Riley Sager dedicates his new killer thriller Lock Every Door (Penguin Dutton, digital galley) to Ira Levin, setting up apartment-sitter Jules Larsen in the Bartholomew, an ominous Manhattan high-rise. Out of a job and a boyfriend, Jules is delighted to stay in the gargoyle-studded building overlooking Central Park where her favorite girlhood novel took place. The rules are strict to protect the privacy of the wealthy residents, but it isn’t until fellow apartment-sitter Ingrid disappears that Jules begins to probe the Bartholomew’s sinister history. As with best-sellers Final Girls and The Last Time I Lied, Sager twists familiar tropes to keep readers guessing and reading. Pages fly by.
Megan Miranda (All the Missing Girls) also knows how to twist plots and play with memory and perception, as proven by The Last Houseguest (Simon and Schuster, digital galley). In the Maine resort town of Littleport, wealthy summer visitor Sadie Loman picks local girl Avery Greer to be her bestie, which is why Avery doesn’t believe Sadie committed suicide last summer. The narrative hopscotches between past and present, as Avery, who works as a property manager for the Lomans, fends off suspicions that she was somehow involved in Sadie’s fatal fall from the cliffs. Miranda deftly depicts class tensions and the small-town dynamics of the summer season.
A female friendship is also at the center of Nancy Thayer’s Surfside Sisters (Ballantine, digital galley), but this is leisurely beach book, no murders involved. Successful novelist Keely Green is reluctant to return to Nantucket when her widowed mother becomes ill because it means seeing her one-time best friend Isabelle. Growing up, the two both dreamed of becoming writers, but a betrayal during college set them on different paths. Thayer’s linear narrative follows Keely as she overcomes past obstacles, mainly her family’s skidding finances, and confronts new ones, like the return of her longtime crush, Isabelle’s brother Sebastian.
Queen Bee (Morrow, digital galley) is another of Dorothea Benton Frank’s winning tall tales of Lowcountry South Carolina. On Sullivan’s Island, Holly McNee Jensen works part-time at the library, tends her beloved bees and immerses herself in the lives of next-door neighbor and single dad Archie and his two young sons. This helps her escape the endless demands of her hypochondriac mother, dubbed “Queen Bee” by Holly and her married sister Leslie, who returns home when her handsome husband decides he’s into cross-dressing. There’s high drama as Archie plans to marry a snob with no use for kids, Leslie and her headstrong mother head for Las Vegas, and Holly tells all to her bees, who weaponize. Queen Bee may be implausible, but it’s also sweetly funny.
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 