8 Must-Read Books Released in March
I’ve got to say, this March has been... unexpected.
Even at the start of the month — when there was some inkling that things might be a little wonky for a while — I never would have thought I would spend three weeks of the month hunkered down in my home with my kiddos, my laptop, and my books.
Though being temporarily shut in has had its perks — hello, long morning reading sessions with a french press of my favorite Boca Java coffee — it has certainly had its difficult moments as well.
It's crazy how faded the memories of things that used to be so normal — like sitting in a coffee shop and enjoying a book and a latte — have already become.
But though I can’t travel out into the world physically, I can always escape into books. And it's these bookish adventures that have made this time easier to take.
If you're seeking an escape that you can take while still sticking to your commitment to socially distance, consider some of the awesome reads that have hit shelves this month.
Here are the 8 we are most obsessed with.
8. Can't Hurry Love
by Melinda Curtis
Genre - Romance
Release Date - March 31, 2020
When Lola married Randy, she was blissfully in love and absolutely certain that they would grow old together.
But fate had other plans.
Randy died, leaving her a widow before she’d even lost her newlywed glow.
To make matters worse, following Randy’s death, Lola finds that he was less than upfront with her. Though she never expected Randy had secrets, she unhappily discovers that he was duplicitous almost right from the start.
Driven to uncover the truth, Lola turns to the local sheriff, Drew Taylor, for assistance. Despite Drew’s better judgement, he agrees to do what he can to help Lola find the answers she so desperately desires.
In reality, though, Lola is not sure she’ll ever find the truth — even with Sheriff Drew’s help. The only thing she is certain of is that she’s not willing to risk being burned again. To protect her heart, she swears off love, resigning herself to moving through the rest of her life alone. But her friends at the Sunshine Valley Widows Club don’t agree with her decision. In fact, they have their sights set on one bachelor in particular, the tempting Sheriff.
Much lighter than you would expect a novel featuring a widow seeking to uncover her dead husband’s falsehoods would be, this romance sparkles while tugging at the heart strings.
7. She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be
by J.D. Barker
Genre - Thriller
Release Date - March 31, 2020
Jack Thatcher first met Stella, a spooky little girl sitting alone — again, spookily — on a bench in a cemetery — which I think we can all agree is the spookiest place one can sit. Shortly after he meets her, she disappeared. Obviously, this is not an encounter he can forget, so he looks for her. But he’s unsuccessful in his hunt until exactly one year later.
Meanwhile, Detective Faustino Brier is investigating a horrible murder. Paradoxically, the victim is covered head to toe in burns, yet his clothes are pristine. Initially, Detective Brier is worried that this is but the start of a string of similarly confusing murders. But as days, then weeks, then months pass without another death, he begins to think he was wrong. Then, exactly one year later, he finds a new body with strikingly similar injuries.
And somewhere, far away, in a hidden lab, a little boy who knows himself only as “Subject D” grows and develops. Isolated from everyone, he has only his thoughts, and they are horrible thoughts indeed.
Complex and stunningly well-paced, this newest novel by J.D. Barker is the Stephen-King-esque read you need to pluck from your shelf while under quarantine.
6. You Are Not Alone
by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
Genre - Thriller
Release Date - March 3, 2020
Shay Miller is generally dissatisfied.
With everything.
Her love life is lackluster.
Her job is unfulfilling.
Her friendships are, well, non-existent.
So when she meets the Moore sisters, it seems like things are — uncharacteristically — going right for her. Jane and Cassandra Moore live a life that would be envious to everyone, but particularly to Shay who has little about which to be excited.
Understandably, Shay is eager to get close to these elusive sisters. And, quite surprisingly, they seem just as excited about the prospect of forming bonds with her.
But the closer Shay becomes to the duo, the more she is being asked to give up. This leaves her pondering, is there anything she wouldn’t sacrifice to fortify this new friendship? What if she had to, quite literally, die for these sisters?
A clean, compelling thriller by a proven co-author team, this novel delights readers with a knock-you-on-your-ass twist that you won’t see coming.
5. Unfollow Me
by Charlotte Duckworth
Release Date - March 10, 2020
Genre - Domestic Thriller
And a vlog.
And social media.
And due at least in part to the fact that the emotions she shared were ones to which other mommies could so easily relate, she managed to build quite the following.
While some women, certainly, follow her casually, others have all but made a career of it, building the viewing of Violet’s newest videos into their schedule as consistently as they do mandatory obligations like work and grocery shopping.
It is these most dedicated followers that are hit hardest when Violet suddenly disappears one day, taking down her social media profiles and her blog.
Lily, a single mom working as a veritable errand girl at a startup in London, feels the absence of Violet most acutely. Though she loves her son, Archie, she has been struggling for quite some time to find things to enjoy in her own life and has taken to living vicariously through Violet.
Now Violet’s absence leaves a gaping hole in Lily’s existence. One that she struggles to fill just as she struggled to find normalcy again after the death of her husband, Archie’s father, years earlier.
Though she’s in a very different place in her life than Lily, Yvonne has also built spending time on Violet’s channels into her daily routine. Relatively nearly married to a younger man, Yvonne and her husband are struggling to conceive their first child.
And as she plows through failed treatment after failed treatment, she watches Violet’s lovely life, so different — and more perfect — than her own, with an almost pathological regularity.
While the logical response to an online presence disappearing would be simple to pluck another personality from the abundance available online, neither Lily nor Yvonne are willing to do this.
Lily is dedicated to finding out what happened to Violet and is willing to do anything, no matter how questionably morale, to learn the truth.
Yvonne also feels compelled to solve this unexpected mystery. Though her motivation is different. She’s fueled by the knowledge that she and Violet have a shared history and that, in truth, she may have some culpability in her disappearance from the public eye.
With skillful pacing and deeply developed, albeit flawed as fuck, characters, this Charolette Ducksworth novel leaves readers guessing until the very end.
4. Lost At Sea
by Erica Boyce
Genre - Crime Fiction / Thriller
Release Date - March 3, 2020
Commercial fishing is a notoriously dangerous profession.
So Ella shouldn’t be completely shocked when her fisherman father, John Staybrook, goes missing while out on the rough open water in the middle of the night.
But regardless of the fact that she should have allowed for the possibility — or, really, the eventually — that she would lose her father to the sea, Ella simply can’t accept the reality that he’s gone.
There are too many lingering questions for her liking.
And so she sets out to answer them, hoping at best that she finds out that her father is somehow alive and at worst that she gets the closure she needs to move on with her life.
But as Ella starts hunting, answers prove to be less than forthcoming.
Too many people in the small Massachusetts town John Staybrook called home seem to be hiding something.
And no one can answer the most important question of all: why would an experienced fisherman go out to sea in the middle of a deadly storm?
There is much to love about this novel, but the setting is the absolute star. Lost At Sea is so effectively atmospheric that readers will all but smell the salty sea water that hangs in a mist over Boyce’s beautifully rendered town.
3. The Boy from the Woods
by Harlan Coben
Genre - Thriller
Release Date - March 17, 2020
Quite uncommonly, Wilde knows nothing about his early history. He knows only that he was found, alone, in the woods in 1986.
Officials could only guess at his age, placing him between six and eight years old. And Wilde himself could be of no help. Though he could speak and he was able to read, he knew neither how he acquired those skills nor how he came to live in the woods.
All he knew was that, as long as he could remember, he had been scavenging off the land and breaking into homes, providing for himself in a way that no young child should have to.
Fortunately, Wilde had a friend to help him transition into living in structured society. A boy he had met and played with in the woods prior to his discovery, named David.
David’s mother, Hester, a powerful though not yet prominent attorney, was understandably reluctant to believe her son’s tales of his friend in the woods. So she was as surprised as anyone when the boy her son had spoken of materialized and the mystery of his origins came to light.
Though it has been 30+ years since Wilde was found, the bond he built with David never weakened. So when David died in a tragic car accident, leaving behind a widow and a son, Matthew, Wilde understandably felt honor-bound to watch over them.
For Matthew, the difficulty of growing up fatherless has been tempered by the presence of both Wilde, a surrogate father, and Hester, a brash grandmother who tells it like it is everywhere — including on her cable news TV show Crimstein on Crime.
So when a classmate, Naomi, goes missing, Matthew knows immediately to whom he should turn. And when he shows up in his grandmother’s TV studio, she can tell something is seriously wrong.
Knowing that it must be important if Matthew is coming to her for help, she enlists the assistance of the eponymous Boy From The Woods, Wilde. Though much has changed in the three decades since he was plucked from the woods, Wilde remains an incredibly intuitive, uniquely skilled individual who can see clearly what others cannot.
But as Hester and Wilde work in tandem to find out what happened to Naomi, they discover that nothing is as it seems. Yet they persist, despite the powerful forces working against them and the inherent danger associated with continuing to ask questions that someone doesn’t want you to have the answers to.
A twisty thriller that takes readers on a ride that is eerily reminiscent of the contemporary world in which we are living, this Coben novel is a cut above the rest.
2. I'll Be Watching You
by Leslie A. Kelly
Release Date - March 31, 2020
Genre - Romantic Suspense
Like most women, the first time Jessica Jensen lost her heart, it was to a teen heart throb.
But unlike too many teen stars, the apple of Jessica’s eye, Reece Winchester, didn’t spontaneously combust under the bright lights of stardom. Though his youth wasn’t without trauma — including the death of his older sister who was, herself, a child star — Reece managed to prevail. Decades after his rocket to fame, he still works in the industry, though now as a writer/director.
Like Reece’s youth, Jessica’s was also rich in struggle. She spent many of her formative years bouncing from foster home to foster home. Like most children stuck in the painful cycle of the system, she saw things she never should have seen and had experiences she would rather forget.
Fortunately for Jessica, she eventually found a forever home. And, grounded by this sense of belonging, has finally started working towards her own goal of becoming a Hollywood screenwriter.
Given their similarly tumultuous childhoods, perhaps it was some prescient knowledge of their shared history of struggle — and not the bouncy ponytail holding her stunning red hair in place and voluptuous young body, not well hidden in a sports bra and leggings — that draws Reece to Jessica when he first sees her through the feed of a security camera while visiting an art gallery that he financed for his aunt.
But whatever the attraction, the draw Reece feels to Jessica is strong. Stronger, probably, than the feelings Jessica developed for him when watching him on the big screen all those years ago.
Though time has changed many things, Jessica still feels a lingering attraction to Reece, so when he approaches her for the first time at a gallery event months after he first admired her from afar, she is taken aback to say the least.
Not only had she spent many an adolescent night dreaming about him, she finds that he’s even better in person.
He’s strong and confident and assured and chivalrous in a way few men are.
And that should be it.
They are made for each other.
Happily ever after.
Roll the credits.
But it won’t be that easy for Jessica and Reece.
Though their love may seem written in the stars, there are forces working against them, threatening not just their blossoming relationship but their very lives. Someone does not like the direction in which Jessica and Reece’s relationship is headed. And this someone will stop at nothing to break their union before it’s even fully formed.
Can their love — and, more importantly, Jessica and Reece themselves — survive?
With a surprising depth of character development and an inarguably engaging plot, I’ll Be Watching You will capture readers’ attention and likely induce them to stay up past their bedtimes.
1. Hide Away
by Jason Pinter
Release Date - March 1, 2020
Genre - Thriller / Police Procedural
We meet the protagonist of Hide Away on the worst day of her life: the day she loses her husband.
Following this loss, we immediately fast forward half a decade.
Despite the passage of time, Rachel isn’t healed.
She’s changed — forever, probably — by this loss.
In the intervening years, she’s done her best to raise her two children as the single mother she never planned to be. When she wasn’t doing that, she was developing herself.
Changing herself from the soft, feminine, passive woman her husband knew to the hard, muscled, selectively aggressive woman she feels she must become in order to prevent another disaster from befalling her family.
Along with changing herself, Rachel relocated her family, leaving behind the ritzy Connecticut suburb in which she previously lived and moving to a far-flung suburb of Chicago.
In moving, she wanted not only a fresh start, but also a new, safe place to raise her children. But her confidence in the town’s safety is tested when Constance Wright, the former mayor, is found dead under a bridge, her body shattered on the hard frozen ice that, in just a few months, would be flowing water that may have cushioned her fall.
Rachel quickly realizes that, though this looks like a suicide, it’s likely anything but. And, newly obsessed with the concept of justice and the very Quantum-Leap-y idea of putting right what once went wrong, she gets involved.
But her involvement isn’t welcome.
The detectives assigned to the case, seasoned and world-worn John Serrano and his partner, acerbic and brutally honest Leslie Tally, certainly don’t want a civilian anywhere near their investigation.
Despite their attempts to steer Rachel back into her lane, she won’t be dissuaded.
She knows that someone murdered Constance.
She knows that that someone is still out there.
And she knows that, without her help, this case might go cold before the killer is ever found.
She’s so driven to solve the case, in fact, that she never stops to ponder whether finding Constance’s killer is really worth putting her family at risk all over again.
Somehow managing to be terrifying and hilarious and heartwarming all at the same time, Hide Away isn’t one to be missed.
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