Tag Archives: Drug Use & Abuse

Wretched by Emily McIntire

Wretched by Emily McIntire

Evelina Westerly has always been the bad guy. As the brains, brawn, and botanist behind her family’s drug empire, she’s her father’s ruthless secret weapon. With her days divided between perfecting her greenhouse, seeking revenge for her sister’s murder, and putting a gun to the head of anyone in her way, Evelina doesn’t have time for anything else. Especially not for love. After a one-night stand with a gorgeous man at a nightclub, she’s sated her urges and is back to her criminal ways. That is, until that same man shows up as the new Westerly lackey under a totally… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Emotional child & sibling abuse recounted
  • Panic attack recounted
  • Drug use
  • Overdose mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a sibling recounted
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Murder
  • Graphic torture
  • Gun violence
  • Physical assault

Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson

Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson

Senior year at Ellingham Academy for Stevie Bell isn’t going well. Her boyfriend, David, is studying in London. Her friends are obsessed with college applications. With the cold case of the century solved, Stevie is adrift. There is nothing to distract her from the questions pinging around her brain—questions about college, love, and life in general. Relief comes when David invites Stevie and her friends to join him for study abroad, and his new friend Izzy introduces her to a double-murder cold case. In 1995, nine friends from Cambridge University went to a country house and… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Panic Disorder
  • Alcoholism mentioned
  • Drug abuse mentioned
  • Death of a child
  • Murder

Stepbrothers’ Darling by KA Knight

Stepbrothers’ Darling by K.A. Knight

Life is never what you expect it to be. I never thought I would end up here, moving halfway across the country on my mother’s whim, and then I meet them… My new stepbrothers. Cyrus, Bray, Asher. Sin incarnate, dangerous, dark and deadly. Everything I crave in a man, but they are off-limits and they make that perfectly clear. However, when my past comes back with a bang, the rules begin to mean nothing and lines start to blur. The only way we will survive this is together. They are my Crew and I’m about to be their Darling. I’m going to make them mine.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Rape mentioned
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Drug & alcohol abuse
  • Murder of a mother
  • Murder of a friend, on-page
  • Torture, on-page
  • Imprisonment mentioned
  • Stalking

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s travelling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Infidelity mentioned
  • Suicide recounted
  • Drug use
  • COVID-19 pandemic
  • False imprisonment
  • Gun violence

The Chain by Adrian McKinty

The Chain by Adrian McKinty

It’s something parents do every morning: Rachel Klein drops her daughter at the bus stop and heads into her day. But a cell phone call from an unknown number changes everything: it’s a woman on the line, informing her that she has Kylie bound and gagged in her back seat, and the only way Rachel will see her again is to follow her instructions exactly: pay a ransom, and find another child to abduct. This is no ordinary kidnapping: the caller is a mother herself, whose son has been taken, and if Rachel doesn’t do as she’s told, the boy will die. “You are not the first. And you will certainly not be the last.” Rachel is now part of The Chain… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Military Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Substance addiction
  • Drug abuse & use, on-page
  • Protagonist with cancer
  • Death and resuscitation of a child for anaphylactic shock
  • Murder
  • Gun violence & threats of gun violence
  • Kidnapping & captivity of children, on-page (theme)
  • Disappearance of a daughter
  • Stalking
  • Physical assault with a wrench and physical assault of a child
  • Animal hunting

The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th-century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, healings—are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles. But when Nahri accidentally summons an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to accept that the magical world she thought only existed in childhood stories is real. For the warrior tells her a new tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Human trafficking
  • Slavery
  • Antisemitism
  • Queermisia
  • Rape mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Smoking and medicinal drug use mentioned
  • Blood & injury depiction including broken bones and knife wounds
  • Depiction of corpses
  • Cancer mentioned
  • Emesis
  • Death of a friend
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Genocide recounted
  • Torture mentioned
  • Physical assault
  • Knife violence
  • Drowning
  • Fire
  • Loss of autonomy (possession)
  • War themes
  • Animal death

Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indriðason

Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indriðason

The loner Erlendur has recently joined the police force as a young officer. The beat on the streets in Reykjavik is busy: traffic accidents, theft, domestic violence, contraband… And an unexplained death. When a tramp he met regularly on the night shift is found drowned in a ditch no one seems to care. But his fate haunts Erlendur and drags him inexorably into the strange and dark underworld of the city.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Domestic violence
  • Alcoholism
  • Drug abuse

Wrecked Palace by Catherine Cowles

Wrecked Palace by Catherine Cowles

One night was all it took for everything to change. From college student to guardian in a single breath. My siblings became my world. No time for date nights or romantic dreams. Giving my all to make sure they were cared for. But Griffin had a brokenness that called to me—one that mirrored my own. Gruff and just a little bit reckless. He was the last thing I needed. But everything I wanted. Only someone isn’t happy about this new life I’m building. Deciding to set fire to everything I hold close. And when the smoke clears, there might be only ashes left behind.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Child neglect
  • Trauma & nightmares
  • Death of a family in a boating accident
  • Drug use

The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

Paris has survived the Great Houses War – just. Its streets are lined with haunted ruins, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine runs black with ashes and rubble. Yet life continues among the wreckage. The citizens continue to live, love, fight and survive in their war-torn city, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over the once grand capital. House Silverspires, previously the leader of those power games, lies in disarray. Its magic is alluring; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Suicidal ideation
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Blood and gore depiction
  • Mutilation
  • Torture
  • Colonialism

Hard to Find by Chace Verity

Hard to Find by Chace Verity

Hard to Find by Chace Verity. Unexpected Friendship: Kelsey makes a new friend when she is dragged into a haunted house one night. Pearls: Once friends, now enemies, two princesses start a tense correspondence. One Last Game: The night before high school graduation, Court wants to get their friends back together to recreate a part of their childhood hide’n’seek games, even if that means seeing their ex-BFF again. A Place To Rest: The afterlife isn’t quite what Sam expected, but at least it has great people.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Amnesia
  • Recreational drug use
  • Death of a parent mentioned