Books like Unspeakable Things

Secrets always intrigue me. Shana Merchant has secrets, and she’s spent years running from them. Shana’s past writhes around her like a poisonous vine. She can’t break free from it, and if she’s not careful, it will suffocate everything around her.

The first book in this series establishes Shana as a smart, once-successful big-city cop, but this isn’t a simple redemption story. I found Shana’s path over the course of this series insightful as she tries to overcome PTSD after being held by a serial killer—not just any serial killer. The connection between the two blew me away and it threads through the series.

Fantastic characters, immersive settings, and tight plots drew me into this series, and I’m waiting for more.

In Black Harbor, Wisconsin’s most crime-ridden city, Morrissey has created a town that is a villain all on its own. A place no one wants to live. Hazel Greenlee has no choice.

An aspiring writer, Hazel is trapped in a less-than-perfect marriage and takes the only job she can find—as a police transcriber. But when her neighbor confesses to hiding the body of an overdose victim in a dumpster, Hazel sees the potential for a story that might help her break out of the frozen hell of Black Harbor.

Morrissey builds Hazel’s desperation, and the desperation of the town itself, with mounting tension so well drawn you can actually feel it in your bones and an ending so intense it leaves you breathless. 

Collins’ The Family Plot is set Blackburn Island, off the coast of Rhode Island where the Lighthouse Family lived in a secluded mansion deep in the woods and isolated by their true-crime-obsessed parents.

After her twin brother disappears when they are sixteen, Dahlia leaves home at the earliest opportunity, returning years later after her father’s death. When the family goes to bury him, there is already a body in his grave—her brother’s.

The layered family drama, secrets, and one hell of a twist make this the kind of story I love—layered with tension and impossible to put down. 

It's not that thrillers need updating, but if you think they did, the novel PINES will fulfill your darkest wishes. This modern-day thriller took off like an irresistibly good bad dream and kept me shivering with page-turning anticipation all the way to the end.

I liked the clean storytelling–action-packed yet full of questions about what’s coming next.

Lorna Landvik’s experience as a stand-up comic shines through in her debut novel, a Minnesota tale about what happens when Patty Jane's husband leaves her, and how she and her sister, Harriett, reinvent themselves by opening a neighborhood beauty parlor – complete with live harp music and Norwegian baked goods. You don’t have to be from Minnesota to appreciate the regional humor, and the narrative voice sounds like an old friend who has shared your joys and heartbreaks over years of good times, bad times, and all those times in between.

This is a novel about loss, family, and reconciliation, and it moved me deeply. It’s set in Minnesota, where I spent about half my childhood, and it deals with personal and family histories, which I find quite compelling. In the novel, Noah’s father, Olaf Torr, lives under the weight of survivor’s guilt. Years earlier, thirty men went out on the ore boat, the Ragnorak, and only three returned. One was Olaf. As the novel begins, Olaf is dying, and he contacts Noah, from whom he’s estranged. But Noah still hasn’t forgiven Olaf for his alcoholism. Also, Noah and his wife, Natalie, are struggling with infertility issues. But Noah and Natalie come to see Olaf, who starts telling Noah what happened on that boat. 

I loved reading this book before it became tainted by fact checkers. That being said, it remains a fascinating, raw, and gripping read. His use of language as falls deeper and deeper into becoming hooked is similar to being a storm chaser. He can’t help himself chasing the highs, knowing full well the low may be the last one. “I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.”

If there ever were… show more.

I still smile when I think of all the Little House on the Prairie books, though this was my favorite. The dramas may be small, but they feel real, and the wealth of small, skillfully woven details brings the characters and their world to life so that we can still relate to them, no matter how different our present-day world may be. 

I loved the imaginative characters, from Detective Lucas Davenport to the brilliant serial killer. Their unique characteristics kept me flipping the pages as fast as I could.

The perpetrator followed a list of rules for his sick, violent games of death. With each body, he left a note describing one of them. Davenport is determined, principled, and ready to take on any foe in his pursuit of justice, even if it means breaking a few rules of his own.

One of the biggest worries as the Civil War wrapped up was that Confederate troops might disappear into the Appalachian Mountains, where they could conduct guerrilla raids with relative impunity. As a result, the war could have been extended for years, maybe even decades, as the insurgents crept out of their strongholds to conduct hit and run raids. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee and Pete Longstreet reminded Southerners they lost the war. It was time to get on with their lives.

Most southern veterans accepted the situation. However, a few, like Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers, couldn’t accept defeat. So they holed up in the backwoods of Missouri and fought a new kind of war using tactics they’d learned under William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson.

Sound familiar? It’s the same situation that has allowed terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda… show more.