9 Books to Cuddle Up With This Winter
While I do enjoy the holidays — I’m not a monster, after all — there is something that I don’t love about it.
How fucking busy it is.
All too often, it seems as if the stretch of days that fill November and December are as hectic as they are perennially dreary.
From brining the turkey to finding a perfect time to visit Santa at the mall, there is rarely an opportunity to eke out any me time.
This year, I made a concerted effort to resolve that issue, taking on less and deliberately slowing down more.
And, in retrospect, I am oh so glad I did.
For one thing, working on my ability to prioritize and, ultimately, say no once in a while afforded me time to read some of the stellar books that launched in November and December.
If you’re looking to build your new years TBR, here are the 9 we think absolutely deserve your attention.
9. Raven Lane
by Amber Cowie
Release Date - November 12, 2019
Genre - Psychological Thriller
Your world can change in an instant.
That’s a truism that Benedict Warner learns the veracity of when, as he backs out of his driveway, he collides with a neighbor who was biking by.
This incident would be a tragedy in any neighborhood, but on the close-knit Raven Lane the collision — and, even more so, the neighbor’s resulting death — has even longer-lasting repercussions.
When the police start to investigate the death of neighbor and novelist, Torn, they quickly discover that he had been carrying on an affair with Esme, Benedict’s wife.
Growing increasingly doubtful that what happened was actually an accident after all, the police dig further, unearthing secrets that had long ago been buried and reigniting fiery scandals that threaten to engulf the well-appointed houses that dot Raven Lane, residents and all.
A slow-burn thriller that leaves you pondering whether you really can trust the people you call neighbors, Raven Lane contains a twisty tale of thickly veiled tumult, discord, and resentment.
8. Tell Me No Lies
by Shelley Noble
Release Date - November 5, 2019
Genre - Historical Mystery
Lady Philomena ‘Phil’ Dunbridge might be recently minus one husband, but she’s certainly not down for the count.
She came to New York City to socialize, and mingle she shall. It is, after all, the Gilded Age. Parties abound and there is entertainment aplenty.
But when a mystery throws itself at her feet she feels like she has little option but to divert her attention to solving it.
Her attention to the case is particularly important given the man who died was a young business tycoon, the reverberations of his death are sure to be felt on Wall Street.
When she starts digging for answers, what she unearths are scandals. But she remains undaunted, as she knows that the power to solve this mystery rests with her and her alone.
Depicting a powerful woman in a time when being a woman of power wasn’t so fashionable, Tell Me No Lies transports readers back in time and gives them a protagonist they can root for.
7. Just Watch Me
by Jeff Lindsay
Release Date - December 3, 2019
Genre - Thriller
Lots of people dislike the elusive .1%, bemoaning the fact that these few have so much while the rest of us scrimp and save, making a meal out of ramen to ensure the Netflix account doesn’t get suspended.
But Riley Wolfe goes far beyond just not really liking the uber-wealthy: he actively hates them. As luck would have it, Riley is a cunning thief — so he can actually hit these hoarders where it hurts. While he’s not determined to use violence in his wealth redistribution, he’s not opposed to it, either.
Addicted to tackling impossible challenges, Riley plans to steal the Crown Jewels of Iran, a collection of baubles worth billions. Though, as you would expect, these gems are well guarded by both man and machine, Riley is undaunted.
Making success even less likely, someone is on to him. A dogged cop is certain that Riley is planning something big and determined to be the one to bring him down.
Understanding what he’s up against, Riley enlists help — this time in the form of a beautiful art forger.
But even with this assistance, success looks far from sure.
In fact, there is only one thing of which Riley is certain: whatever happens, it’s going be major. Major success or major failure, he doesn’t know.
From the author of the Dexter series, Just Watch Me allows readers to slip into the shoes of a Robin-Hood-esque “villian” that you won’t be able to stop rooting for.
6. If I Had Two Lives
by A.B. Whelan
Release Date - November 14, 2019
Genre - Thriller
Vicky Collins’ life is certainly not without stress.
As a successful FBI agent, she is busy in her own right. Add to that the strain of keeping up with her boyfriend, who is both a real estate entrepreneur and social media famous, and it becomes almost impossible not to feel stretched a bit thin.
But she’s happy.
And successful.
And doing what she’s always wanted to do.
When she’s recruited for a special unit of the FBI — one in which she will have access to all of the most engaging, most important cases — it looks like things will only get better.
Her first assignment as a new member of this division is to capture a serial killer. She knows she has to move fast, because this killer is truly targeting those most vulnerable, piggybacking off of the work of other ritualistic murders who came before him.
As if the added emotional strain of this new position and the intense cases it provides isn’t enough, Collins’ personal life becomes more complicated when she discovers something she never expected. After a routine DNA screening, she’s informed that she has a genetic sibling — a brother she never knew.
The inability to leave a mystery unsolved a key part of her brand, Collins can’t help but seek out this brother. But, when she does, she finds that his life has certainly been far from idyllic. She keeps digging with trepidation, as the further she digs the more horrible the truths she unearths prove to be.
With a likable protagonist and two compelling mysteries running parallel through this novel, readers will likely find themselves staying up past bedtime to finish.
5. The Dead Girls Club
by Damien Angelica Walters
Release Date - December 3, 2019
Genre - Thriller
All children go through a phase in which they adopt interesting hobbies. I, as I have mentioned on several occasions, curated a decorative soap collection and, when asked about it, would tell people it was a “clean hobby.” — I… didn’t have many friends.
But my pastime seems essentially normal when compared to the activity preferred by Heather Cole and her friends when they, like me, came of age in the 90’s.
With a band of obviously ballsy friends, Heather formed the Dead Girls Club, a macabre organization in which the girls shared stories about serial killers and monsters.
It all seemed like good — albeit nightmare-inducing — fun.
Until her friend, Becca, started insisting one of the characters about which they gossiped — The Red Lady — was real.
Becca truly believed what she was saying. And, for that, she gave her life.
Though 30 years have passed since Becca died, Heather has — quite logically — kept the truth of what happened on that night a secret.
Heather has good reason to keep the truth under wraps, after all, as it was on that night that Heather discovered that The Red Lady is real.
And it was on that night that Heather killed her friend.
But when a long-lost necklace arrives in the mail, Heather realizes that someone else knows what happened all those years ago.
Someone who might not be as dedicated to keeping the truth hidden as Heather has been.
Twisty and terrifying, this read keeps you guessing until the very end. You’ll leave this novel thankful both that you’re no longer a teenage girl and that you spent your early 90s youth watching VHSs of Full House instead of secreting off with your creeptastic friends and dabbling in the dark arts.
4. Get a Life, Chloe Brown
by Talia Hibbert
Release Date - November 5, 2019
Genre - Romance
There’s nothing like a brush with death to get you working on your bucket list.
Though she previously thought she was too young to worry about what she wanted to do before she died before, when computer nerd Chloe Brown has her own near-miss — and later discovers that she has a chronic illness — she decides she’d better be more pragmatic and actually get on it.
So she pens her list.
Unfortunately, all of the items on it involve her learning how to break the rules. Given that she’s dedicated all of her pre-near-death-experience life to coloring carefully between the lines, she’s not exactly sure how to be bad.
When she realizes she won’t be able to accomplish her goals alone, she decides to enlist some help.
Thankfully, she knows just the guy: sexy and oh-so-good-at-being bad Redford ‘Red’ Morgan, a handyman by trade and promiscuous sex god by hobby. Surely, he will be able to help her accomplish her unorthodox, albeit important-to-her, life goals.
But when what started as a simple, goal-defined partnership threatens to morph into so much more, Chloe finds herself forced to confront her privileged path and unexpectedly invited into Red’s carefully guarded world.
The perfect mixture of deeply emotional and incredibly humorous, this Get a Life, Chloe Brown might start out as a romance, but it ultimately becomes something so much more.
3. Not the Girl You Marry
by Andie J. Christopher
Release Date - November 12, 2019
Genre - Romance / New Adult Fiction
Regardless of who the dumper ends up being when a relationship makes its final death rattle, few people embark on a romance hoping it will end.
But Jack Nolan is one of those few people. When he starts dating Hannah Mayfield he does so with a clear goal in mind: to get her to dump him.
Though journalist Jack always planned to write about stuff that matters, for years he’s been relegated to pumping out flashy and unimportant articles for an internet media company. But now he has a chance to change all of that.
His boss promises him that he will finally get the opportunity to sink his literary teeth into something that matters… if he writes an article on how to lose a girl first.
As fate would have it, though Hannah has everything that Jack desires in a partner, she’s the girl he needs to push away.
Normally, getting Hannah to pull the plug on a relationship wouldn’t be too much of a challenge. But, unluckily for Jack, she has a vested interest in staying in this one for a bit.
Though she’s been successful in building her reputation as an event planner, her boss is reluctant to trust her with one high ticket item: weddings.
By staying with Jack, no matter how distasteful the relationship may become, Hannah hopes to show her boss that she’s not as commitment-phobic as she might appear to be.
As you would pretty much expect, though they enter the relationship with competing motives, both Jack and Hannah quickly start to realize that this might be more than just a ruse after all.
A gender-swapping retelling of the rom-com-classic How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days, Not the Girl You Marry starts out as an adorable and light tale and morphs into something much deeper.
2. Regretting You
by Colleen Hoover
Release Date - December 10, 2019
Genre - Romance / Literary Fiction
A soon-to-be high school senior, 17-year-old Morgan is heading off to a late summer grad party with her boyfriend, Chris. Tagging along is her sister, Jenny, and Jenny’s boyfriend, Jonah.
Though she initially expects the night to be one of frivolities, it becomes anything but. While in transit to the party, she realizes she’s forgotten something. Specifically, she’d forgotten that she was supposed to have her period weeks prior.
Suddenly distracted by the fact that she might be gestating a baby, she finds partying next to impossible.
And, when an unwitting Chris gets drunk and encourages her to do the same, she finds herself feeling trapped — trapped in this party, trapped in this life. Thankfully Jonah, who shares her calm, quiet, reflective demeanor, gets her through what is an unavoidably fraught night.
Flash forward seventeen years.
Though she can still remember that night so long ago in vivid detail, Morgan, now the mother of 16-year-old Clara and long-time wife to Chris, doesn’t regret anything.
She’s happy with her simple, relaxing life. And as mismatched as they may have seemed initially, she and Chris have enjoyed a surprisingly happy union.
To make matters even more perfect, Jonah has recently moved back to town and is preparing to marry Jenny, with whom he shares an infant.
But then, as things have a way of doing, everything changes.
On what started out as a normal day, Morgan gets a call that will forever change her life. Chris has been involved in an accident.
A bad one.
But this accident, and the discoveries that come after, won’t just irrevocably alter Morgan’s life. They will also understandably impact Clara.
Having grown up in a sheltered, ostensibly happy family, Clara has little experience with heartache.
But she’s about to get a crash course — no pun intended.
Though this should be a time they lean on each other for support, the aftermath of the crash pushes Morgan and Clara apart, forcing mother and daughter to re-evaluate their relationship, renegotiate their familial roles, and reimagine their futures.
In typical Hoover fashion, the characters that fill this novel will capture your heart — and stomp it into the fucking ground, leaving you a weeping shell of the human you were before you started reading it. But… read it. Trust me.
1. The Wives
by Tarryn Fisher
Release Date - December 30, 2019
Genre - Psychological Thriller
As hard as being in a four-participant marriage might be for the average person to imagine, it isn’t a hypothetical conundrum our protagonist of The Wives needs to ponder. Instead, it is the position into which she has willingly put herself.
She already knew that her now-husband, Seth, had another wife when she met and married him years ago, but she willingly agreed to the seemingly-destined-to-end-in-heartbreak situation. As he explained it, his first wife didn’t want to have children while he desperately did. So she, his second wife, would fill that role, providing him with the sons and daughters he needed to be complete.
But when her pregnancy ended not just in miscarriage but in a fertility eliminating procedure, she agreed to allow Seth to take on a third, fertile wife.
Though inarguably unorthodox, the set up seemed oddly logical. And she felt strong enough to handle the understandable stress associated with putting herself in such a position.
But, as stress tends to do, it started wearing at her. And, when her wondering about the other wives turned to obsessing, she couldn’t stop herself from doing what she promised she never would: search for information about these women with whom she is sharing her husband.
Probably unsurprisingly, she quickly discovers that the pieces of information she unearths don’t fit together to form the logical and complete puzzle she expected. In fact, the more she digs, the more she begins to think that Seth might be lying not only to her but also to the other women with whom he has shared his heart and regularly shares his bed.
Featuring a protagonist with whom readers will easily empathize, The Wives twists and turns, scrambling all of your preconceived notions. It sinks its claws into you, not letting go until the very last shocking word.
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