My Sister Is Going To Kill Me

An exciting murder mystery that takes readers on a wild rafting trip, while probing sisterhood and secrets.

 

Nina Simon’s character-driven first murder mystery probed the bonds between mothers and daughters (Mother-Daughter Murder Night). In My Sister Is Going To Kill Me, her second book, she again focuses on family dynamics, this time tackling the bond shared between two, very different adult sisters who get swept up into a murder investigation.

 

Every year, the Chisholm sisters leave their respective lives, meet up, and take a joint vacation. This year, they decide on a whitewater rafting trip down the Colorado River at the base of the Grand Canyon. But the river isn’t the only thing that needs taming. Liv--the older, more exacting and conscientious sister with a fear of heights--is challenged by her more free-spirited, fun-loving, younger sister Mandy. Together, the two join a tour of other adventure-seekers as they travel down the river, learning how to navigate the charged waterway. Initially awed by the breathtaking beauty of nature and wildlife, dark emotional undercurrents--namely personality clashes and issues of trust--shift the tide. When one of their traveling companions is found dead, along with another corpse, their idyllic trip suddenly becomes a deeper journey of dangerous survival as everyone is cast into a potential murder suspect—including Liv and Mandy.

 

Readers will need to hold on tight and buckle up as Simon’s winning, fast-paced thriller delivers red herrings and more hairpin twists and turns than the Colorado River itself!

 

My Sister is Going to Kill Me by Nina Simon

William Morrow (HarperCollins), $30.00 hardcover, 9780063478022, 352 pages

Publishing Date: August 18, 2026

To order this book on Bookshop.org, link HERE

 

Learn more about Nina Simon HERE

Summer of Love

A deeply engrossing, fully realized family saga about three independent women and how personal choices affect their lives. 

Feminist themes embody the soul of Kerri Maher’s novels. She’s fictionally explored the historical lives of fiercely independent public women like Kick Kennedy (The Kennedy Debutante) and Grace Kelly (The Girl in White Gloves). She’s also told the story of a humble woman who changed the world and the literary community of the 1920s in The Paris Bookseller. And in All You Have to Do is Call, she evoked the 1970s, extoling the power of female support systems. 

In Maher’s fifth novel, Summer of Love, she braids together two eras, 1967 and 2015, depicting how the past informs the present for three women of the Hartley family. 

Ambitious and inventive Miranda Hartley, the “first woman vintner” of Napa Valley, is inspired and challenged by overseeing the family-run winery. Miranda grew up with her free-spirited sister, Winnie, a poet, who bailed on the family business and took off to San Francisco in the 1960s. When Miranda’s now adult daughter, Dawn, a freelance set designer--and a closeted alcoholic grappling with sobriety and finding her place in the world--exhumes a family secret, the delicate balance of life comes undone and questions long buried about the sisters must get answered. 

Maher is an evocative storyteller whose literary prowess is on full display. Summer of Love delivers an impactful, surprising story about the bonds shared between sisters, mothers and daughters, and friends—and how hard it is to hold on to those we love and also learn to let go. 

Summer of Love by Kerri Maher

Berkley (Penguin Random House), $30.00 hardcover, 9780593816394, 368 pages

Publishing Date: July 7, 2026

To order this book on Bookshop.org, link HERE

Learn more about Kerri Maher HERE

Good Hair Days

A dynamic Southern novel that pays homage to the bonds of sisterhood, community, and lasting legacies.  

Two sisters struggle to save a family-owned legacy business in Good Hair Days by Grace Helena Walz, a heartfelt novel woven with lots of down-to-earth Southern drama and charm. 

The story focuses on Georgia and Junie Scott, two sisters born and raised in Whitetail, a small town outside of Atlanta. Junie, the younger of the two sisters, stayed behind to run the beauty shop left to her by their mother, while Georgia, the older sister, went to a prestigious college and now lives a seemingly successful corporate life in the city.

 

In the process of trying to renovate the shop, Junie gets into a mountain of debt and thus, summons Georgia home for help. But when the sisters reunite, old wounds get reopened and both women, harboring life-changing secrets from each other, must come to terms with their own--and their shared--fates.

 

Written via the strong narrative points-of-view of each sister, Grace Helena Walz (Southern by Design) has a firm command on sisterly bonds, small-town living, and the often-unyielding depth of Southern roots. This well-drawn, nostalgic story might pay homage to the sass and sparkle of Dolly Parton, but it also delivers an unexpectedly moving, tear-jerking twist.

 

Good Hair Days by Grace Helena Walz

Harper Muse, $18.99 paperback, 9781400345663, 400 pages

Publishing date: November 11, 2025

To order this book on Indiebound/Bookshop.org, link HERE

 

 

Learn more about Grace Helena Walz link HERE

 

The Lost Book of First Loves

RaeAnne Thayne, a prolific author of women’s fiction, delivers a heartfelt, emotionally moving story about how secrets revealed change the lives of two women in extraordinary ways.

Juniper “June” Connelly, based in Puget Sound (Washington State), is a 34-year-old, seemingly healthy, high-powered, intimidating career woman who expects much of herself and those who work under her employ. Just as she is about to fire her latest unpaid intern, Allison Wells, a 26-year-old recent law school graduate, June collapses from a heart attack and none other than Allison saves her life. This sets up a complex dynamic that forever links the two women—in more ways than one.

 

It seems that Allison’s career aspirations were something of a pretext. After the death of her literary icon father, a shocking secret sets Allison on a quest to wheedle her way to the internship. Her intent is to get to know June better as a DNA test formerly revealed that she and June, her boss, are actually half-sisters. But before Allison has a chance to enlighten June to the truth, the health emergency takes precedence.

 

As a result, the two likeable women forge an unlikely bond of friendship where Allison actually invites June, in need of R&R and healing, to use the "family cabin" in a small Wyoming town.  Over the course of one summer and June’s convalescence, the two women grapple with the missing pieces of their lives and new love interests as they both discover the real meaning of family.

Thayne (The December Market) delivers another tender, winning romance that’s sure to inspire hope for new beginning and second chances.

 

The Lost Book of First Loves by RaeAnne Thayne

Canary Street Press (HarperCollins/MIRA/Harlequin), $30.00 hardcover, 9781445467713, 352 pages

Publishing Date: June 3, 2025

To order this book on Bookshop.org link HERE

Learn more about RaeAnne Thayne HERE

 

A Good Life

An evocative, powerful love story about two adult sisters forced to reconcile their lives at their grandmother's seaside home in the Basque Country.

In A Good Life, French author Virginie Grimaldi delivers a sensitive, familial love story about the unrivaled, transformative bond of sisterhood. The novel is set in the beautiful Basque countryside, where the adult Delorme sisters, Emma and Agathe, are reunited after a five-year estrangement. The two were forced to come together to spend one last summer vacation at the home of their beloved--now deceased--grandmother Mima. The seaside dwelling, about to be sold, holds dear memories that have anchored the sisters throughout their lives, despite their differences.

 

During the week shared at Mima’s house for the last time, the Delorme sisters revisit bygone stories. Short, evocative chapters render slice-of-life remembrances that take readers through episodes that defined and shaped the women’s childhood and teenage years—and probe stories of family and other loves and losses sustained into adulthood. These enlightening scenes are contrasted against the women’s lives in the present. They come to discover how Mima and the “good times” they shared via her influence at the house every summer served to calm and steady them through the storms of life. The deep challenges that befall the family mark the women’s identities, personalities, and coping methods. Tensions build in the narrative as Emma and Agathe ultimately confront each other and tend to the wounds that drove them apart.

 

Grimaldi’s concise pros, translated by Hildegard Searle, is striking and vivid, painting a sympathetic portrait of the enduring bond of sisterhood. Readers will fall under the spell of a compassionately revealed story that blends poignancy and humor in depicting the transcendental nature of familial love and forgiveness.  

 

A Good Life by Virginie Grimaldi (Translated from the French by Hildegarde Searle)

Europa Editions, $28 hardcover, 288 pages, 9798889660248

Publishing Date: May 28, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (May 31, 2024), link HERE 

 

A longer-form review of this novel was also published at Shelf Awareness on March 26, 2024.  Link HERE to read the review in its original long-form.

15 Summers Later

A moving, thought-provoking story about how a shared, horrific experience from the past resurfaces and upends the lives of two, estranged sisters. 

The different ways individuals process, cope with, and try to move on from trauma marks the central theme of 15 Summers Later, a thought-provoking novel from prolific author, RaeAnne Thayne. 

The past is never past for the Howell sisters of Emerald Creek, Idaho. The two girls suffered a life-changing trauma in their childhoods that became a secret that impacted and forever changed both of their lives…and also estranged them. 

The one sister, Ava, moved away and built a new life for herself via a seemingly happy marriage to Cullen. However, when Ava publishes a memoir that details the private horror from the past--the book becomes a best-seller--Cullen cannot deal with the publicity. He feels Ava, harboring a shocking secret, has betrayed him. Thus, their marriage comes undone. With her ‘perfect’ world in a shambles, Ava returns home to try and make amends with her sister, Madison. 

“Madi” has taken years to overcome and heal. Tenacious, she, too, has struggled to move on. Working hard to establish a “no-kill” shelter for abandoned pets, she finds herself falling in love with her long-time, secret crush—local veterinarian, Dr. Luke Gentry. But when Ava resurfaces in her life and the past again comes calling, questions are raised: If Luke knew the truth about Madi (and her sister)--the horrors faced fifteen years before--would he, too, turn his back on her? 

Readers--especially fans of Debbie Macomber, Susan Wiggs and Robyn Carr--will bask in Thayne’s (The Café at Beach End, Christmas at the Shelter Inn) characteristically sensitive, compassionate storytelling. Readers will not soon forget this suspensefully drawn story--infused with themes of love, forgiveness, and redemption--that maps sibling drama, family loyalty, affection for animals, and two, tender love stories that unfold side-by-side.

15 Summers Later: A Novel by RaeAnne Thayne

Canary Street Press (Harlequin Books/HarperCollins Publishers), $17.99 paperback, 97813350009333, 352 pages

Publishing Date: June 18, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

Peg and Rose Stir Up Trouble

The second in a delightfully fun cozy series where retired sisters-in-law investigate the sudden death of a man met on a dating website.

Laurien Berenson unleashes another warm and fuzzy cozy mystery in Peg and Rose Stir Up Trouble, the second book in her comical Senior Sleuths series set in the Connecticut suburbs.

 

Readers don’t need to be familiar with the first book, Peg and Rose Solve a Murder, where tough and feisty Peg Turnbull and sweet-natured, eternally optimistic Rose Donovan were first introduced. The once estranged sisters-in-law, now in their 60s, are unlikely friends after years of not speaking to each other. Peg is a widowed, Poodle breeder and a “popular and highly esteemed dog show judge,” while Rose, a former nun, now runs a woman’s shelter with her husband, an ex-priest.

 

When Rose gives Peg’s stagnant romantic life a push by signing her up for “Mature Mingle,” a dating service, her actions are met with disdainful skepticism. But when Peg meets and falls for “witty and urbane” Nolan Abercrombie, things take a surprisingly glad turn—until Nolan dies in a hit-and-run accident. When grieving Peg attends his funeral with Rose, the two notice that all the mourners are women around their same age. Why is that? Peg and Rose put their amateur sleuthing skills to work, piecing together clues into who Nolan really was. Might his death not have been accident? And if so, who might’ve wanted him dead—and why?

 

Cleverly sharp twists and turns--tracked by two, spunky retiree protagonists--will once again charm and delight cozy mystery lovers.

 

 

Peg and Rose Stir Up Trouble: A Senior Sleuths Mystery Book Two by Laurien Berenson

Kensington Cozies, $27.00 hardcover, 9781496735751, 288 pages, Publishing Date: July 25, 2023

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 28, 2023), link HERE

The Island Villa

An emotionally probing romance about a mother’s upcoming fourth marriage and how her daughters come to terms with familial dysfunction.

An estranged, dysfunctional family reunites for a summer wedding on Corfu, a rugged island paradise off the coast of Greece, in the engagingly insightful novel, The Island Villa, by prolific British author Sarah Morgan.

 

Family matriarch Catherine Swift is a wildly successful romance novelist. Her own life, however, isn’t so happily-ever-after. Married three times with two daughters conceived from different husbands, she is tying the knot for a fourth time. Might her nuptials this time around offer a chance for mother-daughter reconciliation—and for her two adult children, six years apart, to finally bond?

 

The girls couldn’t be more different. Thirty-year-old Adeline, the older daughter--emotionally buttoned up and self-reliant--is reticent to attend the wedding. She was only eight-years-old when her parents divorced, and she’s skeptical about her mother’s wedded bliss. However, after she breaks up with her beau, Adeline jet-sets to Corfu. There, she’s reunited with her starry-eyed sister and secretly aspiring writer, Cassie, whose father, Catherine’s second husband, died when Cassie was just three-years-old. Cassie is excited about the wedding—until secrets revealed disarm both women. They ultimately find common ground, commiserating about their mother’s choice for a husband. Will the family finally come together or will things, once again, fall apart?

 

Relationships between mothers, daughters and sisters are common to Morgan’s (The Summer Seekers) fiction, and she once again skillfully portrays complex emotional dynamics therein. Readers will be swept up by well-drawn characters, each with her own romantic predicament, and a deft fictional examination of fragile and frayed familial bonds. 

 

The Island Villa by Sarah Morgan

Canary Street Press (HarperCollins/Harlequin), $17.99 paperback, 9781335630957, 384 pages

Publishing Date: May 2, 2023

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (May 5, 2023), link HERE

The Frederick Sisters Are Living the Dream

A quirky, bittersweet story about three middle-aged sisters faced with caregiving issues that force them to re-evaluate their places in the world.

 

Exasperating family dramas take center stage in The Frederick Sisters Are Living the Dream, a dynamic, episodic first novel by Jeannie Zusy.

 

Three middle-aged sisters are bonded by family history: Betsy (aka ‘Bets’) the oldest, is a single, independent, free spirit who runs a successful surfing school in California. Ginny, the middle sister, lives in Maryland. The 56-year-old, sugar-craving diabetic--and retired high-school janitor--reads and writes at a third-grade level.  However, her intellectual disability doesn’t hinder her from conniving to get what she wants. And Maggie, the youngest--a successful storyboard artist for TV commercials--is a dutiful, New York State mother of two, young-adult sons who is separated from her husband.

 

When Ginny is hospitalized after over-indulging in too much sugary Jell-O, Maggie sets off to her rescue. The girls’ parents are deceased, but they left ample finances to provide for Ginny’s care and well-being. When Maggie relocates Ginny--under duress--to a nursing home in Westchester County, New York, her good intentions are met with opposition. Older sister Betsy wants absolutely no part of--or say in--Ginny’s caretaking. And Ginny refuses to live amongst “old people.” Along the way, Maggie is caught in the middle, forced to juggle familial demands as she struggles to manage her own mid-life crisis, as well Ginny’s and Betsy’s—all three women are at personal crossroads.

 

Zusy’s funny, bittersweet story is rife with big scenes where Maggie’s witty, first-person narrative point-of-view adds levity to serious, tender themes about family, sisterhood, commitment, caregiving and love.

 

The Frederick Sisters Are Living the Dream by Jeannie Zusy

Atria Books, $27.00 hardcover, 320 pages, 9781982185381

Publishing Date: September 20, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (September 23, 2022), link HERE

 

The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

A hauntingly reflective memoir details the intricacies of mental illness and the bonds of sisterly love and loyalty in this life--and beyond.

Deep, everlasting love, grief and the mysteries of mental illness are undercurrents that propel The Perfect Other, a chilling, moving memoir by Kyleigh Leddy. A graduate of Boston College now in pursuit of her master's in social work, Leddy grapples with the life and loss of her older sister, Kait, a young woman affected by schizophrenia.

 

Leddy has spent a large part of her young life grappling with the sudden and unexplained disappearance of her 22-year-old sister, Kait, last seen on a frigid January night in 2014. Security cameras show that her older sister took a taxi to the foot of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, Pa., ascended to the highest point and then disappeared. It is believed she jumped; however, her body was never recovered. Thus, her whereabouts remains a mystery--one that haunts Leddy and sets her on a course to make sense of the shocking tragedy, both personally and through a more psychologically clinical lens.

 

Through a sensitively drawn, stream-of-conscious narrative--spurred by a "Modern Love" column Leddy published in the New York Times--she stitches together remembered fragments and pivotal scenes from the life she, her mother and father shared with Kait. After sustaining a head injury, Kait started to exhibit concerning erratic behaviors that took inexplicable, unruly--often violent--turns. Leddy's raw search for understanding, meaning and peace grants readers a rare personal glimpse into the universal mysteries of mental illness and the long-lasting traumatic effects it has on those afflicted, as well as those in its orbit.

 

The Perfect Other: A Memoir by Kyleigh Leddy

Mariner Books, $28.99 hardcover, 9780358469346, 304 pages

Publication Date: March 8, 2021

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (March 8, 2022), link HERE

To read the longer form of this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (January 7, 2022), link HERE