Another novel inspired by the strange case of the high school girls in Leroy, New York, who experienced a strange series of neurological symptoms that terrified parents and sent public health officials into a tizzy. "The Fever" focuses on Deenie, a teenager who has several close friends; one of t...
I liked this book, but not as much as the other Megan Abbott books I’ve read (there wasn’t enough gangster moll action for me). It’s based on a true story, which I didn’t really know about until half way through (I often like to go into books quite blind, so I don’t get distracted from the story ...
It's 1950s Los Angeles with housewives who make jello with fruit in copper molds and housewives who pop pills. There are Hollywood starlets and Hollywood fixers. There's a schoolteacher, a cop, and women with secrets. The women with secrets in Die a Little are Lora and Alice. Alice comes into...
By the author of Dare Me and The End of Everything A young woman hired to keep the books at a down-at-the-heels nightclub is taken under the wing of the infamous Gloria Denton, a mob luminary who reigned during the Golden Era of Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano. Notoriously cunning and ruthless,...
Verver’s T-shirt, the way he held me and it was so hard, his arm against me, pressing against my neck so I thought it might break. Like he’d forgotten I was just a girl and he just might crush me from holding me so tight. I’m thinking of the smell of his T-shirt up against...
Barbara Payton needed nursing. He was flying out to Chicago and then hopping a train up to Minnesota to babysit the newlyweds. It’d be worth it, honest. Of course he was more than pushing his luck. He really wasn’t in that kind of league. And the chances of getting caught showed this was a sucker...
At night, the sounds from the canyon shifted and changed. The bungalow seemed to lift itself with every echo and the walls were breathing. Panting. Just after two, she’d wake, her eyes stinging, as if someone had waved a flashlight across them. And then, she’d hear the noise. Every night. The tap...
We have been drinking cough-syrupy wine that clings to the tongue. Beth calls it hobo wine, and it feels like we are hobos now. Wanderers. Midnight ramblers. I forget everything and think that, hidden up here behind the sparkly granite of a thousand gorges and knobs, I am safe from all hazard. Bu...