Husbands and Lovers by Beatriz Williams

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams— one of the world’s most… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Rape
  • Forced adoption recounted & discussed
  • Hospitalisation of a child from accidental death cap mushroom poisoning

Quicksilver by Callie Hart

Do not touch the sword. Do not turn the key. Do not open the gate. In the land of the unforgiving desert, there isn’t much a girl wouldn’t do for a glass of water. Twenty-four-year-old Saeris Fane is good at keeping secrets. No one knows about the strange powers she possesses, or the fact that she has been picking pockets and stealing from the Undying Queen’s reservoirs for as long as she can remember. But a secret is like a knot. Sooner or later, it is bound to come undone. When Saeris comes face-to-face with Death himself, she inadvertently reopens a… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Rape of the protagonist’s mother & sex work mentioned
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Forced sterilization recounted
  • Blood, injury & gore depiction including decapitation & emesis
  • Murder & torture
  • War themes
  • Extreme childhood poverty recounted

One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware

Lyla is in a bit of a rut. Her post-doctoral research has fizzled out, she’s pretty sure they won’t extend her contract, and things with her boyfriend, Nico, an aspiring actor, aren’t going great. When the opportunity arises for Nico to join the cast of a new reality TV show, The Perfect Couple, she decides to try out with him. A whirlwind audition process later, Lyla find herself whisked off to a tropical paradise with Nico, boating through the Indian Ocean towards Ever After Island, where the two of them will compete against four other couples—Bayer and Angel, Dan and Santana, Joel and Romi, and Conor and Zana—in order to… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Domestic violence
  • Suicide
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Blood & injury depiction and emesis
  • Murder by poisoning
  • Hurricane (on-page)
  • Drowning

The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden

She’s looking for the perfect man. He’s looking for the perfect victim. Sydney Shaw, like every single woman in New York, has terrible luck with dating. She’s seen it men who lie in their dating profile, men who stick her with the dinner bill, and worst of all, men who can’t shut up about their mothers. But finally, she hits the jackpot. Her new boyfriend is utterly perfect. He’s charming, handsome, and works as a doctor at a local hospital. Sydney is swept off her feet. Then the brutal murder of a young woman―the latest in a string of deaths across the coast―confounds police. The primary suspect? A mystery man who dates his victims before… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual harassment
  • Domestic abuse
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Death of a parent
  • Murder & torture
  • Stalking

Leather & Lark by Brynne Weaver

Contract killer Lachlan Kane wants a quiet life working in his leather studio and forgetting all about his traumatic past. But when he botches a job for his boss’s biggest client, Lachlan knows he’ll never claw his way out of the underworld. At least, not until songbird Lark Montague offers him a deal: use his skills to hunt down a killer and she’ll find a way to secure his freedom. The catch? He has to marry her first.  And they can’t stand each other. Indie singer-songwriter Lark is the sunshine and glitter that burns through every cloud and clings to every crevice that Lachlan Kane tries to… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child sexual abuse recounted
  • Physical child abuse & parental neglect recounted
  • Infidelty recounted
  • Panic attack, insomnia & claustrophobia
  • Blood, injury & gore depiction including concussion, gunshot wounds, the use of needles to sew mouths shut, and the removal of fingers and eyes from dead bodies
  • Death of a mother & father mentioned
  • Murder of a father in a home invasion
  • Murder of a terminally ill great-aunt from injection
  • Murder (theme) including the use of a car accident to kill someone
  • Torture
  • Home invasion, stalking & kidnapping discussed
  • Animal attack & injury

*Context : The female protagonist’s ex-partner cheated on her and messaged underage girls. A secondary character is also cheating on his partner with his children’s nanny. The female protagonist is a serial killer her targets rapists and paedophilias; the male protagonist is a contract killer. A dog bites the antagonist and recovers from an injury sustained when the antagonist kicks it in retaliation.

Not in Love by Ali Hazelwood

Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on, the financial stability she yearned for as a kid, and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down. Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period. Eli has his own reasons for pushing this deal through… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment recounted
  • Infidelity mentioned (secondary character)
  • Death of a parent from illness mentioned (off-page)
  • Childhood poverty & food insecurity recounted
  • Mention of an animal death during animal testing

A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen

Bound in an unwanted marriage, Freya spends her days gutting fish, but dreams of becoming a warrior. And of putting an axe in her boorish husband’s back. Freya’s dreams abruptly become reality when her husband betrays her to the region’s jarl, landing her in a fight to the death against his son, Bjorn. To survive, Freya is forced to reveal her deepest secret: She possesses a drop of a goddess’s blood, which makes her a shield maiden with magic capable of repelling any attack. It was foretold such a magic would unite the fractured nation of Skaland beneath the one who controls the shield maiden’s fate. Believing he’s… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual assault & Harassment
  • Blood & injury depiction
  • Murder
  • Fire
  • War themes

Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore

Ezra Friedman sees ghosts, which made growing up in a funeral home a bit complicated. It might have been easier if his grandfather’s ghost didn’t give him such scathing looks of disapproval as he went through a second, HRT-induced puberty, or if he didn’t have the pressure of all those relatives—living and dead—judging every choice he makes. It’s no wonder that Ezra runs as far away from the family business as humanly possible. But when the floor of his dream job drops out from under him and his mother uses the family Passover seder to tell everyone that she’s running away with the rabbi’s wife, Ezra finds himself back in the… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misgendering mentioned
  • Infidelity mentioned (secondary charactes)
  • Hospitalisation for injury & depiction of a dead body
  • Childbirth (on-page)
  • House fire

A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft

Lorelei Kaskel, a folklorist with a quick temper and an even quicker wit, is on an expedition with six eccentric nobles in search of a fabled spring. The magical spring promises untold power, which the king wants to harness to secure his reign of the embattled country of Brunnestaad. Lorelei is determined to use this opportunity to prove herself and make her wildest, most impossible dream come to become a naturalist, able to travel freely to lands she’s only ever read about. The expedition gets off to a harrowing start when its leader—Lorelei’s beloved mentor—is murdered in her quarters aboard their ship. The suspects are her… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Antisemitism discussed
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drugging
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction including dead body and emesis
  • Strangulation
  • Drowning
  • Fire

The Mayor of Maxwell Street by Avery Cunningham

Twenty-year-old Nelly Sawyer is the daughter of the alleged “wealthiest Negro in America,” a Kentucky horse breeder whose wealth and prestige catapults his family to the heights of the exclusive, elite Black society. After the unexpected death of her brother—the family’s presumed heir—Nelly goes from being virtually unknown to a premier debutante overnight. But Nelly has aspirations beyond society influence and marriage. For the past year, she has worked undercover as an investigative journalist for the Chicago Defender , sharing the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people living in the shadow of Jim… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Antisemitism
  • Racism & racial slurs (g slur)
  • Sexual assault
  • Blood & serious physical injury
  • Death of a sibling in a car accident recounted
  • Murder of parents in a fire
  • Gun violence
  • Threats of lynching & police violence