Crime Book Club – The Vote is Open

The vote is now open for our September meeting read. The choices are books published in 2024. It feels like we’ve read quite a few older books recently, so wanted to check out the newish releases. As always read the blurbs and leave your choice in the comments. The vote closes at the end of Saturday 23rd August.

The next meeting is 8 p.m. BST Monday 15th September. If you’re not yet a member of the crime book club you can join up HERE, we’d love to have you.

The Teacher by Freda McFadden

Eve has a good life. She gets up each day, gets a kiss from her husband Nate, and heads off to teach math at the local high school. All is as it should be. Except…

Last year, Caseham High was rocked by a scandal involving a student-teacher affair, with one student, Addie, at its center. But Eve knows there is far more to these ugly rumors than meets the eye.

Addie can’t be trusted. She lies. She hurts people. She destroys lives. At least, that’s what everyone says.

But nobody knows the real Addie. Nobody knows the secrets that could destroy her. And Addie will do anything to keep it quiet.

Our Holiday by Louise Candlish

THERE’S TROUBLE IN PARADISE

Charlotte and Perry have owned their clifftop holiday home in Pine Ridge for years. They’ve worked hard for it – why shouldn’t they enjoy it? Even if the locals can’t afford to live in the village these days…

Now city friends Amy and Matt have bought a second home nearby and when the two families descend, they plan lazy days at the beach and evenings sipping rosé and watching the sun set from Charlotte’s summerhouse veranda.

But this summer is different. A group of locals – headed by the charismatic Robbie – will stop at nothing to make the second home owners pay for their holiday. By the end of their break, marriages will be torn apart, friendships shattered and crimes exposed.

And one of them will have lost their life.

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 win a cash prize.

But not long after they arrive on the deserted island, things start to go wrong. After the first challenge leaves everyone rattled and angry, an overnight storm takes matters from bad to worse. Cut off from the mainland by miles of ocean, deprived of their phones, and unable to contact the crew that brought them there, the group must band together for survival. As tensions run high and fresh water runs low, Lyla finds that this game show is all too real—and the stakes are life or death.

A Lethal Lady by Nekesa Afia

Louise Lloyd’s time away in Paris is everything she was hoping it would be until a shocking murder turns her entire world upside down.

Louise Lloyd is finally living the quiet life she’d longed for, working in a parfumerie by day and spending time with her new friends every night at the Aquarius club in Paris. When a desperate mother asks for help locating her artist daughter, Louise initially refuses to keep her hard-won but fragile peace intact. But the woman comes with a letter of introduction from an old friend in Harlem, and Louise realizes she has no choice but to do what she can to find the missing young woman.

The woman’s daughter, Iris Wright, is part of an elite social circle. Louise soon finds herself drawn into a world of privilege and ice-cold ambition—a young group of artists who will do anything to get ahead—but would they murder one of their own? With the help of some friends from home, Louise must untangle a web of lies, jealousy, and betrayal to find out what really happened to Iris while fighting to keep her new life from crashing down around her.

Finding Sophie by Imran Mahmood

Two parents, desperate to find their missing daughter, stand accused of murder. How far will they go to find the truth?

Someone is guilty.

For the last seventeen years, Harry and Zara King’s lives have revolved around their only daughter, Sophie. One day, Sophie leaves the house and doesn’t come home. Six weeks later, the police are no closer to finding her than when they started. Harry and Zara have questioned everyone who has ever had any connection to Sophie, to no avail. Except there’s one house on their block—number 210, across the street—whose occupant refuses to break his silence.

Someone knows what happened.

As the question mark over number 210 devolves into obsession, Harry and Zara are forced to examine their own lives. They realize they have grown apart, suffering in separate spheres of grief. And as they try to find their way back to each other, they must face the truth about their daughter: who she was, how she changed, and why she disappeared.

Someone will pay.

Told in the alternating perspectives of Harry and Zara, and in a dual timeline between the weeks after Sophie’s disappearance and a year later in the middle of a murder trial, Imran Mahmood’s taut yet profoundly moving novel explores how differently grief can be experienced even when shared by parents—and how hope triumphs when it springs from the kind of love that knows no bounds.

The Alone Time by Elle Marr

Fiona and Violet Seng were just children when their family’s Cessna crash-landed in the Washington wilderness, claiming the lives of their parents. For twelve harrowing weeks, the girls fended for themselves before being rescued.

Twenty-five years later, they’re still trying to move on from the trauma. Fiona repurposes it into controversial works of art. Violet has battled addiction and failed relationships to finally progress toward normalcy as a writer. The estranged sisters never speak about what they call their Alone Time in the wild. They wouldn’t dare—until they become the subject of a documentary that renews public fascination with the “girl survivors” and questions their version of the events.

When disturbing details about the Seng family are exposed, a strange woman claims to know the crash was deliberate. Fiona and Violet must come together to face the horrifying truth of what happened out there and what they learned about their parents and themselves. Before any other secrets emerge from the woods.