PLEASE ENJOY YOUR STAY, ghastly truths emerge about a family tragedy

PLEASE ENJOY YOUR STAY
TARA GOEDJEN
Atria/Emily Bestler Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, treorder now for delivery on 13 October 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After a true crime podcast reopens her cousin’s murder case, a woman must confront her past at a glamorous European castle-turned-hotel where she follows a trail of toxic family secrets and deadly lies.

When they were teenagers, Mia’s beloved cousin was murdered during their stay at an infamous castle in the Austrian Alps. As the only witness, Mia’s testimony put the killer behind bars, but it tore her life apart: the media accused her aunt, a controversial true crime author, of being involved. Now, a decade later, the murderer is appealing his conviction, and a popular true crime podcast starts covering the case, determined to exonerate him, and resurfacing lies about Mia’s family in the process.

Desperate to protect her aunt—and what she knows to be the truth—Mia returns to Austria. The castle is being revamped as a luxury hotel, and Mia gets a job as a nanny for the new owner, hiding in plain sight as she investigates, needing to set the story straight once and for all. But after someone mysteriously disappears on the property and sinister new evidence emerges regarding her cousin’s death, she realizes she might have accused the wrong man...and put her own life in danger.

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My Review: It disconcerts me when I read a debut novel this expertly crafted. I expect untacked hems, unblocked waists and armholes, some lumpy seams...none of that here. Comes the dawn...she's been busy the past ten years tending the story vines in the YA vineyard.

So why move to the adult side? I thought maybe some smexy content...not by my adult lights, but maybe for teens it would be? Nope, this isn't a bonkbuster. It's maybe a little deeper on the fragility of Mia's confidence in herself and in her judgment and memory than is good for YA stories, but that's a problem I have with YA stories aimed at girls a lot of the time. The gothic elements...crazy mother, brooding heroes with dark secrets who tell lies for genuinely good reasons, eville greedy men who want the heroine to fail...aren't too disturbing for any goth teen I've ever met.

Well, here we are. This solidly crafted mystery is a pleasure to read, the setting is so well evoked I put on my cardigan against the chills, as Mia's memories of the deeply traumatizing murder she witnessed are attacked and undermined I was frothingly furious with the liars abusing her for their own gain.

There's that half-star gone. In a truly effective gothic novel I expect to feel doubt about the heroine's perceptions. I expect I'll have to wonder id the lies aren't more evenly distributed. Never, not once, did I think so much as "...matbe she misremembered...?" Mia was victimized, and I truly got angry about it.

Author Tara doesn't deliver by-the-numbers gothic storytelling. She keeps the story moving, bending around some pretty sharp corners. Never once did she cheat on the ghostly horror front, by which I mean it was all revealed as regular ol' skulduggery seen from a particular, carefully engineered angle.

What provided the horror for this out-of-step old man was the true-crime podcasting angle, the way the search for Truth is weaponized and twisted and manipulated. Humans scare me far far more than "ghosts" or the "paranormal" ever could. Humans harm and kill each other for fun and profit...and that horrifies me more than spooky set-dressing ever could.

Uneasy reading for spooky season your jam? This story will deliver, though not for the usual reasons (IMO). Need a heroine to root for? Here she is. Need an ending you can close the book, smile, and say to yourself "okay, that's good"? I got that here almost in spite of Mia having less faith in herself than I had in her...that christawful true-crime podcast...and think most of y'all would too.

LUNA, PHOENIX, QUEEN, the progression will make sense in hindsight

LUNA, PHOENIX, QUEEN
JULIE ORRINGER
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 13 December 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A spellbinding tour de force from the bestselling author of The Invisible Bridge—a novel about varieties of infidelity, the provenance of a literary masterpiece, and the power of storytelling to shape identity and destiny.

Dava and Barr Pennington, professors at a Midwestern university, both harbor potent secrets. Fiction writing is his specialty, English literature is hers. But Dava is unhappy in their marriage, and secretly in love with a colleague, Svetlana White, who teaches in the Russian Studies department; spurred by their complicated liaison, she spends her nights working on a novel about two women who run a domestic violence shelter in coastal Maine. Though she loves the work and the refuge it provides, the writing becomes increasingly difficult as her memory begins to fail; tests reveal that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. After a precipitous decline, she moves to a memory-care facility in a neighboring town. Soon afterward, her husband, alone in the house at night, discovers her hidden manuscript, which he reads with envy, and then with anger, as he extrapolates his wife’s affair from the relationship described in the novel’s pages. Over the next two years he rewrites the novel and publishes it as his own, to wide acclaim. But persistent feelings of guilt lead him to confess his theft to an unlikely party, who leads others to the truth.

Luna, Phoenix, Queen tells its tale of artistic and marital betrayal in a chorus of voices. We hear from Barr as he becomes obsessed with Luna, a horrifically injured dog at a local shelter; from Dava as she meets Svetlana for the first time, on a transatlantic flight to Dublin; from Milo, Dava’s son, as he hides in the woods with Naomi, Svetlana’s daughter; from Svetlana, experiencing the loss of a relationship that ended before it could come to fruition; from Evie, Barr’s research assistant, who witnessed Dava’s last days at home with her husband; from James, the Penningtons’ younger son, who makes a startling discovery after his father’s death; and from Milo and Svetlana again, as they grieve the injustice of Barr’s theft and confront the devastation of Dava’s disease.

In a narrative that spans four decades and four thousand miles, Luna, Phoenix, Queen illuminates the power of storytelling and explores the terror of losing the ability to make sense of our world. It is a cry of rage against our vulnerability and helplessness; an acknowledgment of the mysteries beneath the familiar surface of our world; and ultimately, if unexpectedly, a radical testament to love in its many forms.

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My Review: I'm a sucker for a revenge story. I know, I know, cheating on your wedding vows is okay when you're unhappy and also discovering your same-sex attractions in escaping your tedious, dull, humdrum, bad-heterosex marriage.

Not to me. Talk about it. Make a deal that gets you closer to a happier life. "I can't because {wafflewafflewaffle}." Yes you can; if there's no communication divorce them already and THEN go live that happier life. Be a grown up not a selfish adolescent in other words.

Happily for revenge-story lovers like me, most people are selfish adolescents. Like Dava. In love with Svetlana, not Barr her husband and father of her children, does she say "we should figure out how to get along in honesty while we finish raising the kids" or even the truthful "adios chickenfucker, my lawyer'll be in touch"? No! She lies and sneaks and Barr kinda-sorta knows it but can't be arsed to do anything about it until the horror of dementia eats Dava.

What he does is steal Dava's life of love that she led with Svetlana in the shadows and corners of theit bad-heterosex lives. Dava, you see, wrote her first-ever novel about her true love. Barr's got to clean out Dava's stuff as she disappears from the life she once led, of course; Svetlana has no legal standing to act in protection of Dava's life. (An excellent reason to be upfront with spouses being cheated on: they'll tell your lover the real deal about health and prospects for the future if only crow viciously, victoriously.)

Barr uses his creative writing teaching career's lessons to turn a good story into an excellent novel that catches a strand in the culture and rises on the blending of Dava's happiness away from him and his skill at shaping that story. And Dava can't do anything about it; she doesn't remember it. Svetlana? No legal or moral standing. A good reason to hide her sneakin' lyin' ways from her and Dava's mutual employer (I have to think it's all a fictionalized Iowa Writers' Workshop; it's in Iowa anyway). So Barr has free rein. His employer (the actual workshop) sees Dava's book's success in the wake of a terrible personal tragedy of spousal loss. He's not going to tell the real truth: he stole his cheatin' wife's tainted happiness and made it into better art than she could've, then let the market reward him.

Sleazy enough for a soap opera. But this, my olds, is not the last word on the subject.

Luna the (sadly but accidentally maimed) shelter dog gets Barr's urgent confession. She is then on a walk with her new doggy-daddy. In his declining years by now, Luna becomes the focus of Barr's need for an uncritical audience. His ever-more necessary assistant, Evie, ends up adopting Luna and renaming her Phoenix (why people think it's okay to rename animals grown into full personhood is a mystery to me) while catalyzing surprises.

Milo and Jamie, sons of Dava and Barr, reach out to Svetlana after their father's death brings the whole picture into focus. They want to know the woman Dava, obviously so different from their mother. It is Author Orringer's gift, by structuring the story as she did...alternating narrators by chapter...to keep homing in on the process of family secrets becoming known at a surprisingly effective pace. I'm aware of how judgmental I sound about Dava. I judge Barr harshly as well. I understand and empathize with them both now I've read the novel, and even willingly grant grace to Svetlana for her role in this needlessly complicated love triangle of sorts. Svetlana's utterly uninteresting daughter Naomi, and Author Orringer's use throughout these eight chapters filling under three hundred pages of the evil satanic second person for all narration combined cost the story a whopping quarter star.

Not ordinary for me. I'd've tossed it onto the Pearl-Rule pile early on most days! But I was forewarned that I'd need to read a lot of satanic second person text, so I persevered. The delicate dissection of the characters' reasons and decisions to do the things they did are so believably, humanly, laid out and so gently treated as the very difficult choices they were that I was never going to whap the story with the paddle I'd propped in the corner of my mind. I relate. Not condone but accept. I get it; I wish all y'all'd done different better things.

You couldn't. It's the human tragedy told again, told with accepting love that I hope to high heaven I receive when I go offstage the last time.

And Luna, the Phoenix...she truly got this story over the hill of my intolerance. She was my star, my belovèd dote of a character. You'll see.

Or you'll miss out on a truly delightful read.

WHAT TRIED TO KILL ME HAD MANY NAMES: A Memoir of Spirit, Sex, and Survival, "extreme" is an addiction of its own no matter what it's to

WHAT TRIED TO KILL ME HAD MANY NAMES: A Memoir of Spirit, Sex, and Survival
MARC GAUSS
Sibling Rivalry Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What Tried to Kill Me Had Many Names is a fearless memoir of spirit, sex, and survival.

Raised in a strict Christian home where every desire was measured against sin, Marc Gauss grew up believing that love-especially the kind he felt for other men-was something that had to be hidden, prayed away, or punished. As he moves from small-town boyhood to college campuses, locker rooms, churches, and the neon freedom of gay nightlife, Gauss confronts the contradictions between the life he was taught to live and the truth of who he is.

Along the way he encounters cruelty, rejection, ecstatic freedom, and moments of devastating despair—including the kind of spiritual shame that nearly costs him his life. Told with disarming candor, humor, desire, and vulnerability, What Tried to Kill Me Had Many Names is the story of a man who survived religious judgment, sexual awakening, and the many identities others tried to force upon him. It is a memoir about reclaiming joy, owning one's body, and learning-finally-to live without apology.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: No one on Earth survives contact with high-control systems unchanged. It's not possible to be told how to be yourself without responding to that pressure somehow. Marc Gauss fell into many unhappy experiences on the road away from the horrors of his family's deeply unChristian take on christianity. His story is another block of evidence that "what does not kill me makes me stronger" is a choice of how to respond to your life's less carefree passages.

If you're hoping for non-fiction porn about sex work, not in here, you could be disappointed. Discussions of Sex are aplenty. The sex act itself isn't absent...it can't be. What's not given to you is the salacious stuff that nosy old queers (me) might've thought we were getting.

It's a better book than that. Becoming you, finding a Self in the noise of life is hard for most of us; all of us, I suspect, but I always leave wiggle room because if I don't some annoying twidgee or another will "well, actually" me and I'll be forced back to the poppet-making curse-casting ways of my English ancestors. Ways Author Gauss must've seen for the rage trap they are.

A book that will heal a hurt many gay men of every generation bear. A story that only adds to the world's stock of recovery from evil without succumbing to it examples. Well worth seeking out and spending a weekend with.

And I am positive I am not the first old queer guy to say that about, or to, Marc Gauss.

BEN CANAAN SERIES: historical mysteries by A.E GOLDIN featuring Jewish sleuth Canaan

DEATH ON THE PEARL RIVER (Ben Canaan #2)
A.E GOLDIN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Ben Canaan returns in this darkly gripping stand-alone adventure mystery set in Hong Kong, sequel to the acclaimed Murder in Constantinople!

Ben Canaan is riding high on the recent string of cases he has solved successfully on the payroll of Her Majesty’s Executive. Then a notorious crime boss is found murdered on the city streets, the latest in a series of brutal killings targeting the most powerful men in the opium trade.

The scale of the danger is global. To track down the culprits and prevent more blood from being shed, Ben is sent out to the newly-founded British colony of Hong Kong: a lawless frontier town on the southern shores of China's Great Qing Dynasty. All the victims have had ties to the prominent trading firms that use the Pearl River and the South China Sea as their base of operations—ranging from the firms’ heads, to high-ranking partners, supercargoes, merchants, even sailors.

Ben is plunged headlong into a labyrinthine conspiracy, set against the backdrop of an empire in collapse and a sweeping civil war. As his hunt brings him closer to the truth and the ruthless corporate interests that want him dead, Ben is forced to choose between what is necessary and what is just.

Alfred Hitchcock meets Indiana Jones, this immersive, globe-trotting historical mystery is the second installment in the acclaimed Ben Canaan Mysteries series. Thrillingly paced and filled with enchanting historical settings, this series provides all the nostalgic reading pleasure of classic Sherlock Holmes.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It utterly blows my mind to realize Hong Kong as we know it now is so very young as a city. It does not bear thinkiing about what is happening there now, or what that portends for its inabitants' future. Still, being a Crown Colony was no picnic...as Ben's busy finding out in this wildly improbable, very kinetic tale of derring-do in support of the British opium trade.

Ew.

Of course Ben's not responsible for this global scourge. He's been told where to go and whom he should see by his bosses. Of course there's another terrible choice of woman for him to fall in love with, this time an opium widow grieving her husband.

All the expected gadgetry, intrigue, secrets to uncover that his bosses would really rather he didn't. And then there are the fights Ben needs to win, battles to wake up to instead of the ones he was told he'd be fighting. It still barely hangs together at the plot level and then only if one exercises good will and willingness to overlook how a lower-class Jew in 1850s England comes to be trusted with such important tasks as Ben is.

It all comes out okay in the end. It has to in a series mystery/thriller. Please not this entry does not have any significant characters from the first story. If you're looking for cozy sciibygroups, this is not the read for you. Like the Bond or Bourne books, Ben's the main point of continuity in these stories.

Enjoyable as fluff, but a second outing so soon after I had read the first might not've been rge greatest idea...pace yourself.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MURDER IN CONSTANTINOPLE (Ben Canaan #1)
A.E GOLDIN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: squeaks to 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Alfred Hitchcock meets Indiana Jones in this acclaimed, globe-trotting historical mystery about a wayward Jewish kid drawn into a sinister plot

This entertaining historical mystery is the exciting debut novel from London-based musician and screenwriter A.E. Goldin. Thrillingly paced and with an enchanting historical setting, it launches an unforgettable new hero in a series that provides all the nostalgic reading pleasure of classic Sherlock Holmes.

London, 1854. 21-year-old Ben Canaan attracts trouble wherever he goes. His father wants him to be a good Jewish son, working for the family business on Whitechapel Road, but Ben and his friends, the 'Good-for-Nothings', just want adventure.

Then the chance discovery of an enigmatic letter and a photograph of a beautiful woman bring Ben an adventure more dangerous than anything he’d imagined. Suddenly he is thrown into the heart of a mystery that takes him away from everything he has known and all the way to Constantinople, the jewel of an empire and the centre of a world on the brink of war.

Ben’s only clue is 3 words: ‘The White Death’. Now he must find what links a string of grisly murders, following a trail through kingmaking and conspiracy, poison and high politics, bloodshed and betrayal. In a city of deadly secrets, no one is safe—and one wrong step could cost Ben his life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Like the TV version of The Wild Wild West that ran from 1965 to 1969 (I'm still salty it got canceled by sustained pressure from lamebrained Congressmen), the book has trouble picking a tone. It does not feel entirely intentional, so gives an impression of lurching from sweet to sour to violent to off-the-wall daffy. Had the author, a screenwriter, recalled the true statement "every reader is the director of their brain's movie" there might have been smoother transitions among fewer tonal shifts.

How did a small-time chancer whose petty crimes were the impetus for him to stow away on a Royal Navy ship heading for the Crimean War; then after jumping ship in Constantinople, how'd he end up in the iddle of international intrigues well above his social station? How did he blend in well enough not to be rumbled minunte one? Let alone how did he get the information he's needed for the solutions to immensely consequential international intrigues?

Don't look for logic is how. Either buy in or leave the table, because this game is mad, it's incredible, and it's either going to charm you or piss you right off.

Me, I'm more charmed than any other response. I like Ben's verve and bravado. It makes him exciting to follow around. I don't think a sleuth should be reckless with impunity because life ain't like that. I do enjoy someone screwing up and learning from the screwing up, as failing upwards is relatable to anyone who's ever done anything that semi-succeded knows. Ben has that infuriating knack that real people I hate have of knowing just the right person to accomplish the thing that most needs doing so he can figure a puzzle out.

There is no slowing down either. Infodumps are quite rare and mostly very short indeed. It helps that I needed the ones I got. Plenty of female badassery on display, and integral to the plot...a certain portrait subject in particular. I enjoyed Ben's encounter with a marvelous Florence Nightingale, who factually was where she's met by our (anti)hero at a most amusingly delicate juncture.

Think of this as an 1854 European version of The Wild Wild West featuring a Jewish young man with a love for gadgets and a penchant for picking the wrong woman, and there you go. Again, id any of that is not causing you to break out in purrs, stay or go away soonest, it won't suddenly become your cuppa.

MURDER ON 34th STREET: A Novel, Christmas-season story to scratch you murderous itch

MURDER ON 34th STREET: A Novel
MARIAH FREDERICKS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of The Girl in the Green Dress comes a delightful and captivating novel about a fictional murder mystery at the iconic Macy's parade leading up to the holidays in historic New York City.

New York, 1932. Grace Verlander is the secret beating heart of Macy’s. She’s the “assistant to the assistant to the someone who’s in charge”, the go-to person for keeping everything running smoothly behind-the-scenes at the famous, bustling store.

It’s not every day you get a letter from Santa Claus, but three days before the Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, Grace arrives at work to find a note from the store Santa Claus in her someone has sent him a death threat. Shocked, Grace promises to look into it and speaks to the store detective about the parade’s security, confident that they’ve found a solution that will keep everyone safe. But on the day of the parade, despite all their precautions, a dead body is found on one of the floats.

Using her wits and deep knowledge of the ways of the place, Grace is determined to find the killer and seek justice―not just for the dead man, but to save the reputation of this iconic store from ruin.

Steeped in glittering glamor and nostalgic wonder, this is a remarkable, unpredictable mystery set in the evocative world of one of New York’s most memorable institutions.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm being only a little disingenuous with my tag "Chrismtas romance" applied to this one. There is a romantic subplot. It exists. It isn't the focus of much action. I want all my fellow Christmas/Yule holiday fans to find this story so I'm baiting my hook.

Grace is one of those women who crop up in fiction so often, the one who knows exactly where the bodies are buried, the one who needs Stuff to be Right because that's how it all works best for people...even the ones who don't do Right. They don't know it yet, but they'll live in a better woeld because Grace and her sisters in crime fiction will make sure Right triumphs. (Of course, they'll be in jail and, if they come out, will forever have a criminal record...)

Why on Earth would a woman in 1932 New York, who works for Macy's in a sort of "minister without portfolio" way, get involved in a murder investigation? She is the only person, three days before the Thanksgiving Parade (which I called "Macy's Day parade" as a kid) who knows to call this giy not that one to fix whatever's gone wrong. That's why a threatening note against this year's Santa results in her involving Frank, head of Security for Macy's, in bringing this weird turn of events to NYPD's attention. How would it make the city look for Santa Claus to be murdered here?

Guess we'll find out, say the cops. Cranks will say anything for attention. Been true since forever, y'all, since people been peoplein'.

So when a shot is fired and someone dies, Grace takes her Rolodex (figurative) and starts flippin'. The police have a lot less institutional knowledge after all...and Author Mariah shows us that by peppering the text with really interesting to me Macy's trivia specific to the flagship store on Herald Square...plus she sees the inner workings of this small town that is the store itself every day, made obvious by the startlingly large cast of characters she interacts with. Seriously, Author Mariah...couldn't a few of them have been cut? I got very confused a couple times, expecting some one-shots to pop back up but someone else showed up instead.

That said, Grace and Frank made an effective team. The resolution to the fatal parade shooting was satisfying, and I failed to assign guilt properly, so there's your half-star gone to reader's petulance. (In truth it got added for that, to what otherwise was a four-star, too-busy story.)

What makes this fourth story by Author Mariah that I've read with pleasure so effective is her eye for the details to use from her prodigious store of facts and factoids and trivia. In days of yore I'd picture her in a huge, book-lined room that's organized by some arcane principle that's entirely her own. Now I picture a browser with umpteen tabs open in two screens worth of windows. Same stuff, different era.

I'm hopeful that y'all will trot right out to the local bookery and procure yourself this enjoyable holiday-set restoration of ma'at. It merits your time and treasure in the season coming especially, pr any time you need a Christmas-holiday story variolated into your bloodstream.

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, second Coldren County procedural

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE (Coldren County #2)
RACHEL LOUISE ADAMS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Following the USA Today bestselling series debut, No Rest for the Wicked, Rachel Louise Adams returns with Where There’s Smoke.

A lot has happened in Dolores Hawthorne’s life since the events of last Halloween. She’s divorced, traded being a forensic pathologist for a job as a medical examiner, and now lives in small-town Wisconsin, close—but not too close—to her family.

Dolores doesn’t have much in the way of work, but that all changes when a body is found at the local slaughterhouse. Benedict Marcy owned Marcy’s Meats, and is affectionately called Mr. Mercy across the region. This high-profile case quickly catches the attention of Dolores’s friends at the FBI.

From the very beginning, this case is full of contradictions and surprises, and the team quickly learns someone is willing to go to extreme lengths to stop them from finding out the truth behind Benedict Marcy’s murder.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: In common with her debut mystery, No Rest for the Wicked, which I mildly enjoyed and reviewed in January, this sequel is a pleasant reward for saying "yes" to the publicist in spite of thinking "...mmmaaayyybe." I wasn't excited by the small-Midwest-town-return aspect or the obsessed-by-Halloween town bit, but the story was compelling: where's my dad the US Senator, who took him and why,and after the childhood he gave me do I even care?

Now she's moved back to Circe, Wisconsin, to be the medical examiner and work on those pesky sibling relationships she was denied, the intense emotional damage her abandoned forensic science career at the heights she'd reached, and the husband...well, let's draw a veil over that.

New beginnings in old familiar places. And this murder? What a way to (re)start her law-enforcement career. We're not in cozy anymore...the victim owned a meat-packing business, where he was discovered in his slaughterhouse, and we are off to the procedural races. I was not so sure I'd last as we get a Moby-Dick level of detail very quickly in the said slaughterhouse. No one could possibly enjoy working in a slaughterhouse. Or being in one on...other business. Or even knowing what goes on in one. Or anything in it being made public.

Or, it turns out for Mr. Marcy the dead guy, being involved with the local PTB. Like anyone else whose murder garners law-enforcement attention, the life of the victim and all the lives of those around him are opened up to intense scrutiny by the most motivated nosy people on the planet. It is astonishing how many ugly secrets there are under the rug with barely a lump to give their existence away. A bit less troubling meanness and the rug would never've been moved to expose you, Mr. Marcy....

The story runs in parallel tracks because while all the investigation by Dolores' scoobygroup of Kate (a newbie in the FBI, welcome to the team hope you're a veggie or you will be soon) and Paul, whom we have met before is going on there's also Dolores' processing of her revelations from the first book. That's gonna hurt a long, long time.

Here, then, is the root of the series-appeal of this story: we-the-reader are involved in the larger life of Dolores, the colleague/friends she's lucky enough to have found, as well as in the puzzles she's required to solve as a result of the avoidant career she chose under the stress of her unprocessed trauma. It is the same for series mysteries across all modern time. If series X doesn't appeal it's the world-building that you're not resonating with. Keep shopping, someone's doing exactly, or almost exactly, what you want to read.

I've got this series in my "almost exactly" pile now. Excellent work, Author Adams, and thank you.

EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY, letting go of grieving

EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY
IMBOLO MBUE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers and How Beautiful We Were, a captivating novel about love lost—and the weight of regret

What if I’d never gotten into that car? What if I’d pulled out of the driveway five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later?

Three years ago, Wolo’s wife was killed in a tragic car accident. In an instant, the great love of his life was gone, and so was their beautiful future. In the face of a loss that seemed insurmountable, Wolo has slowly rebuilt a semblance of a life: he goes to work, hangs out with a small circle of friends, and fends off the matchmaking efforts of the older women in his family. The grief that dogged him has, with time, become a little gentler.

Until a letter arrives one day, unbidden, threatening to upend his life once again. It is from Victoria, the woman who was behind the wheel that terrible day. Wolo’s family pastor tells him the letter is the work of the devil; his mother expressly forbids him from making further mention of it; his father’s second wife calls, from Cameroon, to tell him to destroy it. But Wolo ponders it for days, and ultimately agrees to meet with the woman who killed his wife. When he does, the compassion and deep remorse of the woman affects him in ways he had never imagined, and he begins to wonder if the long road to healing can be shared.

What do we owe to those who have hurt us? Are we defined by our worst moments and our deepest regrets? And, more than anything, can forgiveness ease our suffering? Moving and full of life, Every Story Is a Love Story charts the uneven path from heartbreak to healing.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Wolo found true love with Yoma. It's the loveliest moment in someone's life: love is joyous before Life has its way with you, and Wolo? He was absolutely at the peak of joy because Yoma was pregnant!

Life had its way with him.

Victoria causes the accident that ends Wolo's happiness. It is impossible for Wolo to recover from this hideous, disfiguring agony of grief, and however loudly he tells his mother, his stepmother, his matchmaking aunties this he is still urged to date, to love again, to move on.

As if some random woman will be Yoma again, will be The One, will fill his life with laughter and excitement...impossible. And then. Will you look at that. Victoria writes to express her remorse for the awful thing she caused to happen to him. To ask Wolo to meet her and process their shared grief.

The Greek chorus of Wolo's life is unequivocal: Do not do this. Don't even think about doing this. You're morbidly obsessed with your loss already don't reinforce it is the universal subtext of their advice. Wolo's stunted, limited existence, the one he resists altering because letting go of his rage and agony feels like killing Yoma and their unborn twins again, has to change or Wolo will die. From the inside out.

So he says yes.

It was here I began to see why Author Mbue chose flashback, a style of storytelling I often find disinvolving, for Wolo's process of healing. It is reinjuring him, it is shoving his head in the waterboarding bucket again and again...it is allowing him just enough air to survive...it is letting him pull his feet under him on the wet floor and lurch and stumble away from the bucket...it is the light that shows the hand extended to him, showing a human is reaching with kind and helpful intent into his dark, drowning life.

It shows Wolo Victoria. Her pain from causing him pain. Her knowledge that she harmed Wolo, she (without malice) stole his life from him and wants so badly to do anything to help him because only that will help her.

And he reaches back.

Everything else I could say is spoilerific. I didn't give it a full-five rating because of spoilery stuff, but look how close I came. (Side note: I am so very happy to have as of October 2026 the ability to give quarter-star ratings on the country's biggest book-discovery engine.) It is Author Mbue's gift to be able to visit the darkest places in a person's life while they are floodlit in Capitalism's distracting material abundance and spiritual moonless midnight. This is another of her immigrants' tales of fitting in being less important than settling down.

It is a beautiful story with some odd edges to keep it from melting into the pleasant sameness of the bulk of entertaiment. That hard-to-differentiate mass gets so stultifyingly dull.