If there is one truth in this life, it’s this: in Texas, it’s hot as hell in the summer. Scorching, unrelenting, and punishing, summertime calls for icy swimming holes, cold beer, and most of all, scorching thrillers.
Lowdown Road by Scott Von Doviak
“Pursuit doesn’t get any hotter” is the tagline for Doviak’s latest, masterful white-knuckle suspense, a Dukes of Hazard-esque thrill ride set in the summer of 1974 in which two cousins form a plan to drive a taco truck full of marijuana, stolen, nonetheless, across state lines to where Evil Knievel aims to jump over the Snake River on his motorcycle. The NYTimes recently raved, “with its’ hapless good ol’ boy antiheroes clad in aviator sunglasses, crotch-hugging Levis and Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts clearly takes inspiration from the (Dukes of Hazard) series.”
Girls and Their Horses by Eliza Jane Brazier
Set over the course of a summer in a posh, Southern California enclave that revolves around the ruthless, competitive world of show jumping, Girls and Their Horses is like Big Little Lies meets Dallas. Juicy, soapy, and simmering with suspenseful, Girls and Their Horses is a razor sharp examination of mean girls, misfits, overbearing mothers, and toxic wealth.
More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez
“The dance becomes an affair, which becomes a marriage, which becomes a murder,” is the official tag line of this spellbinding, scorching suspense which follows Lore Rivera who, in 1985, leads a double life both in Mexico City and also in Laredo, Texas, marrying two different men, one of whom eventually goes to jail for murdering the other. Or did he? That’s what Cassie Bowman, a true-crime obsessed writer who stumbles across Lore’s story sets to find out in this twisty novel full of secrets, betrayal, infidelity, and lies.
Stone Cold Fox by Rachel Koller Croft
A devious, cat and mouse thriller about an “enterprising woman” named Bea, who, after a lifetime of being groomed to be a con artist by her mother, longs to finally escape that life by marrying into the arms of the filthy rich suitor, Collin Case. But she comes against his blue-blooded bestie, Gale, who will stop at nothing to keep Bea away. Hailed by Good Morning America as a “…delicious, twisty tale of deception and daughterhood will have everyone holding onto their wallets.”
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