The Plot Thickens
If you’re in the mood for fiction that stays with you, and stories that are willing to venture a little further into the shadows while keeping their sense of wit, these novels deliver with depth and bite. Comfort items optional, nerves of steel recommended.
Rebecca Novack’s “Murder Bimbo” (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, $28.99) is not a traditional mystery; it’s a hall of mirrors dressed up as a political assassination thriller. A sex worker may or may not have killed a right-wing politician at the supposed behest of the government. But the real puzzle isn’t who did what. It’s which version of events, if any, deserves your trust.
Told in three increasingly unhinged retellings — emails to a feminist podcaster, to an ex-lover and, finally, to us — Novack turns the saying “there are three sides to every story” on its head. Here, there might be 30. Or none. Each of the acts reframes the same core events, forcing readers to sift through contradictions, omissions and carefully curated self-mythologizing. It’s a gift to armchair detectives: The clues are there, but so are the lies.
What elevates the novel is its biting satire. The narrator is slippery, funny, image-obsessed and fully aware that storytelling is power. Truth becomes transactional. Morality becomes aesthetic. “Murder Bimbo” isn’t about uncovering answers; it’s about interrogating the need for them.
In “Cruelty Free” by Caroline Glenn (William Morrow, $30), another nontraditional venture into the mystery horror world, former starlet Lila Devlin is told her new skin care line needs something to stand out in an oversaturated market. The solution? A secret ingredient harvested from the bodies of the Hollywood elite who wronged her. It’s grotesque, audacious and wildly effective.
Glenn faces a similar challenge: how to make a revenge thriller about beauty, celebrity and grief feel new in a genre already bursting at the seams. Like Lila, she finds the edge. “Cruelty Free” is viciously funny, genuinely gory and unexpectedly tender in its exploration of maternal grief. The true-crime-style interviews and media excerpts sharpen the satire, skewering both toxic beauty culture and our appetite for scandal.
The real question is: Are you cheering for or against Lila? I found myself horrified — and still rooting for her. Glenn makes vengeance feel cathartic even as it curdles.
Maybe the onset of early nights and collective stay-at-home mentality during the nationwide snowstorm made me cynical, but this month, I was drawn to darker, more ghastly reads. In a similar vein of gruesomeness, “Wretch” by Jeremy Wagner (Dead Sky Publishing, $29.99) is a ferocious collision of crime noir and body horror set against a sweltering, blood-soaked Chicago.
When a steroid-fueled sociopath is grotesquely transformed by an experimental drug called Libidonal, both a haunted detective and a vengeance-driven mob boss hunt the same inhuman target. Wagner leans fully into splatterpunk excess — graphic, unrelenting and unapologetic — while threading in sharp commentary on masculinity, addiction and Big Pharma’s moral rot.
The result is brutal but propulsive: a multi-POV descent into obsession and retribution where no one is clean and justice is indistinguishable from savagery. “Wretch” is not for the faint of heart, but it is undeniably gripping.
Horror and motherhood fuse into something incandescent in Eirinie Carson’s “Bloodfire, Baby” (Dutton, $30). The lyrical slow-burn gothic explores postpartum vulnerability, cultural inheritance and the shadow weight of generational trauma with striking precision.
Left alone with her newborn, cut off from support and haunted by both ancestral memory and creeping darkness, a mother unravels, and in Carson’s hands, the spiral feels immersive and achingly real. The novel’s stream-of-consciousness style pulls readers directly into her fraying thoughts, creating an atmosphere thick with dread and emotional urgency. Building tension through mood, history and psychological depth, “Bloodfire, Baby” is a fearless, beautifully written debut that lingers.
On a cozier note, “I’m Not the Only Murderer in My Retirement Home” by Fergus Craig (Berkley, $30) is a wickedly charming whodunit showing that even the quietest retirement community can hide deadly secrets. Craig, also a multi-award-winning actor and comedian, brings astute timing and surprising tenderness to the story of Carol Quinn, a 75-year-old former serial killer who just wants a peaceful life at a luxe Hampstead Heath retirement community. Unfortunately, when a fellow resident plummets from the roof, Carol’s carefully buried past resurfaces, and she’s the prime suspect.
What follows is a delightfully twisted investigation led by the one person uniquely qualified to recognize a murder when she sees one. The ensemble of ex-cops, pathologists and government officials makes for delicious tension, while Carol herself is both droll and unexpectedly sympathetic. Equal parts cozy mystery and redemption tale, this is a brisk, mordantly funny romp about second chances and the inconvenient persistence of reputation.
Have a comfort item on the ready for local author Kate Alice Marshall’s latest, “The Girls Before” (Flatiron Books: Pine & Cedar, $28.99), a haunting, dual-narrative thriller that traps you in the dark, and for Seattle area-based readers, may feel a little too close to home for comfort.
Set in a Pacific Northwest town, it braids a captive girl’s desperate fight for survival with a search-and-rescue expert’s decadeslong quest for answers. By layering folklore, privilege and grief into a tense, atmospheric mystery, Marshall’s writing continues to provide an immersive and emotionally penetrating experience; moody, myth-tinged and impossible to shake.
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