Brian Kenney

A dangerous obsession, true crime, bookselling, alcoholism, and trauma—add some dark humor—and you have the ingredients for this utterly unique tale set in Spines, a present-day-London bookstore. Young, post-punk Roach has only ever worked as a bookseller at Spines, where she can indulge in her obsession with true crime—female victims only, please—and way overstock the true-crime section. Her Mom runs a bar and basically ignores Roach, while Roach’s boyfriend is an unwashed brute in a death metal t-shirt. But things aren’t going so well at this branch of Spines these days, and the corporate office has transferred some seasoned employees to bolster sales. This includes Laura, who’s all vintage dresses and rose oil, berets and hand-rolled cigarettes. She’s what Roach would call a “normie,” until Roach hears her give a poetry reading in which she references many of Roach’s favorite true-crime victims. Roach becomes obsessed with Laura, eventually going full-on stalker. But while Roach is fascinated with the perps, Laura is disgusted by the true-crime genre for glorifying these creeps. Instead, she pays homage to the victims, and does so from a very personal perspective. As Laura’s drinking becomes more and more out of control, it becomes easier and easier for Roach to take over, playing with Laura’s sense of reality and leading to an ending as dark as it is credible. The novel includes a wonderful cast of booksellers who bring some humorous subplots to the book. Readers who enjoyed Laura Sims’ How Can I Help You, reviewed here last week, will be ecstatic to meet these women.

Emma Carpenter is house-sitting in near-total isolation on the Washington coast. For company there’s Laika, her Golden Retriever; a retired alcoholic author a half-mile up the coast with whom she exchanges brief messages; and the occasional delivery person. Something’s bugging Emma. After all, you don’t take a gig like this unless you’ve got a project you’re working on or some issues you need to resolve, and for Emma it’s the latter. She keeps herself occupied by walking Laika and reading thrillers, plowing through two ebooks a day until she comes across a novel so misogynistic, so poorly written, she can’t help but give it a negative review, setting off an online dialog with the author, who demands the review be retracted. That’s when things start to get weird—and tension starts to heighten—as every evening the security lights switch on and off, or Emma hears footsteps in the house, or the CCTV catches an intruder outside her door—complete with ghoulish mask. Could it possibly be the author Emma has been arguing with? Whomever, it is, Emma is no damsel in distress, and she’d rather fight than run. From there the narrative speeds up, the terror mounts, and the layers of plot begin to unfold until the reader feels like they’re strapped to a one-person luge, runners greased and no way to get free. Perfect for the nail biters.