Tag Archives: Mental Illness

Penitence by Kristin Koval

When a shocking murder occurs in the home of Angie and David Sheehan, their lives are shattered. Desperate to defend their family, they turn to small-town lawyer Martine Dumont for help, but Martine isn’t just legal counsel—she’s also the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian, a now-successful New York City criminal defense attorney. As Julian and Angie confront their shared past and long-buried guilt from a tragic accident years ago, they must navigate their own culpability and the unresolved feelings between them.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Infidelity
  • Alcoholism
  • Huntington’s Disease

Never Look Back by Alison Gaylin

When website columnist Robin Diamond is contacted by true crime podcast producer Quentin Garrison, she assumes it’s a business matter. It’s not. Quentin’s podcast, Closure, focuses on a series of murders in the 1970s, committed by teen couple April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy. It seems that Quentin has reason to believe Robin’s own mother may be intimately connected with the killings. Robin thinks Quentin’s claim is absolutely absurd. But is it? The more she researches the Cooper/LeRoy murders herself, the more disturbed she becomes by what she… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Substance addiction
  • Murder

Deep End by Ali Hazelwood

Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream. A Junior at Stanford and a student-athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury that almost ended her career. She has no time for relationships—at least, that’s what she tells herself. Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy, Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It’s how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus, with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental estrangement & abuse recounted
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) & trauma
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent recounted

I Am Still Alive by Kate Alice Marshall

After: Jess is alone. Her cabin has burned to the ground. She knows if she doesn’t act fast, the cold will kill her before she has time to worry about food. But she is still alive—for now. Before: Jess hadn’t seen her survivalist, off-the-grid dad in over a decade. But after a car crash killed her mother and left her injured, she was forced to move to his cabin in the remote Canadian wilderness. Just as Jess was beginning to get to know him, a secret from his past paid them a visit, leaving her father dead and Jess stranded. After: With only her father’s dog for company, Jess must forage and hunt for food, build shelter, and keep herself warm. Some… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism
  • Parental abandonment recounted
  • Depersonalization episode (on-page)
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Alcoholism & alcohol abuse mentioned
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction and emesis
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother & father
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Gun violence
  • Explosion
  • Car accident
  • Fire
  • Kidnapping & hostage situation
  • Blackmail
  • Drowning
  • Graphic animal death & dead bodies including the on-page death of a pet dog & hunting (theme)
  • Bullying recounted

Our Last Echoes by Kate Alice Marshall

Sophia’s first memory is of drowning. She remembers the darkness of the water and the briny taste as it fills her throat. She remembers the cold shock of going under. She remembers her mother pulling her to safety before disappearing forever. But Sophia has never been in the ocean. And her mother died years ago in a hospital. Or so she has been told her whole life. A series of clues have led Sophia to the island of Bitter Rock, Alaska, where she talked her way into a summer internship at the Landon Avian Research Center, the same center her mother worked at right before she died. There, she meets the disarmingly… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Memory loss
  • Panic attack
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Body horror
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent
  • Drowning
  • Animal death

What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall

Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes. For decades afterward, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Attempted sexual assault of a child
  • Infidelity
  • Hoarding
  • Attempted suicide & suicidal ideation recounted (secondary character)
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Attempted murder of a child recounted
  • Gun & knife violence
  • Blackmail

Bad Girl Reputation by Elle Kennedy

When former bad girl Genevieve West returns home for her mother’s funeral, she’s prepared to keep her distance from her ex-boyfriend, Evan Hartley. Their history is rife with turbulence. And passion. A heck of a lot of passion… which she’s trying desperately to forget. But it’s impossible not to run into Evan in the small coastal town where they once ran wild. And the moment she sees her gorgeous ex again, it’s clear to Gen that Evan is still as unruly, sexy, and irresistible as ever. This time around, however, she’s resolved to walk a new path. No more partying. No more foolish mistakes. Her plan is to temporarily remain in town to… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment
  • Alcoholism
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Drug abuse
  • Death of a parent

The Charlie Method by Elle Kennedy

College senior Charlotte Kingston is living two lives―and she’s nailing both of them. By day, she’s the perfect sorority girl, a STEM student in biomedical engineering, and the adopted daughter of an overachiever family. At night, she’s Charlie: a risk-taking daredevil looking for fun who finds herself chatting on a dating app with two anonymous hotties. Will Larsen may seem like the breezy boy next door, but his congressman father is a constant thorn in his side. After a scandal hits another Division 1 hockey program, Will’s dad is determined to distance his son from it, hiring a journalist to prove how squeaky-clean… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Anxiety & panic attacks
  • Terminal cancer

I’m Not Done with You Yet by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Jane is unhappy. A struggling midlist writer whose novels barely command four figures, she feels trapped in an underwhelming marriage, just scraping by to pay a crippling Bay Area mortgage for a house–a life–she’s never really wanted. There’s only ever been one person she cared about, one person who truly understood her: Thalia. Jane’s best and only friend nearly a decade ago during their Creative Writing days at Oxford. It was the only good year of Jane’s life–cobblestones and books and damp English air, heady wine and sweet cider and Thalia, endless Thalia. But then one night ruined everything. The blood-soaked night…. Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Toxic friendship
  • Emotional abuse & gaslighting
  • Infidelity mentioned
  • Social Anxiety
  • Heart attack mentioned
  • Murder by poisoning & stabbing
  • Strangulation

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies… especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold. Yet, even as Jade… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Sexual harassment
  • Nonconsensual voyeurism of children mentioned
  • Rape of a child
  • Incest (father-daughter)
  • Child pregnancy from rape
  • Parent with alcoholism
  • Attempted suicide & suicidal ideation
  • Self-harm
  • Graphic blood & gore depiction, including dead bodies
  • Emesis
  • Animal abuse