Laura’s Picks
Laura lives for gothic fiction. She also likes a good mystery and anything set in Victorian England, but she’s likely to pick up any novel that catches her eye. Her nightstand is usually stacked full of good things to indulge in.
Word of Mouth
Laura Kina and Jave Yoshimoto
Paperback/March 31, 2025
University of Arkansas Press
Laura’s thoughts: “This beautiful book is deep, meaningful, and important, in addition to being a fabulous Asian cuisine cookbook. It is the product of a collaboration between a group of Asian artists. Each artist has a section that features a personal story, a recipe, an illustration of that food, and an example of the artist’s work. It is a window into the Asian American experience. I found the stories incredibly moving and emotional in all the right ways . . . and I’m very eager to make Lien’s fried banana cake!”
The Weekend Retreat
Tara Laskowski
Paperback/November 29, 2023
Harlequin
Laura’s thoughts: “If you need an upbeat mystery with a ‘locked room’ feel, this is the book for you. Three siblings and their spouses converge at the family vineyard in a mansion that houses secret passageways, life-long servants, and conflicting allegiances. This Clue-game-esque story has a distinctly modern feel. I loved it!”
WINNER OF THE AGATHA AWARD
Every year, the illustrious Van Ness siblings, heirs to a copper fortune, gather at their secluded winery estate for a joint birthday celebration. It’s a tradition they’ve followed nearly all their lives, and now they are back with their significant others for a much-needed weekend of rest and relaxation, away from the public spotlight.
With lavish comforts, gorgeous scenery, and indulgent drinking, the trip should be the perfect escape. But it soon becomes clear that even a remote idyllic getaway can’t keep out the problems simmering in each of their lives. As old tensions are reignited, the three couples are pushed to the edge. Will their secrets destroy them, or will they destroy each other first? And who’s been watching them from beyond the vineyard gates?
When a torrential rainstorm hits, plunging them into darkness, the answers prove all too deadly…
Letters from the Dead
Isabella Valeri
Hardcover/May 27, 2025
Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Laura’s thoughts: “I didn’t want this epic, sweeping tale to end. I felt just as immersed in the old-world mansion full of secret rooms and a massive library as the main character must have felt, as she was rarely allowed to leave. The intrigue of elaborate parties, secret meetings, and a family vault full of art and old documents had me snuggling in to read as often as I could. I’m hoping for a second book to continue following the dynasty of this ancient family.”
This addictive debut novel takes us into an intoxicating world of old money, privilege, and family intrigue as a young heiress must return home from a decade-long exile to face the powerful enemies arrayed against her, including those within her own family.
TRUE TO LIFE FAMILY DYNASTIES: Isabella Valeri is the youngest daughter of a shady and powerful European family from whose long reach she has struggled to free herself. She has taken her most harrowing and chilling truths to inform this novel with unrelenting verisimilitude. This book takes the same kind of enthralling and mesmerizing insider look at the intrigue and dealings of wealthy family dynasties as Succession and takes it to even more chilling places. People love to see the fabulously wealthy, behaving badly, and the family in this book has all of the hideous and glamorous secrets you could ask for.
HEIRESS ON THE RUN: Due to her complicated relationship with her real life family, Valeri must keep her true identity a secret. As a fugitive heiress, Valeri for a long time felt only two things: fear and loneliness. In 2018, when the loneliness became too much, she began to blog, quickly becoming an online enigma as the conspiracy theories around her identity grew. Her blog was reported on by Wired and Esquire, among others.
Our Last Wild Days
Anna Bailey
Hardcover/May 20, 2025
Atria Books
Laura’s thoughts: “This story is just as gritty and mud-covered as the swampy small town in which it takes place. I loved the depth of the characters, particularly the alligator hunter brothers (the lowest of the low in this backwater town) and the slight, pink-haired gay boy who is no stranger to receiving a few cuts and bruises. This is a solid mystery about the death of the brothers’ tough-as-nails alligator hunting sister and a missing girl from a neighboring town.”
The Labasques aren’t like other families.
Living in a shack out in the swamps, they made do by hunting down alligators and other animals. To the good people of Jacknife, Louisiana, they are troublemakers and outcasts, the kind of people you wouldn’t want in your community.
So, when Cutter Labasque is found face down in the muddy swamp, no one seems to care, not even her two brothers. The only person who questions the official verdict of suicide is Cutter’s childhood friend, Loyal May, who has just returned home to care for her mother. When she left town at eighteen years old, she betrayed Cutter. Now with a ragtag group from the local paper where she works, Loyal goes in search of answers, uncovering a web of deceit and corruption that implicates those in town. It may be too late to apologize to Cutter, but Loyal has restitution in mind.
Weaving through the swamps and bayous of rural Louisiana, Our Last Wild Days is an atmospheric, smoldering suspense about our darker impulses—and how to set things right.
The Note
Alafair Burke
Hardcover/January 14, 2025
Knopf
Laura’s thoughts: “Every once in a while, I need a good fast-paced mystery that keeps me guessing. This was light and quick, with lots of juicy secrets and a great cast of characters to shift my suspicions all the way up to the last pages.”
“I absolutely loved The Note. Trust no one in this irresistible page-turner.” —Ashley Elston, #1 New York Times best-selling author of First Lie Wins
It was meant to be a harmless prank.
Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. Well-behaved, top of her class, a compulsive rule-follower. Raised by a first-generation Chinese single mother with high expectations, May didn’t have room to slip up, let alone fail. Her friends didn’t call her the Little Sheriff for nothing.
But even good girls have secrets. And regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she’s had her fair share of both. Their bond—forged when May was just twelve years old—has withstood a tragic accident, individual scandals, heartbreak and loss. Now the three friends have reunited for the first time in years for a few days of sun and fun in the Hamptons. But a chance encounter with a pair of strangers leads to a drunken prank that goes horribly awry.
When she finds herself at the center of an urgent police investigation, May begins to wonder whether Lauren and Kelsey are keeping secrets from her, testing the limits of her loyalty to lifelong friends.
What had they gone and done?
The Note is a page-turner of the highest order from one of our greatest contemporary suspense writers.
Hum
Helen Phillips
Hardcover/August 6, 2024
S&s/ Marysue Rucci Books
Laura’s thoughts: “Hum drew me in with its seemingly absurd, but on second-thought, completely believable AI infused reality. It’s main character is a mother who struggles with the seductive pull of technology, the horror of its effect on her children, and the social consequences of tossing it aside. This book has stuck with me for several months since reading it. It would be great book club pick, ripe with material for interesting conversation.”
In a near-future world addled by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. Desperate to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.
Seeking reprieve from her recent hardships and her family’s addiction to their devices, May splurges on passes for her family to spend three nights respite in the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals still thrive. But when her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives to save her family.
Written with “precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Hum is a “striking new work of dystopian fiction” (Vogue) that delves into the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
James McBride
Hardcover /August 8, 2023
Riverhead Books
Laura’s thoughts: “This is one of those stories that comes together so perfectly that you say “ahhh” out loud and maybe even cry a little. It is a “feel deeply to appreciate humanity” masterpiece.”
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood’s quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town’s first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill’s residents—roused by Chona’s kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.
Midnight Rooms
Donyae Coles
Hardcover /July 2, 2024
Amistad
Laura’s Thoughts: “This book grabs you by the wrist and pulls you along in the most delicious fever dream of a story. Orabella navigates her newly married life in a strange, rambling mansion where the forest has begun to take over her home, her family, and her reality. I needed to keep reading to understand what was happening to her and was rewarded at the very end with a most satisfying realization and an appreciation for the weaver of this story.”
England, 1840. Orabella Mumthrope spies an unexpected visitor in her uncle’s parlor. Scruffy in appearance yet claiming to be the scion of a fabulously wealthy family, Elias Blakersby declares a deep desire to make Orabella his wife. The orphaned daughter of a white man and a Black woman—an outsider with no fortune or connections—Orabella never expected to marry. But her uncle has many debts, and Orabella, curious about the seeming devotion Elias bestows upon her, agrees.
The new bride is quickly whisked away to Korringhill Manor, the Blakersby family estate, and far from everything she knows. Expecting splendor, Orabella is shocked to find decay, skittish servants, and curt elders. But her kind new husband’s loving touch, promises of a happy life together, and his assurances she’ll never want for anything soothe her concerns.
Yet there is a darkness deep within this house. Rooms are locked or hidden away, and the walls seem to thrum with secrets. Orabella can never venture outside unattended; she spends her days having tea with a catatonic sister-in-law and evenings at Elias’s side, dutifully hosting lavish dinners. The darkness soon begins to engulf her, too. Becoming dizzy and drowsy after dinner, she falls into a fitful sleep filled with macabre dreams, and is awakened by blood-curdling screams in the night. In the morning she rises from her bed covered in mysterious bruises. Confused and terrified, she begins to question where her dreams end and reality begins. The longer Orabella stays in this place, the more she loses parts of herself . . . how long until she no longer exists?
Midnight Rooms is a sweeping saga with supernatural undertones set in Victorian England. Vibrating with tension, richly atmospheric—haunted by ghosts, guilt, and familial bonds—it is an electrifying story that will linger in your dreams.