The Plot Thickens
Summer is the season of page-turners. The books you promise yourself you’ll read for just an hour and somehow end up finishing before sunset. As vacations ensue, summer Fridays return and our vitamin D levels rise, there’s no better time to dive into a mystery that keeps you reading long after the sunscreen has worn off.
This month’s lineup offers plenty of suspicious ongoings, dark secrets and deliciously twisty plots — with one thing in common: in recognition of Pride month, every title is either written by a LGBTQ+ author or features LGBTQ+ characters and themes.
Erica Hendry’s debut, “Let’s Not Go Overboard Here” (Grand Central Publishing, $29), neatly fits the bill. Beneath the surface of this seemingly sun-soaked novel set aboard a Greek yacht lies a missing-person mystery, with a surprisingly nuanced portrait of grief, obsession and the friendships that shape who we become.
Melanie Hoffman, a pop culture obsessive still reeling from the death of her best friend, finds herself aboard a luxury yacht investigating a disappearance that no one else seems particularly concerned about. Rather than treating pop culture, typically thought of as lowbrow, as a punchline, Hendry uses it to show how people navigate loss.
She recognizes the seductive pull of distraction. For Mel, reality television, celebrity gossip and amateur detective work become places to hide when grief feels too large to confront directly. There’s enough heart in “Let’s Not Go Overboard Here” to make you care as much about Mel’s healing as you do about solving the case.
Few things are more dangerous than a broken heart in Clarence A. Haynes’ latest work, “The Broken Hearts Agency” (Legacy Lit, $18.99), a mesmerizing urban fantasy set in Washington, D.C.
Still reeling from a supernatural ghost invasion, the novel follows empathic private investigator Linda Villanueva as she takes on a case that begins with heartbreak and spirals into something far darker.
Mystery, horror, romance and spirituality are blended with remarkable ease, creating a world where desire can be weaponized and grief leaves literal scars. The supernatural thrills in “The Broken Hearts Agency” are matched by its emotional depth, particularly in its exploration of memory, loss and the people we become after devastation.
With its inventive premise, compelling mystery and richly drawn characters, “The Broken Hearts Agency” delivers a haunting and emotionally resonant story that stands out in both the mystery and urban fantasy genres.
Johanna van Veen’s haunting “Bone of My Bone” (Poisoned Pen Press, $19.99) is the kind of historical horror novel that gets under your skin and stays there, whether you want it to or not.
Set amid the devastation of seventeenth-century Bavaria, it follows a nun and a peasant girl who find themselves bound together by a unique combination of war, faith and a saint’s skull said to grant a wish. Their journey becomes an unsettling medley of folk horror, queer romance and grim pilgrimage, and it carries them through a landscape crawling with death.
Van Veen excels at atmosphere. Every page feels steeped in mud, blood, superstition and dread, but in a hypnotically entertaining way. The undead horrors and Germanic folklore are wonderfully grotesque.
The novel’s greatest strength, however, lies in its emotional core. Amid plague, violence and fanaticism, the growing bond between main characters Ursula and Elsebeth becomes a fragile act of resistance. Bleak yet strangely hopeful, what remains when the world has been stripped bare?
“Slasher Summer” (Crown, $20) is pure horror-nerd catnip. E.L. Chen takes a familiar setup — a group of former friends reuniting at the remote cabin where their favorite cult slasher was filmed — and squeezes every drop of fun from it. The novel knows exactly what it is: a blood-soaked, self-aware love letter to the VHS era, packed with nods to genre icons, masked killers, final girls and the delicious certainty that someone is making very bad decisions.
What elevates the novel beyond homage is its affection for the characters beneath the archetypes. The jock, the goth, the stoner, the popular kid — they’ve all grown up, but old roles die-hard. As bodies begin to drop and long-buried resentments resurface, Chen balances camp, suspense and genuine emotional stakes with impressive ease.
Nostalgia meets a smart and wildly entertaining narrative; “Slasher Summer” feels like stumbling across the perfect late-night horror marathon and deciding sleep can wait, regardless of tomorrow’s obligations. Tiredness? That’s a future self problem, and well worth the anxiety and queasy stomach from too much caffeine.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com ’
