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Siblings

Review

The Murder Party

by Dodie Ownes

June’s older sister Lily is perfect—gets all A’s in school, has a gorgeous boyfriend, and is respectful to Ma and Pa and their Asian heritage—while June is messy, not a scholar, and questions everything. When Lily dies in an accident involving a malfunctioning prop knife during a secret Murder Club, her family is devastated, and June blames herself, since she knew that her sister was sneaking out at night. But something doesn’t seem right, and with the help of best friend Zoey and cute guy Alex, she starts to put together the pieces and decides to throw a Murder Club of her own. As June continues to pull on the strings holding together the lie about what happened on the night Lily died, we discover that her sister’s perfect circle of friends are anything but that. June wants justice for her sister and is willing to put herself at risk to out Lily’s murderer, no matter the cost. Author He constructs a tightly wound thriller against the backdrop of high-school reality with a shocking conclusion that will leave readers breathless.—Dodie Ownes

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Review

Tell Me Something True

by Willy Williams

Book of the Week June 18, 2026

This emotionally resonant standalone by a two-time Gold Dagger winner is Robotham’s most personal book yet. Although this is his 20th novel, the author, as he notes in his acknowledgements, first wrote it in his twenties and then filed it away until he accumulated a lifetime of writing experience to return to the manuscript. After 12 years in prison, Arlo Hackett has returned to see his mother in the small Australian town of Yulara on the Great Southern Road between Sydney and Melbourne. But the self-righteous, small-minded community is not ready to forgive Arlo for his role as an accessory after the fact in the rape and murder of 17-year-old Saxon Winacot, apparently committed by his neurodivergent younger brother, Luke, who later killed himself. Despite the town’s seething hostility, Arlo is determined to stay and fix up his mother’s house for sale after a stroke puts her in a nursing home. When he uncovers evidence that the cops might have brutally beaten Luke to extract a confession, Arlo searches his memories and questions locals to uncover the truth that will exonerate his brother. Alternating between past and present timelines, this is more than an atmospheric crime novel populated with well-drawn characters: It’s a haunting coming-of-age story; a sorrowful tale of lost love, missed chances, and promising lives cut short; and a moving narrative of redemption. Fans of Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore will find much to appreciate in Robotham’s trenchant depiction of small-town Aussie life.—Willy Williams

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Review

January and July

by Jeff Ayers

January Holte works for an intelligence agency nicknamed the Annex. An op in Paris crashes and burns, and she’s deemed responsible. Now back home and trying to make amends, she secretly sets out to uncover someone in the Annex who’s selling secrets. The clues lead her to a small town in Texas and a possible suspect named Bill Connors. July Whitlock begins a job as a bodyguard-for-hire, and his first client, Bill Connors, convinces him to wait outside while he meets with someone for a few minutes. Bill vanishes, and feeling guilty for leaving his side, July goes searching. His investigation takes him to a small town in Texas. January and July might not find Bill, but they do find deception, animosity, and their lives threatened. Abbott has crafted two terrific characters in January and July, and readers will quickly become invested in how things work out for them, even though they might be on opposite sides. The pacing is lightning-fast, the mysteries are complex and hard to decipher, and the story begs for a sequel featuring more of their adventures.—Jeff Ayers

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Review

The Summer House Murder

by Brian Kenney

Yes, it’s ridiculously early. But I’m ready to crown The Summer House Murder the most toxic family novel of 2026. Venom, backstabbing, competitiveness, lies, jealousy, greed, out-and-out hatred all come together to create their own totally riveting little house of horrors. At the center are three sisters—Esme, Piper, and Regina—who are off to Lake George, and their now deceased parent’s cottage, for their annual shared vacation. With three immensely different characters at work, it only takes a few drinks for the women to quickly point out one anothers’ faults, from not cleaning the kitchen to mishandling infidelity to, I kid you not, child abduction. As if that weren’t enough, how about a murder, with a direct connection to the three sisters? I loved this book, but more importantly, so will you. The perfect summer read.

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Review

Beth is Dead

by Dodie Ownes

Readers will find all the timeless themes of Louise May Alcott’s Little Women—family, independence, selflessness, love, ambition and sisterhood—in Katie Bernet’s debut YA novel, but in a contemporary setting with all the flair and complications of modern life. Mr. March, a hopelessly optimistic writer, pens a thinly disguised novel about his family, including his four daughters Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. He feels it is his masterpiece, but the book is quickly disparaged as an unfair exposé. Most importantly, Beth dies in the novel, which results in him getting death threats; for the family’s safety, he goes into hiding. Even with all this publicity swirling, the March girls and their mother keep their heads up, and Beth and Amy even go to a New Year’s Eve party. When Jo discovers Beth’s bed empty the next morning, she and Amy soon find her—dead, with a halo of blood around her head. Nearly everyone in town is a suspect, including the March sisters, who it seems have all been keeping their own secrets. Beth may have been having second thoughts about attending the prestigious Plumfield Academy, Meg could be in love with Beth’s piano tutor, Amy and her cousin Florence’s art talent may not be the primary interest of their mentor, and Jo’s journalistic nose for clues is quite useful. Each chapter alternates among the sisters, offering “Then” and “Now” points of view, adding to the story’s layers. This has all the romance and heart of the original, with clever twists and darkness in the reimagined storyline. Readers are kept guessing until the very end as these little women find Beth’s killer

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Review

The Influencers

by Henrietta Thornton

Social media replaces life for the Iverson family, which is headed by freezing-cold May Iverson, whose Mother May I videos have chronicled the childhoods and now young adulthood of her daughters January, March, April, and twins June and July. Their real last name is Iniesta, but their Latino father and mixed-race identities are mostly swept under the carefully curated rug, except when it works for May to use it as content. The girls are both hyper-aware of their every movement as fodder for videos—how could they not be, when a genuine emotion is met with the request to do it again for the camera?—and bone-deep in the influencer life. It all threatens to collapse when May’s second husband, happily for the brand named August, is found murdered at their white-on-white home, a fire set seemingly to cover the crime. As though from multiple camera angles, the narrative unfolds over different time lines and from various characters’ perspectives, including, perfectly, “We Who Grew Up Watching the Iversons” and “We the Followers of Mother May I.” As the engaging and incredible lives of the Iverson/Iniestas unspool, a grotesque view of modern life is put under the microscope, with no pink-marble stone left unturned. One for We Who Grew Up Watching the Kardashians, of course, but also for fans of family drama and sociological skewerings.

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Review

Deep Beneath Us

by Danise Hoover

Tabitha is compelled by the spiteful actions of her ex-husband to move back to her childhood home. This is not a cozy, safe space as one might hope. It is a sort of compound: two schoolhouses on different sides of a reservoir, one occupied by her family, the other by her uncle’s family. In the past, four cousins, Tabitha the youngest, ran and played like a pack. But her mother is an unstable artist, her father and uncle killed themselves, and her sister and cousin married each other at age 16. Now, cousin Davey purportedly dies by suicide as well, leaving his property to Tabitha. But is that what really happened? Davey’s two cronies, along with three smart teens, use skills learned from TV crime dramas and DNA analysis to get to the bottom of it all. The characters are captivating, the atmosphere is dark and dour, and the wretched weather contributes to the overall tone of the book. The novel is set in Scotland and the use of Scottish dialect and expressions is sometimes daunting, but never gets in the way of the telling. To say that the plot here is a tangled mess may be an understatement, but the untangling is a treat.

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Review

The Ones We Love

by Henrietta Thornton

The Jansen family is newly arrived in LA from Melbourne, Australia. Janus, the father of the family, is sure the screenplay of his successful novel will be their fortune. Things take a very sinister turn when daughter Liv wakes with a hangover and bruises, and her parents seem furious with her. Her bedroom is padlocked shut—it’s the law, Janus and wife Kay say, because there’s a mold issue. Son Casper suspects that there’s something much worse afoot; his parents won’t talk to each other and barely seem aware of him, and that locked room is suspicious. Liv herself can’t remember anything but starts to catch on that there’s a problem when her friend who was out with her on the mysterious night in question won’t return texts. What happened? That’s carefully revealed in a tense psychological thriller that masterfully examines love and fear from every angle. The fully fleshed out teenage characters make this a solid YA crossunder. Get it on your TBR list!

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Review

The Perfect Sister

by Henrietta Thornton

I love the kind of us-and-them stories set in places like the Hamptons, and the latest by DeCarolis (The Guilty Husband, Deadly Little Lies) is packed with twists. Alex and Maddie Walker are sisters who look so alike and are so close in age that people think they’re twins. Their mother referred to them that way, a glimpse of love amid her boozy, selfish ways. Now Mom’s long gone, and the sisters, who are now in their twenties, are distant after an argument that followed her funeral. But when Alex doesn’t hear from Maddie, who has been in the Hamptons for the summer, she heads to that tony town to get to the bottom of things. What she finds is very strange—Maddie had been living at one of the swankiest houses in the area, Blackwell Manor. Alex stays with the Blackwells herself, keeping a safe distance from their rich but miserable lives—until things take a turn when another young woman goes missing. As Alex becomes a thorn in the police’s side, she uncovers secrets about the present and the distant past. Dark sexual themes feature amid the absorbing suburban suspense that’s told from multiple, tantalizing viewpoints.

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Review

The Dredge

by Willy Williams

“Some families are haunted. The stuff of the past, the traumas and the ghosts—they just go on and on,” thinks Caleb “Cale” Casey, a successful real-estate broker in Hawaii who has been estranged for almost 30 years from his brother Ambrose, who runs a construction company back in their small Connecticut hometown. Both are tormented by a terrible secret that they buried as teenagers in Gibbs Pond. When a real-estate developer announces plans to dredge the pond in preparation for further development, Cale reluctantly returns home. Unbeknownst to the brothers, Lily Rowe, the contractor in charge of the dredging, also suffers from a dark family history, a childhood of abuse and neglect, shared with her troubled sibling Ray, that led to a shocking act of violence. How these well-drawn traumatized characters and their secrets collide in the present day, permanently changing the course of their lives, is the theme of Flaherty’s beautifully written debut. His Connecticut is not the monied suburbia of Rick Moody and John Cheever, but a rural working-class community more reminiscent of Daniel Woodrell’s Ozark mountain towns. After a strong buildup, the conclusion felt a bit anticlimactic. Still, this sad novel about the corrosive effects of family trauma and pain will linger in readers’ minds.

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