The Literate Kitty

Some of the biggest milestones in life are exciting and bittersweet at the same time.  Take high school graduations. The prospect of freedom is a siren’s call to soon-to-be grads... while the idea of leaving behind the known quantity of old friends and family may be both scary and sad. One thing that rarely crosses most new graduates’ minds, though, is their own deaths. Yet that’s the very tragedy at the beginning (and heart) of Ann Cleeves’ latest novel of suspense,  The Dying Light .   When Detective Matthew Venn gets called to a young woman named Lottie’s scene of death—a tragedy which occurred in a problematic location, to put it mildly—he’s rightfully on edge. The body was found in the swimming pool of a holiday home in the Devon countryside (not ideal)—owned by Paul Armstrong, a controversial politician on the rise. Paul and his family—wife and two young sons—found the body shortly after arriving at the mansion, where they planned to meet daughter Hannah and her sch...

I’m not a pumpkin spice girl, not really... but I   am   a big-time Fall girl. Colorful leaves ( or not ,  in SoCal ). Cooler weather (erm, well...  eventually ,  right? ). Wearing more layers—sweaters, booties, and the occasional flannel.  Cozy foods, apple cider, and cool-weather cocktails. Shorter days... and longer nights. And for reading? I want ALL the autumnal vibes. Chilling suspense. Whispers of the supernatural. Maybe even some full-on moments of terror. All of which make Emma C. Wells’  We Already Dug the Grave  pretty much the perfect book to usher in the new season.    Milly—in her late 20s—is, without question, firmly down on her luck. She’s worked one go-nowhere waitressing job in diner after crappy diner. Sure, she had dreams...  once .  But a single fateful night during her senior year changed everything... causing her to leave her younger sister—and the aunts they’d been living with on their little Tennessee f...

  Most of us, when moving into a new home, have a couple of wishes when it comes to our neighbors.   We hope they’re easygoing—friendly enough to wave and say hello to (and happy to let us use their phone if we manage to lock both keys and cellphone in the car). We also desperately hope they aren’t busybodies—peeping out their window making note of everything we do and every visitor (and reporting each nitpicky thing they find objectionable).  But then there’s an anomaly like elderly Mrs. Golda Bakofsky—landlord-in-residence of the tiny Marigold Cottages—who is almost gleefully cheerful...  and  staying busy keeping tabs on every tenant on her small property like that was her job. And in  Murder on Charity Lane —Jo Nichols’ follow-up to last year’s delightful  The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective  (see review here )—she’s back in full-force... meddling, matchmaking, and, as these things happen, marshalling her troops to solve yet another murder...

There are two ways that childhood friendships can go, in adulthood. One involves you leaving most (or all) of your school pals behind as soon as you move away (move on, whatever). The other is hanging onto those earliest friends—and all the shared history— regardless  of whether any common interests end up surviving past graduation. Kevin Wade’s  One Good Eye  is a story of the latter...   Under normal circumstances, small-town Police Chief Jeep Mullane wouldn’t have any cause to answer a distress call about a home invasion from a resident of the neighboring—and very wealthy—Long Island community... but these aren’t normal conditions. For one thing, the whole eastern seaboard is in the midst of dealing with a raging hurricane, meaning it’s all-hands-on-deck time for anyone in emergency services. But it’s another reason that’s far more important.  The caller, Jenny Racine—Jeep’s next-door neighbor in high school, now an influencer worth millions, who moved back t...

  in particular, that two people could communicate simple thoughts to each other via their minds. We spent hours swapping roles of sender and receiver, trying to transmit images we’d drawn on a set of cards telepathically to each other.  Our success rates skewed higher than the average, so of course we were positive we had The Gift. Did we  really  possess any sixth sense abilities... or were our positives mere chance?  [We’ll never know; our “tests” were completely unscientific.] Yet scientific studies have long been conducted, with compellingly positive results. Some were discussed publicly while they were going on, but probably at least as many studies were kept top-secret by researchers and governments... and remained so for  decades , until the truth about what actually transpired became too heinous to stay buried forever. Sarah Pekkanen’s latest thriller,  The Women in White , is the terrifying tale of what one such hush-hush research project mig...

An aimless but likeable twenty-nine-year-old, currently crashing in someone’s garage during another sweltering Texas summer.   (And not a pimped-out one, either; he’s crammed in with a bunch of stuff the owner stores there.) The problem is, jobs have never really stuck with him, so for years he’s just been floating from one situation to the next, smoking blunt after blunt and hooking up with other attractive men and beautiful women at every opportunity. But one day his casual, wake-and-bake lifestyle is thrown for a loop by a stranger’s arrival... a lawyer, who brusquely informs him that he’s the sole heir to his uncle’s fortune.  And that he needs to go to Austin (a place he’s never been)  right now , to claim it. Full of questions without answers, Peter Key can’t begin to imagine the dangers awaiting him, in the debut of Jack Friday’s new unlikely-sleuth series,  Killer Vibes .   The first question Peter has is why him? He’d only met Uncle Forrest a handful of...