Confessions by Kanae Minato

Confessions by Kanae Minato

After calling off her engagement in wake of a tragic revelation, Yuko Moriguchi had nothing to live for except her only child, four-year-old Manami. Now, following an accident on the grounds of the middle school where she teaches, Yuko has given up and tendered her resignation. But first she has one last lecture to deliver. She tells a story that upends everything her students ever thought they knew about two of their peers, and sets in motion a maniacal plot for revenge.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Parental neglect & abandonment
  • Transphobia mentioned & misgendering
  • Depression
  • HIV/AIDs (theme)*
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a father in a car accident mentioned
  • Death of a mother from illness mentioned
  • Murder of a daughter from drowning
  • Attempted murder of a child from electrocution
  • Murder of a teen girl from strangulation
  • Mass death of a family from poisoning discussed (mother, father & child)
  • Explosion, off-page
  • Animal death & cruelty mentioned

*Context: A teacher purposefully infects the two teenage boys who murdered her daughter with HIV/AIDs. The aftereffects of being infected are explored in depth. Mentions of HIV+ stigma and how the teacher’s ex-husband is dying of HIV/AIDs.

Run Posy Run by Cate C. Wells

Run Posy Run by Cate C. Wells

When I fell for Dario Volpe, I thought he was Prince Charming, and I was the luckiest girl alive. He didn’t care about my past. The talk. The stain on my family’s reputation. Then he saw something I never wanted anyone to see. He cares now. This isn’t a breakup, it’s a warning shot, and if I want to get out of this bad romance alive, I have to run and never look back.
Dario Volpe is no storybook hero. He’s a psychopath, and he can’t decide–kiss me? Or kill me?… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Slut shaming
  • Threats of sexual assault
  • Sexual harassment
  • Revenge porn
  • Cheating
  • Intimate partner abuse recounted
  • Voluntary euthanasia mentioned
  • Pregnancy & childbirth, on-page
  • Anti-Social Personality Disorder
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Death of a parent from cancer recounted
  • Death of a daughter in a car accident mentioned
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping
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Don’t Look for Me by Wendy Walker

Don’t Look for Me by Wendy Walker

One night, Molly Clarke walked away from her life. The car abandoned miles from home. The note found at a nearby hotel. The shattered family that couldn’t be put back together. It happens all the time. Women disappear, desperate to leave their lives behind and start over. She doesn’t want to be found. Or at least, that’s the story. But is that what really happened to Molly Clarke?

The night Molly disappeared began with a storm, running out of gas, and a man in a truck offering her a ride to town. With him is a little girl… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Vehicular manslaughter of a daughter recounted
  • Kidnapping & captivity
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Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth-century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.” Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Misgendering (accidental)
  • Panic disorder
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Disappearance and implied death of a wife and daughter (theme)
  • Kidnapping 

Breathe My Name by RA Nelson 

Breathe My Name by R.A. Nelson

I need to see you. Please come right away. We have to finish.

Frances Robinson is in high school now. She lives a quiet, suburban life, far from her horrifying past. When she was a child, her birthmother smothered her three sisters. Through pure luck, Frances survived. Now her mother has just been released from prison . . . and she wants to see Frances.

A new boy at school called Nix charms Frances. Together, Nix and Frances embark on a clandestine journey to visit Frances’ mother: to confront the monster in its lair. This trip will help Frances at last find peace or die trying. But no matter what, Frances will discover just what it means to finish.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Blood depiction
  • Death of sisters recounted
  • Filicide by suffocation recounted
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Parent in incarceration

Duma Key by Stephen King

Duma Key by Stephen King

When Edgar Freemantle moves to the remote island of Duma Key to escape his past, he doesn’t expect to find much there.

But Duma has been waiting for him. The shells beneath his house are whispering to him, and something in the view from his window urges him to discover a talent he never knew he had.

Edgar Freemantle begins to paint. And as he paints, the island’s secrets begin to stir. Secrets of children lost in the undertow, of a ghost ship riding the distant horizon – and a family’s buried past reaching long hands into the present.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic violence
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Attempted suicide by gunshot recounted
  • Dementia
  • Blood depiction
  • Physical injuries from a workplace accident, including an amputated right arm and a head injury impairing speech, vision and memory
  • Death of a wife & daughter recounted
  • Death of a sister by drowning
  • Paternal flicide by drowning
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Desperation by Stephen King

Desperation by Stephen King

Desperation is a deserted mining town in the Nevada desert. It`s not a place to visit by choice, and the few unhappy travellers who are forced to stop there witness the familiar-looking town undergo a terrible transformation. In the struggle between good and evil, sacrifice may be the only answer. 

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Self-sacrifice
  • Death of a daughter
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Explosion
  • Kidnapping & captivity
  • Loss of autonomy (possession)
  • Death from animal attack (cougar)
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Deadly Little Scandals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Deadly Little Scandals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Reluctant debutante Sawyer Taft joined Southern high society for one reason and one reason alone: to identify and locate her biological father. But the answers Sawyer found during her debutante year only left her with more questions and one potentially life-ruining secret. When her cousin Lily ropes her into pledging a mysterious, elite, and all-female secret society called the White Gloves, Sawyer soon discovers that someone in the group’s ranks may have the answers she’s looking for. Things are looking up… until Sawyer and the White Gloves make a disturbing discover near the family’s summer home–and uncover a twisted secret, decades in the making.

No one is quite who they seem to be.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Illegal adoption of a baby
  • Dead body
  • Death of a daughter
  • Attempted murder
  • Car accident
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Mists of the Serengeti by Leylah Attar

Mists of the Serengeti by Leylah Attar

When a bomb explodes in a mall in East Africa, its aftershocks send two strangers on a collision course that neither one sees coming.

Jack Warden, a divorced coffee farmer in Tanzania, loses his only daughter. An ocean away, in the English countryside, Rodel Emerson loses her only sibling.

Two ordinary people, bound by a tragic afternoon, set out to achieve the extraordinary, as they make three stops to rescue three children across the vast plains of the Serengeti—children who are worth more dead than alive… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a sister, on-page
  • Death of a daughter, on-page
  • Murder
  • Bombing
  • Kidnapping
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Recursion by Blake Crouch

Recursion by Blake Crouch

That’s what NYC cop Barry Sutton is learning, as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome—a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived.

That’s what neuroscientist Helena Smith believes. It’s why she’s dedicated her life to creating a technology that will let us preserve our most precious memories. If she succeeds, anyone will be able to re-experience a first kiss, the birth of a child, the final moment with a dying parent.

As Barry searches for the truth, he comes face to face with an opponent more terrifying than any disease—a force that attacks not just our minds, but the very fabric of the past. And as its effects begin to unmake the world as we know it, only he and Helena, working together, will stand a chance at defeating it.

But how can they make a stand when reality itself is shifting and crumbling all around them?

At once a relentless pageturner and an intricate science-fiction puzzlebox about time, identity, and memory, Recursion is a thriller as only Blake Crouch could imagine it—and his most ambitious, mind-boggling, irresistible work to date.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableist language
  • Gaslighting
  • Depression
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Forced drug use
  • Alzheimers’ disease
  • Needles
  • Nonconsensual human experimentation, on-page
  • Forced & coerced sensory deprivation
  • Grief depiction
  • Death of a daughter, recounted
  • Death of a child
  • Torture, including psychological torture
  • Death by a fall, on-page
  • Captivity
  • Kidnapping
  • Atomic bomb
  • Animal medical testing
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