her hotel catering job as cover. It's a solid system until she gets caught. And the person who catches her? Her longtime rival, Harper Parisi.

But instead of turning Chloe in, the hotel owner coerces both women into teaming up to pull off a much bigger job. What follows is a slow-burn heist with a Miami backdrop, sharp writing, and enemies-to-lovers tension that absolutely simmers.

This is Jenna Voris's adult debut, and it shows real range. The rivalry between Chloe and Harper crackles. You know they hate each other, but you also know something else is going on underneath all of it. The supporting characters, Priya and Logan, round things out nicely and give the story some breathing room from all that charged energy between the leads. The Miami setting is a great fit for the story's vibe.

This one is a slow burn. If you want nonstop action from page one, you might feel the setup phase dragging a little. But once it gets going, it delivers.

If you love a good heist, strong female characters, sapphic romance, and the general vibe of "be gay, do crime" then this one's for you. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 

Thank you to Dial Press Trade Paperback and NetGalley for the digital ARC. Out June 2.

If you enjoyed this review, you might like Count My Lies.

About the Author

Jenna Voris writes books about ambitious girls and galaxy-traversing adventures. She was born and raised in Indiana—where she learned to love roundabouts and the art of college basketball—and now calls Washington, DC, home. When she’s not writing, she can be found perfecting her road trip playlists and desperately trying to keep her houseplants alive. She is also the author of Made of Stars and Every Time You Hear That Song. 

For news and information about Jenna and her books, visit her website.