Book Review

Marcus Kliewer's The Caretaker follows Macy Mullins, a broke young woman who takes a Craigslist caretaking job at a remote Oregon house and discovers its unsettling rules are chillingly real. This spoiler-free review weighs Kliewer's sharp voice, analog-horror atmosphere, and OCD-coded dread against a baggy middle and an ending some readers will find frustratingly ambiguous.

In Mad Mabel, Sally Hepworth hands the microphone to Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick: eighty-one, six feet tall, and once the youngest murderer in Australian history. When a nosy seven-year-old and a true-crime podcast drag her secrets into the open, the past she has buried for sixty-six years finally wants its turn to speak.

Patrick Radden Keefe's London Falling follows the Brettlers as they uncover their dead son's hidden life among London's oligarchs, gangsters, and gilded men. A spoiler-free review.

The Auction by Sadie Kincaid is a slow-burn gothic dark romance with a masked hero, a resilient heroine, and Brotherhood secrets that go deeper than anyone knows.

Release Me by Tahereh Mafi is the Book 2 of the Shatter Me: The New Republic series. Three fierce POVs, a devastating slow burn, and a surveillance state that shows exactly what freedom costs.