From radio hosts to housewives and heiresses, this month’s psychological thrillers will introduce you to a variety of strong and curious women. One wants to catch a killer. One wants to know the secrets around her birth and her parents’ death. One is cheating on her husband with her kids’ orthodontist, and one is rattling around Italy trying to find herself (I sometimes wish I found myself in Italy too). And one teenaged girl is stuck on an island with her mother, her teacher, and a fresh corpse. I bet she wishes she opted for Italy too.
Louise Beech, Call Me Star Girl (Orenda)
Radio personality Stella McKeever is doing her final show. The theme: secrets. Stella promises she will deliver the goods and talk about her terrible childhood and destructive relationships in return for listeners calling in and spilling their guts. But what she really wants is for a man who keeps calling the station to share what he knows about the recently murdered and pregnant Victoria Valbon, who was found in an alley three weeks prior. Beech’s tense and dark novel might have you turning on your radio at night.
Lisa Jewell, The Family Upstairs (Atria)
Jewell has a way with the quietly creepy subgenre of domestic suspense. Her books, this one included, often rely on the kind of passive spying we do on our neighbors and loved ones—the kind of spying that uncovers unsettling secrets. In this book, the heroine, Libby Jones, has reached her twenty-fifth birthday and thus learns what her long dead parents left to her: a house in London’s chichi Kensington neighborhood. But while Libby has been going about her life without incident when she becomes an heiress everything changes: she also learns of the violence in her family’s past and has no choice but to try and figure out what happened to her parents.
Liska Jacobs, The Worst Kind of Want (MCD x FSG)
Pricilla Messing, called Cilla, desperately needs to change her life. She’s been stuck taking care of her irascible mother for years. Now in her 40s, Cilla is brought to Italy to keep an eye on her teenage niece, Hannah, but she’s really in it for herself. She quickly becomes more of a party pal to Hannah than a babysitter, drinking, dancing, and generally having a fantastic time. But as she maintains her social whirl Cilla begins to unravel, and things take a turn for the dangerous when she gets into a relationship with a teenage boy.
Julie Mayhew, Impossible Causes (Bloomsbury)
Ingredients for a spooky thriller: one British island, fogged in most of the time; a mother and daughter looking for a peaceful life; a devoutly religious village full of secrets and lore; a puzzling circle of sacred stones; and four girls accused of murder. Mayhew’s book evokes the chilly atmosphere of one of Sharon Bolton’s standalones, which often take isolated locales as their settings. In brief: the mother and daughter hear a radio ad for the island, emphasizing its safety in its isolation from the modern world. After they settle there, however, a new teacher arrives, and more about the pagan and mystical aspects of the island is revealed, culminating in a murder in which the four eldest girls are accused of witchcraft.
Margot Hunt, The Last Affair (MIRA Books)
Nora Holliday is a sensible and efficient woman, running a household with two surly kids and one depressed husband. So is it really a surprise when she begins an affair with her kids’ orthodontist (who’s another parent in her social circle)? Nora’s lover, Josh Landon, has his own perfectionist wife and surly teenagers to deal with—especially his daughter, Abby, who came home from college after she caught her best friend and her boyfriend together. When Abby starts suspecting her father of having an affair, she’s determined to identify the mystery woman. But then her mother is murdered, and everything in their perfectly ordered suburban life blows up.
