When Micah Wilkes was in high school, her boyfriend Alex was accused of murdering her best friend Emily by pushing her out a window. After his conviction, Micah did her best to move past the grief and confusion. She eventually opened her own coffee shop, moved in with her new boyfriend, and settled into a stable life in her small Pennsylvania town.

But ten years later, a series of strange events brings Emily’s murder to the forefront of Micah’s mind, along with questions as to whether Alex may have been wrongfully convicted. Someone is leaving cryptic notes and photos for Micah to find; and at the same time, she becomes aware of a group of true-crime enthusiasts called the Truthseekers who have taken a renewed interest in the case and exchange theories online. Are the notes connected to their website? Is one of the Truthseekers trying to pump information from Micah?

She has always believed in Alex’s guilt, but now Micah starts to wonder if she missed something the night Emily died. Unable to bear the uncertainty, Micah begins her own search for the truth, hoping to put Emily’s murder to rest once and for all. But as Micah investigates, she has a rough time dealing with the emotional and mental toll that digging through the past takes on her; and as she becomes more closed off and erratic, the life she’s built starts to fall apart.

Catch Her When She Falls is a riveting mystery debut that makes readers question everything they know about the characters and consider several different theories about what could have happened to Emily. There are plenty of suspects, including Emily’s misfit younger brother Joshua, Alex’s new girlfriend Julia (who regularly visits him in prison), as well as Emily’s former dance teacher Mr. Lionel.

Author Allison Buccola artfully describes the dynamics of a small town and how a murder affects it. She also sheds light on the rampant gossip and malicious rumors that percolate in online communities. There is a strong undercurrent of suspense as Micah gets closer to finding out the truth and readers will be sympathetic to her as she risks her happiness to ensure justice has been done. All in all, Catch Her When She Falls is an intriguing story about crime, punishment, and how a murder case changes countless lives forever—no matter what the verdict turns out to be.

The latest standalone by Gilly Macmillan, The Long Weekend, isn’t your standard closed circle mystery. Instead of being on a faraway island, a train, or high on a mountain top, Macmillan’s characters find themselves in a remote barn in the middle of nowhere. And because things never go right in stories like these, the start of the weekend begins with three women driving up to their annual couples getaway together without their husbands, who can’t make it immediately.

Straight-laced Jayne and flighty Ruth have been friends a long time, but feisty new bride Emily is an outsider and making little effort to change that. They’re also feeling the absence of their friend Rob, who recently passed away, and his wife Edie, who couldn’t bear to join their annual holiday without him. The evening promises to be an awkward one. Naturally, it goes from bad to worse.

Waiting for them on the table is a package with a carefully written note. In it, the not-so- mysterious E tells them that she’s leaving to start a new life—and that she killed one of their husbands before she left. The wives, now deep into the countryside, have no cell service, no internet, no easy way back to their host’s farmhouse and, oh, by the way, a violent storm is rolling in. Jayne and Ruth know Edie to be a trickster and a lover of all things dramatic. So did she write this note just to ruin their holiday without her, or is someone really dead? As the wives stay in limbo, the narrative quickly makes it clear through the killer’s perspective that someone has, indeed, been murdered.

Macmillian’s dark homage to the 1949 Joseph Mankiewicz film A Letter to Three Wives kicks off with a bang and just keeps the twists coming. Set mainly over the course of three days, the breakneck pace only slows down long enough to inspect each of the wives insecurities in turn and reveal how fragile their relationships really are. These are flawed, very human women who immediately commence arguing, breaking down, and getting nearly nothing done. On top of everything, their host, John Elliott, is suffering from delusions and may be dangerous as he wanders around in the dark. In probably the most nail-biting portion of the plot, Rob and Edie’s daughter Imogen also finds herself hitched to the murder train whether she likes it or not.

Macmillan is a veteran of tales where the past comes back to haunt characters in full force, and The Long Weekend is no exception. If there is any fault in the tightly plotted story, it’s that more attention isn’t given to the husbands and their childhood friendships that started it all. The men spend very little time on the page, and what we learn of them comes secondhand—portraits tinted by the lies they’ve told and the emotions at the forefront of their marriages. It seems strange to leave these ties behind in the shadows, strong as the wives are as characters. Regardless, this is a solid entry into Macmillian’s blibliography, and it will keep reader’s guessing until the very end.

Janice Hallett’s unusual and compelling debut brings a modern twist to the novel in letters. Knowing only that one person is dead and another may be wrongfully incarcerated, Femi and Charlotte, junior associates at a law firm, are tasked with reviewing a mountain of evidence for an unnamed client’s appeal. Since the senior partner wants a fresh, unbiased analysis, they’re given no context or background. The two plunge into reading a huge volume of emails and texts sent among more than a dozen people between late March and mid-July 2018, along with a smattering of news clippings and other documents. The novel is constructed entirely through these written materials, providing shifting points of view with no independent narrator.

The multilayered story centers on the Fairway Players, a long-running amateur theater group run by Martin and Helen Hayward, pillars of the community and owners of The Grange, a country club in the English town of Lockwood. Helen, the family matriarch, is the star of every show; Martin produces and directs; their adult children, James and Paige, are also key members of the troupe.

The Players are just beginning a new production, and their stagestruck newest member, Isabel Beck, enthusiastically recruits her fellow nurses Sam and Kel to audition. The couple has recently returned from eight years volunteering for Doctors Without Borders in the Central African Republic and are eager to get to know their new neighbors.

Just as the production gets underway, Martin Hayward makes a shocking announcement: his two-year-old granddaughter Poppy has been diagnosed with a rare brain cancer. He turns directing responsibilities over to James, while Helen inexplicably carries on in her leading role. The Haywards are desperate for Poppy to get an experimental new drug treatment from the United States, but its cost is astronomical. Stunned by the news of Poppy’s illness, the entire community rallies to help raise the funds and ensure that the show will go on—no matter what. But not everything (or everyone) is what it seems, many of the key players have hidden agendas, and the production ends disastrously.

Hallett brilliantly draws lifelike characters and the complicated relationships among them using only their own words—at times just a few brief lines. Instead of offering a known crime and a detective who solves it, the novel’s unconventional format makes the reader the detective along with Femi and Charlotte. The mystery isn’t just whodunit—it’s what did they do, to whom, and why? The Appeal is a highly original tour de force that’s almost impossible to put down.

Kit Mayquist’s debut novel Tripping Arcadia centers around a notorious family with incredible wealth. Famous for their debauched lifestyle and condemned for the way their company absorbs others and puts employees out of work, the Verdeaus are hardly wallflowers. But when our sheltered heroine Lena steps into their world, she has somehow never heard of them.

Lena, a med school dropout with an ailing unemployed father, leaves her personal utopia (studying plants with her aunt in Italy) when her family needs her to get a paying job to help stay afloat. At first, gaining a position as a physician’s assistant for the Verdeaus seems like a dream come true. Lena isn’t qualified, and it pays incredibly well. All she has to do is spend a few hours a day helping care for the moody and perpetually ill Jonathan Verdeau. The heir to his father Martin’s empire, Jonathan feels confined by his family and the unwanted media spotlight they attract. Though he’s the younger sibling, the fact that he is male has caused him to be elevated over sister Audrey.

But on paper, Audrey seems the perfect choice to be heir. She is a practicing lawyer, healthy, and older than her brother, and actually interested in the company. Audrey outpaces Jonathan in a lot of ways. Lena is taken with her at once, but it is clear to the reader, if not to Lena, that beneath Audrey’s gorgeous face lie a lot of secrets. In this modern gothic, Audrey is the classic handsome heir leading the governess into temptation—and Lena is panting at her heels.

Lena is knocked out of her reverie the moment she is invited to work one of the family’s famous parties. The opulent drug and alcohol fueled affairs are designed to stroke Martin’s ego by making others feel low. When she hears that her father was one of the employees displaced by the Verdeaus’ company, and that he too was shamed at these parties like so many before him, she gets angry. She plans immediately to poison Martin using her skills in botany—though not to kill him, merely bring him low too. It’s hardly a surprise when things get out of hand.

Poison is a theme throughout the novel. It’s literal in the form of Lena’s mixtures and in the substances the wealthy consume to prove they’re alive. It’s metaphorical in the toxic way the Verdeaus treat one another in the dark world of wealth that starts to taint Lena herself. Pulled away from friends and family, and drawn further and further into the shadows she hates, it isn’t long before the Verdeaus are her whole world.

Masterfully written in classic gothic style, this book is a slow burn that relies on a claustrophobic atmosphere and a tight, well-developed cast. As such, the supporting characters fall by the wayside. Lena’s former friends are barely characters, her family are plot devices, and even the favored Aunt Claire plays little part of the plot. The Verdeau siblings are the stars from the start—outshining mousey Lena—and their venomous allure deserves center stage. As Lena throughout makes it clear that she is looking back on events, the reader never worries that she won’t survive them. The question that keeps the pages turning is, instead, what state we will find Lena in at the tale’s conclusion.

While driving home after their daughter’s high school nighttime lacrosse game, the unthinkable happens to a suburban Philadelphia family. A tailgating pickup runs their car off a deserted road and two men with guns emerge from the truck. What follows will forever alter the lives of the Bennetts, whose ensuing journey is both gripping and heartwrenching.

From the prolific author Lisa Scottoline, What Happened to the Bennetts is a compelling and cleverly layered psychological thriller that explores themes of family, love, loss, and the limits of justice.

Delivered in the voice of father-husband Jason Bennett, the story traces events that unfold following the seemingly random carjacking-gone-deadly. Two lives are lost. One is teenage Allison, whose last word to Jason is, ‘Daddy?’ The other is one of the carjackers.

The Bennetts are still deep in grief—they haven’t even notified family and friends or started making plans for a funeral—when they’re visited by the FBI. Informed that their own lives are now at risk because of the dead carjacker’s ties to a dangerous drug-trafficking network, Jason, his wife Lucinda, their withdrawn preteen son Ethan, and the family pooch, Moonie, are whisked into hiding.

They’re taken to a safe house in the Delaware hinterlands and urged to consider joining the United States Federal Witness Protection Program.

Unable to reach out to loved ones, including Lucinda’s ailing mother, the family huddles together as their disappearance and a mysterious fire that burns their house to the ground is reported on the news. Well-intentioned neighbors are voicing their concerns over the missing Bennetts to the media. A “citizen detective” blogger gets involved in the hunt for the family. Meantime, Jason, a court reporter, begins to question some of the FBI’s claims and to do some investigating of his own.

Known for her myriad bestsellers and awards (including two Edgars), Scottoline provides a deft mix of domesticity, drama, and startling twists. Oblique references will come to resonate. But this is more than an exercise in suspense and surprises. It’s also about characters we can really get behind. We’re rooting for the shattered Bennett family to piece together what they have left and to carry on. This book has a strong “what if” factor—as in, what if the same thing happened to any of us? We all like to believe that we would be like the Bennetts, people who would fight for the truth, even amid tragedy.

It’s a few days before Thanksgiving and Joe and Marybeth Pickett are awaiting the arrival of their three daughters for the holiday. But both soon have more than a turkey dinner to deal with.

Joe is called out to check on a report of moose poaching, but his investigation takes a much darker turn when the body isn’t that of an animal, but rather the tortured and burned body of a local fishing guide. Meanwhile, Marybeth finds a mysterious package left on the doorsteps of the library where she works as the director. When she opens it, she is confronted with a horrific photo album dating back to Nazi Germany. Who left the album and why?

As Marybeth and Joe pursue answers to their individual quests, it quickly becomes apparent that the body and the album are tied together. When another murder victim is discovered, the Picketts are left to wonder what is so important about the album that someone will stop at nothing to get their hands on it—and how do they protect their family from being harmed?

Box also continues a plot introduced in last year’s Dark Sky involving his other series lead, falconer Nate Romanowski, whose birds were stolen and his wife attacked. In Shadows Reel Nate is hunting the man responsible through a number of states to get his birds back and exact revenge.

C.J. Box introduces new character Geronimo Jones, a fellow falconer whose assistance Nate picks up along the way. The duo discover there’s far more to the thief’s plan than simply selling stolen birds and together they face down a killer with a skill set equal to Nate’s. I thought Geronimo Jones made for a great addition to the story and I hope to see more of him in the future.

The narrative pacing to Shadows Reel felt quite different to me than the previous two books in the series (Dark Sky and Long Range). While those books were adrenaline-fueled chase and survival tales, things moved a little slower here, but in a good way. There’s plenty of dramatic suspense and action, but Box lets things simmer and develop a bit longer than usual, giving readers a chance to breathe before sucking them back into confrontations that leave the Picketts and Nate in harm’s way once more.

And while I won’t spoil it here, there’s a growing but subtly written development in Shadows Reel. It could make for challenging times for the Picketts ahead. Shadows Reel is another superbly crafted tale.

Two brutal sets of murders, occurring 15 years apart in the same New Jersey town have striking similarities. Is there a link between the Blockbuster Video killings of New Year’s Eve 1999 and what happened at the Dairy Creamery ice cream shop in 2015? Could it be a coincidence that the killer whispered “Good night, pretty girl,” to the sole survivor of both massacres? Is the suspect in the Blockbuster case, who’s long been MIA, resurfaced?

The Night Shift explores both cases and their interconnecting threads through multiple narratives.

Ella, the only survivor of the first killings, is now a therapist, but her life is messier than most of her clients. These include Jesse, the hardened teenage survivor of the ice cream shop killings. Then there’s Chris Ford—a public defender who uses the last name of his adoptive family, so that no one knows he’s related to the long-missing Blockbuster suspect. Finally, there’s FBI Special Agent Sarah Keller, happily married and eight months pregnant with twins. She used to work with local law enforcement, who have recently brought her back to town.

Author Alex Finlay, a pseudonym for a Washington, D.C., lawyer, garnered attention with his 2021 debut thriller, Every Last Fear. This latest standalone should please his growing fan base, though there may be disappointment that he didn’t flesh out a relationship that is referenced in the epilogue. And it’s sometimes tough to sort through the supporting players related to the two crimes. What Finlay does do, effectively, is to underscore the high price that comes with surviving a crime. You don’t have to wind up dead to be a victim.

Shay Lambert lands a well-paying job as a lawyer for a fashion company and with it the chance to start anew after struggling for years with joblessness, poverty, debts, and an increasingly strained marriage with her husband, David.

But only one month into her employment, an unexpected tragedy occurs. Shay gets on the elevator at her office building with Lucy Barton-Jones, the company’s human resources director, but by the time it reaches the ground floor, Lucy is dead, killed by a single gunshot.

Shay becomes the prime suspect as the police struggle to determine whether Lucy’s death was a suicide or a murder. As Shay copes with her own trauma and the investigation continues, readers are gradually given reason to think that Shay may not be telling the police all she knows…and that her company might be hiding secrets of their own. But what are these secrets, and are they worth dying—or killing—for?

The Cage is an intriguing office thriller that provides a glimpse into the corporate world with all its flaws and competitiveness, examined here through the accelerant of a mysterious death. Some of the plot can be confusing for readers who don’t know much about the legal system or how corporations work, but Shay is a compelling protagonist who perseveres through many challenges (a direct contrast to her husband, who seeks solace in alcohol and drugs) as she tries to protect her career, reputation, and even her life.

In the end, the truth of Lucy’s death, which is not revealed until the final pages, will be difficult for readers to guess, since the evidence seems to support many theories and makes good use of red herrings. Bonnie Kistler’s The Cage is a gripping read about integrity, power, accountability, and resiliency.