Reading List by Jennie for Late 2025 to Early 2026
This is an overdue roundup of what I’ve read; it’s also uninspiring, with seven of the ten books being C range. The theme is “books that I didn’t think were that good and also were kind of depressing.”
Wanting Daisy Dead by Sue Watson
This was an Amazon First Read. The blurb:
They all had a reason. Only one had the nerve.
Twenty years ago, student Daisy Harrington went out for the evening and never came home. Her body was found a week later. The killer was caught. Case closed.
Now, on what would have been her fortieth birthday, her five university housemates are invited to a weekend gathering. None of them want to go. But none of them can refuse—the invitation makes it clear that if they don’t attend, the past they’ve spent two decades hiding will finally come to light.
Because the man convicted of Daisy’s murder was innocent. And one of the five has known this all along. As the weekend unfolds, the truth threatens to finally be revealed…
They all wanted Daisy dead, but one wanted it more. The question is…who? And why?
This was a very weak read for me – unlikable characters and unbelievable twists. I can’t even bring myself to do more of a write up. I gave it a C-.
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Made You Look by Tanya Grant
I had this on my reader for a while – in spite of the setup being one I like, for some reason I wasn’t eager to start it. It ended up being pretty entertaining. A group of influencers are snowed in at a resort and then they start dying one by one. I never know why everyone doesn’t just stick together in this type of story but I guess the answer is – you wouldn’t have a story then. The resolution was fairly prosaic – with a limited number of characters (getting more limited as they are killed), the identity of the murderer is never going to be a *big* surprise, so it’s more about how it’s revealed and the reason, and of course the requisite twist. That was all pretty well done. My grade was B.
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Not Your Final Girl by Mikayla Randolph
This was very similar to the above book in structure – a group of people, an isolated house, and murders. In this one, they are all old friends with some shared guilt about a friend who is not there (though her look-alike younger sister is invited; weirdly, this is a scenario I’ve read at least twice in the last couple of years). The characters here – one in particular – are not especially likable, and yes, as in Made You Look, these folks go their separate ways WAY too much after several murders have occurred. The resolution and twist on this one was rather nasty, and the juxtaposition of it against Made You Look (without saying too much, it’s the difference between the bad guy getting away with it vs. justice triumphing) made me realize that I’m just basic enough to prefer the latter. My grade: C+.
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The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
This is my next-to-last read of Ware’s backlist, and it was a pretty strong one. It opens with Rowan in prison, writing a letter to an attorney and pleading for his help in her case: that of the murder of a child. We then go back to her arrival at a high-tech house in the Scottish Highlands, where she’s beginning a prestigious nannying position for Sandra and Bill. They promptly take off for a work project of Bill’s (not exactly devoted parents), leaving three girls in Rowan’s care: Maddie, who is hostile and creepy, the friendlier Ellie, and the baby Petra. Strange things quickly start to happen – bumps in the night, and Rowan discovers a locked poison garden on the property. The resolution here was well-done – I had not expected a certain element to the twist. As with several of the books in this batch, the ending was somewhat downbeat (and not just because, yes, one of the children dies). Still, I gave this a B+.
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Good Intentions by Marissa Waltz
I actually read this last year and don’t remember it terribly well, so let’s just do a blurb:
Even the best intentions can grow into obsession . . .
On the surface, Cady has the perfect life. She has a thriving luxury event-planning business, the man she’s loved since she was seventeen, and a social calendar she can barely keep up with. She also has Dana, her identical twin, her most trusted confidante. But when Dana dies suddenly, before Cady can say goodbye, everything shatters.
Yet to her family’s alarm, it isn’t grief for Dana that consumes her. It’s Morgan, a stranger Cady meets in the hospital waiting room that same day—a grieving mother whose tragedy mirrors her own. Cady doesn’t believe in coincidences. She becomes convinced that helping Morgan is the key to facing her sister’s death.
But is that really what she wants? Or is Cady drawn to Morgan for reasons far more complicated—and dangerous—than she’s willing to admit?
Sly, twisted, and irresistibly provocative, Good Intentions explores the moral gray zones we enter when the unthinkable happens—and the dark places obsession can take us.
I do remember that the twist was pretty over the top, not believable and kind of disturbing. I gave this a C+.
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Watch Us Fall by Christina Kovac
Lucy lives in a rambling Georgetown house with her three best friends from college. Lucy has a troubled past related to her mother’s disappearance when she was a teenager, but she’s doing well in the present – good job, steady boyfriend and good friends. When Addie, her closest friend in the house, begins seeing a mystery man, Lucy and the other girls are intrigued. But the relationship goes south and shortly afterward, the boyfriend – revealed to be a prominent local television reporter – goes missing. Police lean on Lucy and her friends, suspecting Addie’s involvement in the disappearance. Lucy becomes obsessed with finding the truth, which ends up being closer to home than expected. I gave this a B-; it was involving enough but nothing I really thought much about after, and the twist was kind of sad and downbeat.
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Yours Always by Corinne Sullivan
This one felt very blah and I gave it a C. Talia and Townsend reconnect after dating and being broken up by his dalliance with a girl named Amanda (Talia finds Amanda and Townsend in bed together). Now Amanda is missing and her sister Kaitlyn has come to town, suspecting that Townsend has done something nefarious. Talia, at the same time, seems to be being target by a stalker, and her friend and colleague Meena gets involved in trying to figure out who is targeting her. (Overinvolved, really, which makes her a suspect too.) Who did what to who? I didn’t really care that much (though my educated guess was correct). I didn’t really care about the characters enough to care about the impact.
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Dark is When the Devil Comes by Daisy Pearce
This was a strange one – sort of a combination of suspense and horror, and the combination didn’t work that well for me. Hazel comes home to her small English town; she’s recently divorced and house sitting for her parents while they’re on vacation. Hazel tries to reconnect with her sister Cathy, from whom she’s estranged. Then Hazel makes a bad choice and ends up captive of a madman. Cathy is angry at first to be stood up (she and Hazel had planned to get coffee), but evidence starts to suggests that Hazel didn’t disappear willingly. There were some creepy supernatural elements that I don’t remember well (I read the book a few months ago). I initially gave this a B- but I don’t remember it that fondly so I’m dropping the grade to a C.
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Kiss, Marry, Kill by Lori Gold
A bit of a change from my usual suspense/mystery train – this one is sort of magical realism romance, I guess? Three women – friends who started a business together – play a game – kiss, marry, kill is the PG version – and the next day they wake up in an alternate world. One, grieving her dead fiancé, finds she has kissed (and maybe more?) a younger co-worker she has a bit of a crush on. The next is married and suffering fertility struggles in “their world”, but she wakes up and finds herself married to an entirely different man, and very pregnant. The last has been having a secret affair; she wakes up in her lover’s apartment and finds his dead body. As the three work to understand what has happened and how to get back to their reality, secrets and tensions emerge. This was just okay; it was readable enough but I never engaged with the story or characters beyond the surface level. I gave it a C+.
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When She Returned by Lucinda Berry
Kate Bennett stumbles into a rural gas station eleven years after disappearing; she has a baby with her and she’s malnourished and injured. Kate’s devoted husband jumps in the car and drives from California to Montana to be reunited with his wife, bringing with him wife number two (Kate had long ago been declared dead) and the daughter who was barely more than a toddler when Kate disappeared.
This is another shifting timeline story; in the earlier timeline Kate is drawn into a cult by its magnetic leader, while in the present she tries to reintegrate into her family (awkward given that she’s living with her daughter, her husband and…his other wife).
This held my attention while I was reading it but it has plot holes big enough to drag a Mack truck through – chiefly, the fact that the creepy cult that Kate was first investigating (she was a reporter) then just hanging out with is not looked at all when she disappears. It was hard for the credibility of the story to come back from that one.
This was another C+, maybe edging down to a C. The twist at the end isn’t even really shocking, though it’s kind of downbeat and depressing (the theme of this crop of books).
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Yes, downbeat and depressing seems to be a good summation overall! I hope that your next batch of books will be more upbeat and rewarding, Jennie.
@Kareni: Thank you! I’ve already read some good books this year, so it hasn’t been all bad.