Speculative

Brace yourself…there’s a lot going on in this book, in the best way. Heidi Quick is a junior doctor in an understaffed English hospital. It’s the 1970s, and it’s not easy being a woman in any realm, but a woman doctor treating male patients is beyond the pale for many. After Heidi is struck by a male patient, she’s relieved to be offered a ride home by her coworker Dr. Preston. When he insists on being let into her home, she has no polite way out, and is murdered by him. That would seem to be the end of Heidi, until the next day when she wakes up in exactly the same situation, has the same conversation with her coworker, and must try to create a different route through the day so she’s not re-murdered (now there’s a word that’s normally not necessary). Over and over it goes, with Heidi slowly suspecting that Dr. Preston is a serial killer and longing to fix one of the tries at the situation so that she can make someone believe what’s going on. There’s quite the twist in one of Heidi’s later tries at life versus Preston, and with that twist, the fascinating do-overs, and the well-fleshed-out characters who populate Heidi’s strange roller coaster, this is one of the best books I’ve read in ages. Comparisons to Groundhog Day are inevitable, but this is more akin to the best time-travel dramas, such as Elly Griffiths’s The Frozen People.—Henrietta Thornton

Richland, Ohio is a town on its last legs. With Bradson Foods—its biggest employer—about to close, the community is quietly unraveling. Dave Prost serves as both chief of police and sole police officer. Mike Boyd, recently laid off from the FDA, returns home to stay with his dad and stepmother and immediately senses that something is deeply off about the place he grew up. Meanwhile, a local woman named Andi hatches a plan to revive the town’s fortunes: a festival celebrating Ohio’s legendary cryptids, dubbed the Monster Mash. It’s eccentric, but it might just work—until the missing-pet flyers start appearing, and a cow that should be dead turns up alive and somewhat abnormal. One by one, other animals follow. Then the people start changing, too, in ways that are difficult to explain and horrifying to witness. Scalzi builds a quietly devastating portrait of rural decline and populates it with a cast that feels genuinely real—ordinary people blindsided by the extraordinary. The horror creeps in slowly before going full throttle, and the author never loses his grip on the humor that keeps things from becoming relentlessly bleak. Think Twilight Zone by way of The Thing: unsettling, darkly funny, and impossible to put down.—Jeff Ayers

Versions of a Murder

The Monsters of Ohio