I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018)

Subtitled: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. 

McNamara, who passed away a few years ago at age 46 and was married to Patton Oswalt, was obsessed with her DIY search to find the identity of the East Area Rapist in California. Very absorbing until the very end, where her assistants tried to piece together the remainder of her search after her death. She was a terrific writer, and it's a chilling story. Perfect for the myriad fans of true crime podcasts and amateur sleuthing. 

Meet Me at Beachcomber Bay by Jill Mansell (2017)

I always adore Jill Mansell and sometimes you just need to read a book about charming people falling in love, despite a few hiccups, in a beautiful British location. 

Let's see: There's a girl with a weird name, who has a contentious relationship with her stepsister, who meets a man on a plane, but loses contact, then he shows up as her stepsister's boyfriend but there's still attraction. So girl with weird name pretends to be dating her boss. who has his own hopeless (seeming!) love affair, PLUS a whole thing with his birth mom. Everything turns out beautifully, sigh.

CLEMENCY! The name is Clemency. Well, yeah.

The Stars In Our Eyes by Julie Klam (2017)

Subtitled: The Famous, the Infamous and Why We Care Too Much About Them. 

Pretty fun look at our obsession with celebrities. I think I've read an embarrassing number of books about celebrity culture, but Klam's stories about her own personal celebrity worship are relatable and enjoyable. Although this book gets a bit name-droppy, with celebrity friends describing their own brushes with fame. Dishy, fun,  and light vacation reading.

See also: But Enough About Me by Jancee Dunn (2006)

The Woman Who Wasn't There by Robin Fisher Gaby, Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr. (2012)

Subtitled: The True Story of an Incredible Deception

There a million stories that came out of the World Trade Center attacks--and not all are true. Tania Head's story of surviving the 9/11 attacks was gripping and horrifying and led to her becoming a celebrity in the survivors' rights movement. Only problem with her story? It wasn't true.

Gaby and Guglielmo tease out this compelling tale with fascinating inside detail. Intriguing, satisfying, and a very fast read. 

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc (2017)

Julie and James have recently bought a beautiful old home in the suburbs for an amazing price. But there's a few mysterious things they discover about the house--a strange sound they can't identify, mysterious secret compartments, their very unfriendly neighbor. And then things get even worse. 

Jemc does a beautiful job of establishing a truly creepy atmosphere and ramping things up without taking things too far. Very vivid and compelling. Also, this is one of the best horror covers ever. Matches the story perfectly! 

You'll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein (2016)

Memoir in short essay form by comedy writer and comedian Jessi Klein. Very funny essays on a range of topics from getting older, dating, Anthropologie, The Bachelor, infertility and becoming a stand-up comedian. 

This list makes it sound a bit vapid, but it's quite funny and truthy and clear-eyed. Delightful, really!

From the (Dating) Types essay: 

"Noses are of key importance. I need a large nose. Something with a bump. I cannot abide a small nose on anyone, really--men or women. I need the kind of nose that suggests some sort of Jewish/Italian/Greek/African influence. The kind of nose that says, 'At some point in the history of my people, we were forced to flee.'" (p. 94)

LOVE it.

The Real Thing by Ellen McCarthy (2015)

Subtitled: Lessons on Love and Life from a Wedding Reporter's Notebook.

McCarthy had the wedding beat at the Washington Post, and shares what she's learned from heaps and heaps of couples over the years. Divided into Dating, Commitment and Breakups, and including stories from her own life, this is a charming collection that includes gentle dating and love advice with tons of real-world examples (and a few schadenfreudeish examples too--which are the best!) This is a very sweet, sensible, and a little inspirational addition to the love and marriage section. 

Best Day Ever by Kaira Rouda (2017)

A very simple story: a married couple is driving to a romantic weekend getaway to a lake house. And yet ... As they drive, tension between them mounts and we learn they're both harboring secrets. 

Deliciously readable with beautifully unfolding tension and yes, a fascinatingly unreliable narrator. (I'm using ALL my adjectives on this one.)

Warm Bodies - Isaac Marion (2011)

I picked up this zombie romantic comedy purely because they made a movie of it and the trailer looked cute. By the way, isn't that cover great?

This is a very endearing zombie romantic comedy--yes, zombie romantic comedy--that tells the story of R, a zombie wandering around in a zombie vs. survivalist humans world. The story is told from R's point of view, and there are many laugh out loud moments. When he eats the brain of a young human and falls for his girlfriend Julie, it gets a bit more serious.

But throughout, it still has lovely touches of humor. Marion does a beautiful job of getting inside R's head and still showing what he looks and sounds like from the outside. It's thoughtful and philosophical about the end of the world in a way that most zombie, post-apocalyptic novels don't bother with--certainly not zombie movies anyway. R, Julie and her friend Nora are very endearing characters as are the complex leaders of the humans.

Really a great book and rather gentle and sweet for a book about zombies.

My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix (2016)

In 1988, Abby and Gretchen are in high school and are best friends. After a experiment with LSD after which Gretchen goes missing for an evening, Gretchen comes back and seems very different and very wrong. Abby tries to figure out what is wrong with her friend, and tries to get help from family, friends and other grownups, to no avail. 

As the dust jacket says, "Is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil?" Filled with pop culture references that will delight readers of a certain age (my age, btw), this is also a great horror novel and a great novel about friendship. It's an unexpected combination that works beautifully. 

Surprisingly insightful into the minds of teenage girls and all the trials and tribulations of friendship and of being a teen. It also has a yearbook design motif (probably used since Hendrix's Horrorstor used the IKEA catalog so effectively), which is a bit superfluous in this novel. Nonetheless, Hendrix powerfully captures just how powerless you are when you're a teen.

I adored this:

"Abby Rivers and Gretchen Lang were best friends, on and off, for seventy-five years, and there aren't many people who can say that. They weren't perfect. They didn't always get along. They screwed up. They acted like assholes. They fought, they fell out, they patched things up, they drove each other crazy, and they didn't make it to Halley's Comet. But they tried."

Aw!