Tag Archives: Murder & Attempted Murder

Beyond the Thistles by Samantha Young

It’s been a long time since Walker Ironside left behind Scotland and the memories that haunt him. Yet after years of traveling the world as a bodyguard, Walker misses his homeland enough to return. To a village in the Scottish Highlands that plays host to an exclusive members-only club, Ardnoch Estate. If not happy, Walker is content working with the elite security at the club and maintaining his bachelor lifestyle. What he doesn’t need is distraction in the form of the enticing but too-young newcomer, single mother Sloane Harrow. Sloane never imagined she’d get pregnant at sixteen. Or that a decade later she’d escape from… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Attempted rape
  • Domestic violence
  • Death from an overdose mentioned
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Cancer mentioned
  • Murder
  • Gun violence

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counsellor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found. As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Statutory rape mentioned
  • Domestic violence
  • Death of children
  • Murder recounted
  • Drowning

The Half-Life of Ruby Fielding by Lydia Kang

Brooklyn, 1942. War rages overseas as brother and sister Will and Maggie Scripps contribute to the war effort stateside. Ambitious Will secretly scouts for the Manhattan Project while grief-stricken Maggie works at the Navy Yard, writing letters to her dead mother between shifts. But the siblings’ quiet lives change when they discover a beautiful woman hiding under their back stairs. This stranger harbours an obsession with poisons, an affection for fine things, and a singular talent for killing small creatures. As she draws Will and Maggie deeper into her mysterious past…. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Depression & anxiety
  • Suicide & attempted suicide
  • Murder

Opium and Absinthe by Lydia Kang

New York City, 1899. Tillie Pembroke’s sister lies dead, her body drained of blood and with two puncture wounds on her neck. Bram Stoker’s new novel, Dracula, has just been published, and Tillie’s imagination leaps to the impossible: the murderer is a vampire. But it can’t be—can it? A ravenous reader and researcher, Tillie has something of an addiction to truth, and she won’t rest until she unravels the mystery of her sister’s death. Unfortunately, Tillie’s addicted to more than just truth; to ease the pain from a recent injury, she’s taking more and more laudanum and some in her…. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Rape mentioned
  • Drug abuse
  • Murder

She’s Not Sorry by Mary Kubica

Meghan Michaels is trying to find balance between being a single mom to a teenage daughter and working as a full time nurse. While on duty at the hospital one day, a patient named Caitlin arrives in a coma with a traumatic brain injury, having jumped from a bridge and plunging over twenty feet to the train tracks below. But when a witness comes forward with shocking details about the fall, it calls everything they know into question. Was Caitlin  pushed  and if so, by whom and why? Meghan has always tried to stay emotionally detached from her patients, but this time… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Domestic violence
  • Divorce recounted
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Unplanned pregnancy
  • Hospitalisation for a traumatic brain injury & coma sustained in an attempted suicide mentioned

How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

It’s 1965 and teenage Frances Adams is at an English country fair with her two best friends. But Frances’s night takes a hairpin turn when a fortune-teller makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day, Frances will be murdered. Frances spends a lifetime trying to solve a crime that hasn’t happened yet, compiling dirt on every person who crosses her path in an effort to prevent her own demise. For decades, no one takes Frances seriously, until nearly sixty years later, when Frances is found murdered, like she always said she would be. In the present day, Annie Adams has been… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Domestic violence
  • Murder

The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill

When Theodosia Benton abandons her career path as an attorney and shows up on her brother’s doorstep with two suitcases and an unfinished novel, she expects to face a few challenges. Will her brother support her ambition or send her back to finish her degree? What will her parents say when they learn of her decision? Does she even have what it takes to be a successful writer? What Theo never expects is to be drawn into a hidden literary world in which identity is something that can be lost and remade for the sake of an audience. When her mentor, a highly successful… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Attempted paedophilia & child sexual assault recounted
  • Attempted sexual assault by a teacher recounted
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Murder & attempted murder by gun & knife violence
  • Police violence (shooting)

Context : The protagonist was nearly assaulted by a paedophile when she was 10 years old, but her brother stabbed her attacker and saved her.

Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson

When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out. The program is a who’s who of crime writing royalty: the debut writer (mc!), the forensic science writer, the blockbuster writer, the legal thriller, the literary writer, the psychological suspense writer. But when one of us is murdered, the remaining authors quick… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child sexual abuse, implied
  • Sexual assault mentioned
  • Murder
  • Poisoning
  • Death of children and spouse in a fatal car accident

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate. I’m Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I’d killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let’s get started. Everyone in my family has killed someone. My brother. My stepsister. My wife. My father. My mother. My sister… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Suicide
  • Alcohol consumption & drug use (on-page)
  • Graphic physical injury & emesis
  • Death of a child recounted
  • Murder
  • Gun violence
  • Torture (off-page)
  • Kidnapping
  • Incarceration recounted (secondary character)

Armada by Ernest Cline

Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. Dreaming that the real world could be a little more like the countless science-fiction books, movies, and videogames he’s spent his life consuming. Dreaming that one day, some fantastic, world-altering event will shatter the monotony of his humdrum existence and whisk him off on some grand space-faring adventure. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little escapism, right? After all, Zack tells himself, he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. He knows that here in the real world, aimless teenage gamers with anger issues don’t get chosen to save.. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Alcohol consumption & drug use (on-page)
  • Gun violence