Category Archives: Mystery & Thriller

Vantage Point by Sara Sligar

The old-money Wieland family has it all—wealth, status, power. They’re also famously cursed. Clara and her brother Teddy grew up on a small island in Maine in the shadow of their parents’ tragic deaths, haunted by rumors and paparazzi. Fourteen years later they’ve mostly put their turbulent past to rest. Teddy has married Clara’s best friend, Jess, and the three of them have moved back home to take over the sprawling, remote family mansion known as Vantage Point. Then Teddy decides to run for the Senate—an unnerving prospect made much worse when… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Domestic abuse
  • Sexual assault
  • Eating disorder (protagonist)

That’s Not My Name by Megan Lally

Shivering and bruised, a teen wakes up on the side of a dirt road with no memory of how she got there―or who she is. A passing officer takes her to the police station, and not long after, a frantic man arrives. He’s been searching for her for hours. He has her school ID, her birth certificate, and even family photos. He is her father. Her name is Mary. Or so he says. When Lola slammed the car door and stormed off into the night, Drew thought they just needed some time to cool off. Except Lola disappeared, and the sheriff, his friends, and the whole town are convinced Drew… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Domestic violence
  • Blood & illness depiction including an allergic reaction
  • Amnesia (protagonist)
  • Murder
  • Disappearance of a child

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

On a hot day in 1960s Maine, six-year-old Joe watches his little sister Ruthie, sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields, while their family, Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, pick fruit. That afternoon, Ruthie vanishes without a trace. As the last person to see her, Joe will be forever haunted by grief, guilt, and the agony of imagining how his life could have been. In an affluent suburb nearby, Norma is growing up as the only child of unhappy parents. She is smart, precocious, and bursting with questions she isn’t allowed to ask – questions about her… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Miscarriage (late term)
  • Cancer

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Suicidal ideation

Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

Can you stop a murder after it’s already happened? It is midnight on the morning of Halloween, and Jen anxiously waits up for her 18-year-old son, Todd, to return home. But worries about his broken curfew transform into something much more dangerous when Todd finally emerges from the darkness. As Jen watches through the window, she sees her funny, seemingly happy teenage son stab a total stranger. She doesn’t know who the victim is, or why Todd has committed such a devastating act of violence. All she knows is that her life, and Todd’s, have… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Suicide mentioned
  • Emesis
  • Death of a parent
  • Murder by stabbing
  • Kidnapping of a child
  • Blackmail

The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie

When Hercule Poirot and his associate Arthur Hastings arrive in the French village of Merlinville-sur-Mer to meet their client Paul Renauld, they learn from the police that he has been found that morning stabbed in the back with a letter opener and left in a newly-dug grave adjacent to a local golf course. Among the plausible suspects are Renauld’s wife Eloise, his son Jack, Renauld’s immediate neighbor Madame Daubreuil, the mysterious “Cinderella” of Hasting’s recent acquaintance, and some unknown visitor of the previous day–all of whom Poirot has… Read more,

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical sexism
  • Infidelity
  • Minor blood and injury depiction (fainting episodes, dead bodies)
  • Death of a father and husband
  • Death from an epileptic fit mentioned (off-page)
  • Murder by stabbing with a knife
  • Faked being tied up and held captive by armed burglars
  • False incarceration
  • Blackmail mentioned

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

A refugee of the Great War, Poirot has settled in England near Styles Court, the country estate of his wealthy benefactor, the elderly Emily Inglethorp. When Emily is poisoned and the authorities are baffled, Poirot puts his prodigious sleuthing skills to work. Suspects are plentiful, including the victim’s much younger husband, her resentful stepsons, her longtime hired companion, a young family friend working as a nurse, and a London specialist on poisons who just happens to be visiting the nearby village.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical sexism
  • Period-typical racism & racial slurs including antisemitism, antiziganism (g slur) and mentions of blackface
  • Drugging
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Seizures (on-page)
  • Death of a mother from accidental overdose mentioned
  • Murder of a mother/mother-in-law and wife by poisoning (which was first diagnosed as death from heart failure)
  • Incarceration pending trial
  • Military service mentioned
  • Mentions of euthanising a dog

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Slut-shaming
  • Rape & attempted rape (recounted & discussed), including a mob lynching after a rape
  • Childbirth (multiple scenes)
  • Stillbirth discussed
  • Death of three children from illness (protagonist)
  • Murder

Clever Little Thing by Helena Echlin

Charlotte’s daughter Stella is sensitive and brilliant, perhaps even a genius, but a recent change in her behavior has alarmed her mother. Following the sudden death of Stella’s babysitter, Blanka, the once disruptive and anti-social child has become docile and agreeable. But what’s unsettling is that she has begun to mirror Blanka’s personality, from Blanka’s repetitive phrases to her accent, to fierce cravings for Armenian meat stew after being raised a vegetarian. Charlotte is pregnant with her second child, and depleted and sick with the pregnancy. She is convinced that Blanka… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Rape
  • Infidelity
  • Suicide

Murder on the Marlow Belle by Robert Thorogood

Verity Beresford is worried about her husband. Oliver didn’t come home last night so of course Verity goes straight to Judith Potts, Marlow’s resident amateur sleuth, for help. Oliver, founder of the Marlow Amateur Dramatic Society, had hired The Marlow Belle, a private pleasure cruiser, for an exclusive party with the MADS committee but no one remembers seeing him disembark. And then Oliver’s body washes up on the Thames with two bullet holes in him – it’s time for the Marlow Murder Club to leap into action… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Adult-minor relationship
  • Parent with substance addiction
  • Alcohol consumption & drug use including overdose
  • Cancer
  • Murder
  • Gun violence
  • Animal death