The best books to read when you don’t want to guess what’s going on

I picked up Then She Was Gone at a thrift store, thinking it would be a quick, fun read while I was at the beach. Quick read, yes. Fun…? Not so much. Then She Was Gone had me flipping the pages faster than a snake can hiss. As the story unraveled, I found myself muttering “oh no, no…no way” more than once. The story was both heart-wrenching and disturbing, and it lingered with me long after I’d closed the book. It touches on love, marriage, motherhood, loss, grief, and shattered hopes. It’s not a feel-good book, but it’s a really good read. I love stories that drag me over the rough road but also hit me in the heart, and Then She Was Gone delivers.

Strong women don’t get that way because their lives have been easy, and I’m a sucker for stories about women facing the worst and getting through it. It doesn’t even have to be with grace and dignity! Half Past has a shattering premise – the utter rejection of a mother to her daughter. The book is a family mystery heavy with heartache, and I devoured it. While there’s grief and angst, the book also describes the journey of a woman who thinks she’s faced her lowest point – and how she manages to rise above it all. The book also had a really clever use of actual, simple science that I appreciated because it was so real and yet led to a horrifying reveal!

After reading Darby Kane’s Pretty Little Wife, I knew I had to pick up The Replacement Wife, and boy, am I glad I did. The main character in this book is also a mom and wife, but unlike a lot of other domestic thrillers, Elisa Wright is happy with her life. The problem isn’t her suspiciously-acting husband, but her brother-in-law, who was going to marry her good friend…until that friend went missing. The dips and swerves in this book had me convinced I knew what was going to come next, but I did not! I’ll admit, I do love an unreliable narrator, but you’ve got to find a way to make me believe and relate, and Kane turned that trope upside down and spun it around. 

I’m going to say everything about Everything We Didn’t Say. This family drama is full of mystery, but also love, heartbreak, surprise, distrust, fear, and redemption. One thing I loved about it was the relationship between the main character, Juniper, and the daughter she chose not to raise. Instead of a “will they won’t they” romance, this book has a similar vibe but with the relationship between a mother and daughter. Hearts are hard to heal, you know? Add to it the truth about who murdered the neighbor couple way back when, some sibling love (I do love a good sibling relationship, especially one that’s complicated) and a bittersweet romance in the past that tangles everything into a huge knot. This book gave me all the feels!

Strap yourself in. Ask yourself, what would I do, if this happened to me? Look, if I was tossed into the middle of the zombpocalypse, I already know I’d die off right away, because I can’t run fast. I like to kid myself that if I suddenly became the main character in a thriller, I’d figure out all the tricks and make it to the end, but the truth is, I’m not sure I’d have the guts to do even a single thing the mom in The Chain has to do. This book had me tapping my tablet so fast I got a blister on my finger. That’s how crazy the ride was. Not only that, every time I thought it had been resolved, something even wilder happened. A roller coaster of a book.