By Tracy Sierra
Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 2024. 355 pages. Fiction
A footstep on the stairs. A second to react. What happens next will determine everything. Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs. She sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway, shrouded in the shadows. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender. In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt to escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is and what he wants.
This heart-pounding thriller is a page turner. Sierra immediately throws you into a life-or-death situation told through the perspective of a mother trying to save her children. I was blown away by Sierra's storytelling and she really excelled at walking you through the narrator's thought process in such dire circumstances. It was extremely relatable and incredibly frustrating at the same time. I was also thoroughly impressed with the direction the story takes at the midway point. I thought the book was about one thing and then it completely turned itself on its head. The ending is truly a work of art and a testament to Sierra's craftmanship. Overall, if you love action-packed thrillers, then Nightwatching is for you!
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By Lisa Jewell
Atria Books, 2023. 370 pages. Fiction
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix's children's school. Josie has been listening to Alix's podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life. Josie's life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can't quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix's life-and into her home. But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family's lives under mortal threat. Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
By Amy Tintera
Celadon Books, 2024. 336 pages. Fiction
What would you do if you thought you murdered your best friend? And if everyone else thinks so too? What if the truth doesn't matter? As Lucy Chase's Texas hometown begins to tell versions of what happened and who Lucy is to a nationwide, true crime obsessed audience, at the bequest of her grandmother, she returns to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend's murder, even if she is the one that did it.
BW
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