Beach Reads
August is here, and that means hot and sticky summer days are as well. When things are heating up all over town, it’s nice to hit the beach where you can sit your chair in the water, listen to the waves hit the shore, and catch up on a good book. There have been so many outstanding thrillers lately that it was hard to choose just a few. Each one of these is super chilling and will certainly cool you down!
“The House Across the Lake” by Riley Sager
Casey Fletcher is an actress. She’s recently widowed and bad press won’t stop following her, so she heads to her family’s lake house in Vermont to get away from it all. At the lake, she spends too much of her time watching the couple who live in the house across the lake through her binoculars. Tom Royce is a powerful tech innovator and his wife Katherine is an absolutely gorgeous former model. One day, Casey saves Katherine from drowning in the lake and the two become instant friends. However, the closer they get, the more Casey realizes that Tom and Katherine just might not be the perfect couple after all. When Katherine goes missing, Casey is obsessed with finding out what happened. This dark road might not be one that Casey wants to venture down.
“The Lies I Tell” by Julie Clark
Kat Roberts has been waiting a long time to get her revenge on Meg Williams, the woman who turned her entire life upside down. But who is Meg, really? Is she Maggie Littleton? Melody Wilde? All different names for the same person. She has made her life being whoever she needs to be, and nothing she says is true. She’s a con artist through and through, and Kat wants to be the one to finally expose her. Except as the two get closer, Kat begins to wonder if she was wrong all along and if Meg isn’t really out to get her. “The Lies I Tell” has twists and turns with every page and will leave you guessing until the very end.
“Carolina Moonset” by Matt Goldman
Every family has secrets and every family has memories, some good and some bad. Joey Green has returned home to Beaufort, S.C., to help take care of his father, who is suffering from dementia. Marshall Green’s short-term memory is pretty much gone, but his long-term memories are becoming as clear as if they happened yesterday. He keeps slipping back in time to when he was a boy growing up in Beaufort. While revisiting yesterday seems like a nice escape for Marshall, Joey starts to worry when these long-term memories reveal arguments that hint at deadly secrets and scandals. These secrets have the power to destroy those in their path, including everything Joey thought he knew for sure. And then, a new murder brings the police to their door.
“The Family Plot” by Megan Collins
Dahlia Lighthouse was raised on an island in a secluded mansion, deep in the woods. She spent her childhood isolated by her parents, who were obsessed with true crime stories. When she was just 16, her twin brother Andy disappeared. Upon her father’s death, Dahlia, now 26, returns to the mansion to find her father’s plot is already occupied by Andy and that his skull was split wide open. Dahlia immediately thinks this is the work of the serial killer who terrorized the island for years, but the rest of her family reacts in suspicious ways. Her brother Charlie focuses only on creating a family memorial museum. Her sister, Tate, continues making her crime-scene dioramas, and her mother acts cheerfully and far from the same woman who used to reenact murders for her children. Dahlia is on her own to find out what really happened to Andy.
“Sleepless” by Romy Hausmann
Nadja Kulka spent years in prison after being convicted of a horrible crime. Now she is doing everything she can to get acclimated to society again and live a normal life with a normal job and even some friends. One of those friends is Laura von Hoven. Laura is a free spirit, beautiful and fun and also the wife of Nadja’s boss. When Laura kills her lover, she calls Nadja for help. The two women head out into the woods to a remote house that seems like the perfect place to hide a body. Everything changes when Nadja finds herself outplayed in a weird game where she has found herself both the perfect victim and the perfect killer.
“Hidden Pictures” by Jason Rekulak
Mallory Quinn has finally gotten out of rehab and taken a job babysitting for Ted and Caroline Maxwell’s 5-year-old-son, Teddy. Mallory loves her new job. She has her own space and finally some stability. Even better, she adores Teddy. He’s sweet and shy and always drawing pictures that typical 5-year-olds draw pictures of – balloons, animals, etc. One day, Teddy draws a picture of a man in the woods, dragging a woman’s body. Then his artwork gets even worse, and his lifelike sketches are way beyond what a child could draw. Mallory knows something is happening and sets out to figure out where these pictures came from, what they mean, and to find a way to save herself and Teddy.
