Can't Wait to Read!
Welcome to today's guest author, E.F. Sweetman, who is focusing her list on thrilling summer reads of several stripes. If you're a writer, and would like to curate a future Can't Wait to Read, contact susanna@spinemagazine.co. We encourage you to visit your local library or bookstore and take a look at these new titles.
Bunny by Mona Awad
Samantha Heather Mackey is the outsider in her MFA program. The simpering, inner-circle girl gang lovingly call each other “Bunny," and fawn over one another’s stories while rejecting Samatha and her work. But what happens after she is invited to the inner circle makes Mean Girls seem harmless. Funny, dark, twisted, creepy, and recently acquired by AMC to be made into a television series.
One Little Secret by Cate Holahan
Who wouldn’t want a kid-free getaway? Three couples head to the beach, but marital and work tensions begin to creep in, cocktails flow a little too freely, and one of the party turns up dead.
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
Author Rachel Monroe investigates our hunger for true crime by linking four archetypes — Detective, Victim, Defender, Killer — to true stories of four separate women who became obsessed with violent narratives.
Grab a Snake by the Tail: A Murder in Havana's Chinatown by Leonardo Padura, trans. by Peter Bush
Summer doesn’t lend itself to hours wrapped up in a book on the couch. Leonardo Padura’s novella with Inspector Mario Conde promises a quick read. An elderly man, Pedro Cuang, is found hanging in his shabby room, missing a finger, with two arrows carved on his chest. Is the murder a ritual Santería killing? Is Cuang a victim of the drug wars? Conde investigates.
The Black Jersey by Jorge Zepeda Patterson, trans. by Achy Obejas
It wouldn’t be July without the Tour de France: cycling, corruption ... and murder? After cyclists start dropping out of the race, in violent circumstances, former military specialist and professional cyclist Marc Moreau agrees to help the French police with their investigations from the inside.
The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
Ware's fifth book is the Gothic tale of a young woman who finds herself in a nanny job for the perfect family in a huge manor on the Scottish Highlands, a job that is too good to be true. Until it isn’t.
E.F. Sweetman is a writer living in Beverly, Massachusetts. Her stories have appeared in noir, crime, flash, horror, and gothic anthologies Microchondria II, One Night in Salem, Switchblade V, Sixx, and Stiletto Heeled, EconoClash Review, Broadswords and Blasters, and FunDead's upcoming Gothic Anthology. She lives with her husband, two sons, and three rescue dogs. When she is not working on her noir novel, which she hopes to finish before she turns 95, you can find her glaring out the window at her neighbors.