Tag Archives: Animal Cruelty, Abuse & Torture

Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney

Twenty years after a baby is stolen from a stroller, a woman is murdered in a care home. The two crimes are somehow linked, and a good bad girl may be the key to discovering the truth.

Edith may have been tricked into a nursing home, but at eighty-years-young, she’s planning her escape. Patience works there, cleaning messes and bonding with Edith, a kindred spirit. But Patience is lying to Edith about almost everything… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child abuse
  • Postpartum depression
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Emesis
  • Death of a child
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping of a child
  • Physical assault
  • Animal cruelty

The Sky is Mine by Amy Beashel

No one has ever asked Izzy what she wants. She’s about to change all that…

In a house adept at sweeping problems under the carpet, seventeen-year-old Izzy feels silenced. As her safety grows uncertain, Izzy know three things for sure. She knows not to tell her mother that Jacob Mansfield has been threatening to spread those kinds of photos around college. She knows to quiet the grief that she’s been abandoned by her best friend Grace… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Slut-shaming
  • Rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Domestic abuse
  • Animal abuse mentioned

After She Falls by Carmen Schober

Strong-willed Adri Rivera always dreamed of becoming a professional mixed martial artist, but then she fell in love with a man who smashed everything to pieces. When their tumultuous relationship finally comes to a head, Adri flees with their young daughter to her small hometown in the mountains of Pennsylvania. There, she must face the people she left behind and put her broken life back together as a single mother. Adri struggles to regain her independence after so many years under the oppressive influence of her ex, but a job opportunity at a local gym gives her hope that she’ll be able to stand on her own two feet. The… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Domestic violence
  • Physical assault
  • Animal abuse

After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez

Guapo pobrecito her grandmother calls him. The “poor handsome man.” Professor Jeremiah Post, the poor handsome man, is in fact standing in the way of Alejandra “Alex” Torres turning Loretta’s, her grandmother’s bar, into a viable business. The hot brainiac who sleeps in one of the upstairs tenant rooms already has all of her Mexican American family’s admiration; she won’t let him have the bar and building she needs to resurrect her career, too. Alex blowing into town has rocked Jeremiah to his mild-mannered core, but the large, boisterous Torres clan is everything he never had. He doesn’t believe Alex has the… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Racism, on-page
  • Emotional & verbal parental abuse
  • Familial estrangement
  • Parent in recovery for alcoholism
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Abortion mentioned
  • Death of a grandfather recounted
  • Bullying recounted
  • Animal cruelty mentioned

Rain Reign by Ann M. Martin

Rose Howard has Asperger’s syndrome, and an obsession with homonyms (even her name is a homonym). She gave her dog Rain a name with two homonyms (Reign, Rein), which, according to Rose’s rules of homonyms, is very special. Rain was a lost dog Rose’s father brought home. Rose and Rain are practically inseparable. And they are often home alone, as Rose’s father spends most evenings at a bar, and doesn’t have much patience for his special-needs daughter… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment recounted
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Smoking mentioned
  • Physical injury, including a broken arm
  • Death of a mother from a heart attack mentioned
  • Hurricane
  • Animal abuse

The Bone Labyrinth by James Rollins

In the remote mountains of Croatia, an archaeologist makes a strange discovery:  a subterranean Catholic chapel, hidden for centuries, holds the bones of a Neanderthal woman. In the same cavern system, elaborate primitive paintings tell the story of an immense battle between tribes of Neanderthals and monstrous shadowy figures. Who is this mysterious enemy depicted in these ancient drawings and what do the paintings mean?…. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Animal death
  • Animal experimentation
  • Graphic animal cruelty

The Last Girls Standing by Jennifer Dugan

Sloan and Cherry. Cherry and Sloan. They met only a few days before masked men with machetes attacked the summer camp where they worked, a massacre that left the rest of their fellow counsellors dead. Now, months later, the two are inseparable, their traumatic experience bonding them in ways no one else can understand. But as new evidence comes to light and Sloan learns more about the motives behind the ritual killing that brought them together, she begins to suspect that her girlfriend may be more than just a survivor—she may actually have been a part of it. Cherry tries to reassure her, but Sloan only… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Blood depiction
  • Animal cruelty, off-page

The Boneless Mercies by April Genevieve Tucholke

Frey, Ovie, Juniper, and Runa are Boneless Mercies – death-traders, hired to kill quickly, quietly and mercifully. It is a job for women, and women only. Men will not do this sad, dark work.
Frey has no family, no home, no fortune, and yet her blood sings a song of glory. So when she hears of a monster slaughtering men, women, and children in a northern jarldom, she decides this the Mercies’ one chance to change their fate… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexism
  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Parental abandonment recounted
  • Child abuse
  • Attempted forced child sex work mentioned
  • Suicide & assisted voluntary euthanasia, on-page
  • Suicidal ideation & attempted suicide recounted
  • Self-flagellation, on-page
  • Dead bodies & body parts
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Eyeball trauma
  • Serious physical injury & illness
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a child, on-page
  • Death of a sister recounted
  • Death of a girlfriend recounted
  • Death of a mentor recounted
  • Death of a parent from illness recounted
  • Death of a friend, on-page
  • Graphic murder & attempted murder (theme)
  • Knife, axe & attempted murder
  • Hanging, off-page
  • Poisoning
  • Graphic drowning
  • Kidnapping & captivity
  • War themes & battle scenes
  • Animal attack
  • Graphic animal death
  • Animal abuse

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Hate crimes
  • Classism
  • Death of a parent
  • Child death
  • Physical assault
  • Animal cruelty

The Nightmare Man by J.H. Markert

Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of New Haven. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book’s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life. Detective Mills arrives at the scene of a gruesome murder: a family butchered and bundled inside cocoons stitched from corn husks, and hung from the rafters of a barn, eerily mirroring the opening of Bookman’s latest novel. When another family is killed in… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual assault
  • Self-harm, specifically cutting
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Blood depiction
  • Murder
  • Disappearance of children
  • Animal cruelty