Deep Down by Mia Hopkins

Resilient and disciplined, tsunami survivor Eve Ono moves to California from Japan looking for a position as a sushi chef. When she’s suddenly fired from her restaurant job, desperation drives her to find work on a fishing boat despite her fears of the ocean. To make matters worse, she’s stuck in close quarters with her new captain—a man whose raw physicality drives her out of her mind with lust. Free-spirited and roguish, Sam Lamont is a commercial fisherman aboard his own dive boat, the Bravado. When he makes a bad deal with a deadly loan shark who threatens to… Read more.

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Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Hospitalisation
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) & trauma
  • Panic attacks (on-page)
  • Death of grandparents in a tsunami recounted
  • Shark attack (on-page)

Fire Storm by Nancy Mehl

When FBI profiler Kaely Quinn’s mother is diagnosed with cancer, Kaely takes time off work to go to Dark Water, Nebraska, to help her brother care for their mother. Upon her arrival, she learns of a series of fires in the small town, attributed by the fire chief to misuse of space heaters in the frigid winter. But Kaely is skeptical, and a search for a pattern in the locations of the fires bolsters her suspicions. After yet another blaze devastates a local family, Kaely is certain a serial arsonist is on the loose. Calling upon her partner from St. Louis, Noah Hunter, and her brother’s firefighter neighbor who backs Kaely’s suspicions… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parent with cancer, including mentions of hospitalisation
  • Suicide mentioned (brief)
  • Gun violence
  • Fire & arson (theme), including murder by arson recounted, mentions of death in a fire, and hospitalisation for smoke inhalation/burns
  • Explosion (grain elevator) mentioned

The Tenant by Freida McFadden

Blake Porter is riding high, until he’s not. Fired abruptly from his job as a VP of marketing and unable to make the mortgage payments on the new brownstone that he shares with his fiancée, he’s desperate to make ends meet. Enter Whitney. Beautiful, charming, down-to-earth, and looking for a room to rent. She’s exactly what Blake’s looking for. Or is she? Because something isn’t quite right. The neighbors start treating Blake differently. The smell of decay permeates his home, no matter how hard he scrubs. Strange noises jar him awake in the middle of the night. And soon Blake fears someone knows his darkest secrets…

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Infidelity
  • Suicide
  • Blood & gore depiction including body horror, emesis and medical content
  • Hospitalisation
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Murder
  • Animal death (fish)

Halfway Normal by Barbara Dee

Norah Levy has just completed two years of treatment for leukemia and is ready to go back to the “real world” of middle school. She knows it’ll be tricky—but like the Greek mythological characters she read about while she was sick, Norah’s up for any challenge. But seventh grade turns out to be harder than she thought. Norah’s classmates don’t know what to make of her. Her best friend, Harper, tries to be there for her, but she doesn’t get it, really—and is hanging out with a new group of girls. Norah’s other good friend, Silas, is avoiding her. What’s that about, anyway? When Norah… Read more.

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Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental divorce
  • Protagonist is in remission for leukemia
  • Discussions of past hospitalisation & medical treatment

Accidentally in Love by Danielle Jackson

Accidentally in Love by Danielle Jackson

As office manager of the city’s leading luxury boudoir and pinup photography studio, lovable grump Samantha Sawyer has everything under control. With an eventful summer season on the horizon, Sam is balancing a hectic workload while preparing the Buxom Boudoir “Photobus,” a vintage coach bus converted into a mobile photobooth and meeting space, to make the rounds at Chicago’s bustling summer street festival roster. Sam’s busy schedule makes avoiding the difficult parts of her life much easier, but there’s one person who can see right through her to-do lists and icy façade, really see her. A lot has changed… Read more.

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Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcohol consumption
  • Heart attack (secondary character)
  • Protagonist with Graves’ Disease (an autoimmune thyroid condition), including mentions of medical issues, hospitalisation, scarring, and weight gain

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Sixty-year-old self-proclaimed tea expert Vera Wong enjoys nothing more than sipping a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy ‘detective’ work on the internet (AKA checking up on her son to see if he’s dating anybody yet). But when Vera wakes up one morning to find a dead man in the middle of her tea shop, it’s going to take more than a strong Longjing to fix things. Knowing she’ll do a better job than the police possibly could – because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands – Vera decides it’s down to her to catch… Read more.

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Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Spousal emotional, verbal & financial abuse recounted
  • Dead bodies
  • Hospitalisation
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a sibling
  • Death of a spouse
  • Murder

One Way or Another by Kara McDowell

The average person makes 35,000 decisions every single day. That’s about 34,999 too many for Paige Collins who lives in debilitating fear of making the wrong choice. The simple act of picking an art elective is enough to send her into a spiral of what ifs. What if she’s destined to be a famous ceramicist but wastes her talent in drama club? What if there’s a carbon monoxide leak in the ceramics studio and everyone drops dead? (Grim, but possible!) That’s why when Paige is presented with two last-minute options for Christmas vacation, she’s paralyzed by indecision… Read more.

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Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Anxiety & panic attacks
  • Sclerosis & hypothyroidism mentioned
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Hospitalisation
  • Car accident

The Guilt Trip by Sandie Jones

Rachel and Noah have been friends since they met at university. While they once thought that they might be something more, now, twenty years later, they are each happily married to other people, Jack and Paige respectively. Jack’s brother Will is getting married, to the dazzling, impulsive Ali, and the group of six travel to Portugal for their destination weekend. Three couples.
As they arrive at a gorgeous villa perched on a cliff-edge, overlooking towering waves that crash on the famous surfing beaches below at Nazaré, they try to settle into a weekend of fun. While Rachel is looking forward to getting to know her future… Read more.

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Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Fatphobia & body-shaming
  • Infidelity
  • Alcohol consumption & drug use
  • Hospitalisation
  • Death of a friend
  • Car accident

Break to You by Neal Shusterman, Debra Young and Michelle Knowlden

Adriana knows that if she can manage to keep her head down for the next seven months, she might be able to get through her sentence in the Compass juvenile detention center. Thankfully, she’s allowed to keep her journal, where she writes down her most private thoughts when her feelings get too big. Until the day she opens her journal and discovers that her thoughts are no longer so private. Someone has read her writings—and has written back. A boy who lives on the other side of the gender-divided detention center. A boy who sparks a fire in her to write back… Read more.

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Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Hospitalisation
  • Death of a parent
  • Poisoning
  • Incarceration (juvenile detention)
  • Bullying

The Champions by Kara Thomas

It was the deaths of five cheerleaders that made the town of Sunnybrook infamous. Eleven years later, the girls’ killer has been brought to justice, and the town just wants to move on. By the time Hadley moves to Sunnybrook, though, the locals are more interested in the Tigers, the high school’s championship-winning football team. The Tigers are Sunnybrook’s homegrown heroes–something positive in a town with so much darkness in its past. Hadley could care less about football, but shortly after she gets assigned to cover the team’s latest championship bid for the school newspaper, one of the Tigers is poison… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual assault & gang rape
  • Domestic violence
  • Infidelity
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drugging
  • Hospitalisation
  • Emesis
  • Gun violence
  • Bullying & hazing mentioned