Book picks similar to
Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon
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Inhuman
Kat Falls - 2013
Many of the people there exhibit varying degrees of animal traits. Even the plantlife has gone feral.Crossing from west to east is supposed to be forbidden, but sometimes it’s necessary. Some enter the Savage Zone to provide humanitarian relief. Sixteen-year-old Lane’s father goes there to retrieve lost artifacts—he is a Fetch. It’s a dangerous life, but rewarding—until he’s caught.Desperate to save her father, Lane agrees to complete his latest job. That means leaving behind her life of comfort and risking life and limb—and her very DNA—in the Savage Zone. But she’s not alone. In order to complete her objective, Lane strikes a deal with handsome, roguish Rafe. In exchange for his help as a guide, Lane is supposed to sneak him back west. But though Rafe doesn’t exhibit any signs of “manimal” mutation, he’s hardly civilized . . . and he may not be trustworthy.
His Other Wife
Ava Strong - 2021
When someone turns up murdered, Stella, to clear her name, is forced to investigate. But in a culture ridden with masterful liars, can she ever really find the truth?Stella seems to have her whole life ahead of her: she has just graduated with a dual masters in Psychology and Criminal Justice, she is engaged to the man of her dreams after a whirlwind romance, and she is moving to the East Coast with him as she prepares for the wedding and searches for a dream job, hoping to be a criminal profiler. She is unbelievably excited for her life together with Chris—until she meets his family.Stella, from a humble Midwestern upbringing, never felt comfortable around money, and she hates the world Chris comes from. She is in shock at the culture clash as she gets to know his elitist family and friends, all of whom look down on her. Isolated and demeaned, Stella wonders if she can live a life in such hostile surroundings.They move into the guest house on his estate, and things only get worse. As Stella meets his ex and his friends at his club, all of whom seem to know something she doesn’t, she wonders if Chris is really the man she thought he was. As she learns more about his past and discovers his dark side, she wonders if she has made a big mistake. Beneath its trimmed hedgerows and gleaming storefronts, Stella soon realizes that this wealthy town hides terrible secrets.But before she can decide what to do, a murder leaves her blindsided.Stella, implicated, her future on the line, has no choice but to investigate. As her dreams devolves into hell, Stella, still struggling to overcome her own traumatic past, questions everything around her—including her own sanity.Can she find the killer, and clear her name, before it’s too late?A fast-paced psychological suspense thriller with unforgettable characters and heart-pounding suspense, HIS OTHER WIFE is book #1 in a riveting new series that will leave you turning pages late into the night.
Please See Us
Caitlin Mullen - 2020
Only one person even knows they’re there. Meanwhile, Clara, a young boardwalk psychic, struggles to attract clients for the tarot readings that pay her rent. When she begins to experience very real and disturbing visions, she suspects they could be related to the recent cases of women gone missing in town. When Clara meets Lily, an ex-Soho art gallery girl who is working at a desolate casino spa and reeling from a personal tragedy, she thinks Lily may be able to help her. But Lily has her own demons to face. If they can put the pieces together in time, they may save another lost girl—so long as their efforts don’t attract perilous attention first. Can they break the ill-fated cycle, or will they join the other victims?
Paradise: A Michael Quinn Short Story
Kevin Scott Olson - 2018
An unforgettable evening awaits him... if he lives through it. Past collides with present... temptations and tensions simmer... until they erupt.
The Exes' Revenge
Jo Jakeman - 2018
Phillip Rochester is controlling, abusive, and determined to make things as difficult as possible. When he shows up without warning demanding that Imogen move out of their house by the end of the month or he'll sue for sole custody of their young son, Imogen is ready to snap.In a moment of madness, Imogen does something unthinkable--something that puts her in control for the first time in years. She's desperate to protect her son and to claim authority over her own life.But she wasn't expecting both Phillip's ex-wife and new girlfriend to get tangled up in her plans. These three very different women--and unlikely allies--reluctantly team up to take revenge against a man who has wronged them all.
The Existence Of Amy
Lana Grace Riva - 2019
That is, if you were to go by a definition of 'no obvious indicators of peculiarity', and you didn't know her very well. She has good friends, a good job, a nice enough home. This normality, however, is precariously plastered on top of a different life. A life that is Amy's real life. The only one her brain will let her lead.What is it really like to live with mental illness?An insight into the reality of life with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety and depression.
The Lost Night
Andrea Bartz - 2019
Mercurial and beguiling, she was the shining star of a group of recent graduates living in a Brooklyn loft and treating the city like their playground. When Edie’s body was found near a suicide note at the end of a long, drunken night, no one could believe it. Grief, shock, and resentment scattered the group and brought the era to an abrupt end.A decade later, Lindsay has come a long way from the drug-addled world of Calhoun Lofts. She has devoted best friends, a cozy apartment, and a thriving career as a magazine’s head fact-checker. But when a chance reunion leads Lindsay to discover an unsettling video from that hazy night, she starts to wonder if Edie was actually murdered—and, worse, if she herself was involved. As she rifles through those months in 2009—combing through case files, old technology, and her fractured memories—Lindsay is forced to confront the demons of her own violent history to bring the truth to light.
The Beauty of the End
Debbie Howells - 2016
"I was fourteen when I fell in love with a goddess. . ."So begins the testimony of Noah Calaway, an ex-lawyer with a sideline in armchair criminal psychology. Now living an aimless life in an inherited cottage in the English countryside, Noah is haunted by the memory of the beguiling young woman who left him at the altar sixteen years earlier. Then one day he receives a troubling phone call. April, the woman he once loved, lies in a coma, the victim of an apparent overdose--and the lead suspect in a brutal murder. Deep in his bones, Noah believes that April is innocent. Then again, he also believed they would spend the rest of their lives together. While Noah searches for evidence that will clear April's name, a teenager named Ella begins to sift through the secrets of her own painful family history. The same age as April was when Noah first met her, Ella harbors a revelation that could be the key to solving the murder. As the two stories converge, there are shocking consequences when at last, the truth emerges. Or so everyone believes. . .Set in a borderland where the past casts its shadow on the present, with a time-shifting narrative that will mesmerize and surprise, The Beauty of the End is both a masterpiece of suspense and a powerful rumination on lost love.
The Body Institute
Carol Riggs - 2015
Thanks to cutting-edge technology, Morgan can temporarily take over another girl’s body, get her in shape, and then return to her own body—leaving her client slimmer, more toned, and feeling great. Only there are a few catches… For one, Morgan won’t remember what happens in her “Loaner” body. Once she’s done, she won’t recall walks with her new friend Matt, conversations with the super-cute Reducer she’s been text-flirting with, or the uneasy feeling she has that the director of The Body Institute is hiding something. Still, it’s all worth it in the name of science. Until the glitches start… Suddenly, residual memories from her Loaner are cropping up in Morgan’s mind. She’s feeling less like herself and more like someone else. And when protests from an anti-Body Institute organization threaten her safety, she’ll have to decide if being a Reducer is worth the cost of her body and soul…~The sequel to this book is entitled SPARES, the finale of this tale.~
Twenty Years Later
Charlie DonleaCharlie Donlea - 2021
But TWENTY YEARS LATER, to understand the present, you need to listen to the past… Avery Mason, host of American Events, knows the subjects that grab a TV audience’s attention. Her latest story—a murder mystery laced with kinky sex, tragedy, and betrayal—is guaranteed to be ratings gold. New DNA technology has allowed the New York medical examiner’s office to make its first successful identification of a 9/11 victim in years. The twist: the victim, Victoria Ford, had been accused of the gruesome murder of her married lover. In a chilling last phone call to her sister, Victori Emma Kind has waited twenty years to put her sister to rest, but closure won’t be complete until she can clear Victoria’s name. Alone she’s had no luck, but she’s convinced that Avery’s connections and fame will help. Avery, hoping to negotiate a more lucrative network contract, goes into investigative overdrive. Victoria had been having an affair with a successful novelist, found hanging from the balcony of his Catskills mansion. The rope, the bedroom, and the entire crime scene was covered in Victoria’s DNA. But the twisted puzzle of Victoria’s private life just the beginning. And what Avery doesn't realize is that there are other players in the game who are interested in Avery’s own secret past—one she has kept hidden from both the network executives and her television audience. A secret she thought was dead and buried . . . Accused of a brutal murder, Victoria Ford made a final chilling call from the North Tower on the morning of 9/11. Twenty years ago, no one listened. Today, you will.
Lola on Fire
Rio Youers - 2021
Just when he expects the cops to arrive, the phone rings. It’s Blair Mayo—the woman he bumped into—and she’s got the missing billfold.Brody will get it back, but only if he does her a favor: steal her late mother’s diamonds from her wicked stepmom. But when he gets to the house, he finds a gruesome crime scene—and a security camera. Brody knows he’s been framed.Back home, the terrified young man gets another call. The police won’t get the incriminating video footage, Blair says. Instead, her daddy, the notorious mobster Jimmy Latzo, will exact his own kind of revenge. Brody and Molly realize that they’ve become pawns in a mysterious game—one that involves a notorious enforcer named Lola Bear who brutally crossed paths with Jimmy Latzo twenty-six years before. . . a ghost from the past who is intimately connected to their lives.
Until I Find You
Rea Frey - 2020
55 steps to go up. 40 more to the crib. Since Rebecca Gray was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease, everything in her life consists of numbers. Each day her world grows a little darker and each step becomes a little more dangerous. Following days of feeling like someone’s watching her, Bec awakes at home to the cries of her son in his nursery. When it’s clear he’s not going to settle, Bec goes to check on him.She reaches in. Picks him up.But he’s not her son.And no one believes her. One woman’s desperate search for her son . . . In a world where seeing is believing, Bec must rely on her own conviction and a mother’s instinct to uncover the truth about what happened to her baby and bring him home for good.
""Completely captivating, utterly compelling?a must read!"" - Liz Fenton & Lisa Steinke, authors of The Two Lila Bennetts
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The Dreamers
Karen Thompson Walker - 2019
She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores begin to run out of supplies. A quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned. Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. Two visiting professors try to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A father succumbs to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. And at the hospital, a new life grows within a college girl, unbeknownst to her—even as she sleeps. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?
Gather the Daughters
Jennie Melamed - 2017
They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers--chosen male descendants of the original ten--are allowed to cross to the wastelands, where they scavenge for detritus among the still-smoldering fires.The daughters of these men are wives-in-training. At the first sign of puberty, they face their Summer of Fruition, a ritualistic season that drags them from adolescence to matrimony. They have children, who have children, and when they are no longer useful, they take their final draught and die. But in the summer, the younger children reign supreme. With the adults indoors and the pubescent in Fruition, the children live wildly--they fight over food and shelter, free of their fathers' hands and their mothers' despair. And it is at the end of one summer that little Caitlin Jacob sees something so horrifying, so contradictory to the laws of the island, that she must share it with the others.Born leader Janey Solomon steps up to seek the truth. At seventeen years old, Janey is so unwilling to become a woman, she is slowly starving herself to death. Trying urgently now to unravel the mysteries of the island and what lies beyond, before her own demise, she attempts to lead an uprising of the girls that may be their undoing.Gather The Daughters is a smoldering debut; dark and energetic, compulsively readable, Melamed's novel announces her as an unforgettable new voice in fiction.
Do You Follow?
J.C. Bidonde - 2022
When she secures a marketing job and apartment in New York City—much to her father’s and therapist’s concern—Alexa has high hopes of finally sneaking her way into adulthood. But her newfound freedom is cut short when her estranged twin sister Beth, after a long stint in a psychiatric setting, unexpectedly shows up at the doorstep of her tiny apartment.Alexa too has spent time at the Weinstein Center. But she's determined to lead a normal life now and soon begins to date a YouTuber client. According to Beth, something isn’t quite right with Curt, but Alexa shrugs her clingy sister’s warnings off. It’s Beth who’s crazy, after all . . . As the sister bond grows strained over Alexa’s relationship and career success, questions mount, and secrets unfold, revealing the wickedly dark shared history of the twin siblings. What exactly happened when the twins were only nine that set this vile trajectory in motion?Things get more complicated, and one treacherous act threatens everything Alexa has been working toward. It will be on her—and Beth—to claw the way out of this situation.